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By Jenna Corsi, Registered Dietitian from Jenna Corsi Nutrition
Expertise: Jenna helps her community eat without guilt, shame, or stress through Intuitive Eating. remove all food and body worries that can consume your mind so that you have more space to find and follow your passions & purpose in life.
You'll Learn:
What exactly is Intuitive Eating
Identify if you are stuck in the diet mentality
What contributes to your health
Intuitive eating is an approach to eating to help you make peace with food and no longer view food as the enemy. It allows you to create a healthy relationship with food and your body. You will find so much freedom around food that you will never want to diet again!
You may have heard of some of these… Keto, Atkins, Weight Watchers, Whole30, MyFitnessPal (calories), Nutrisystem etc. Aka diets. The thing with diets is that they are unsustainable and don’t work meaning people gain the weight back and then some time after they stop the diet.
Have you ever found yourself in this situation?
The Diet Trap Phenomenon
You want to lose weight so you go on a diet like keto. At first, you’re excited because this one is going to work and it’s going to help you get to where you want to be.
You lose some weight so you try to keep going. Then you realize that you’re thinking about food a whole lot more, it’s so hard to stick with and it makes it harder to socialize because you can’t eat what others are having.
You say “screw it”, stop the diet and eat ALL the carbs. It kind of makes you sick but you temporarily feel mentally free.
After some time, you feel like you need to go back on another diet. And this cycle continues. Yet, you blame yourself as the failure for not being able to stick with it.
Well, I am here to tell you that you are not broken and nothing is wrong with you. It’s the diet that failed!
That is the diet trap. Diets don’t work. If they did then the diet industry would not be worth 72 billion dollars! That’s where Intuitive Eating comes in.
What is Intuitive Eating?
Intuitive Eating gets you back to connecting with your body and honoring your health through healthy habits and behaviors. Focusing on healthy habits and behaviors, rather than the scale or calories in vs out etc, will allow you to understand your bodies needs and improve your overall wellbeing.
10 Principles of Intuitive Eating
There are 10 different principles to Intuitive Eating that work together to help you feel your best. Those principles are: reject the diet mentality, honor your hunger, make peace with food, challenge the food police, discover the satisfaction factor, feel your fullness, cope with your emotions with kindness, respect your body, movement — feel the difference and honor your health with gentle nutrition. If you would like to learn more about the 10 different principles in depth, click here.
Like a diet, there's a lot there but the 10 Principles equip you with the tools to take care of yourself for the long term and avoid the pitfalls of short term thinking and quick fix promises, like diets often promote.
Remember: Health is not just about what you eat. There are many other ways to pursue health besides our eating patterns, like managing stress, moving your body, self-care practices, sleeping enough and well, hydrating properly and taking care of your mental health.
By Jenna Corsi, Registered Dietician
If you are struggling with your relationship with food and your body and you want to find freedom around food, learn more about the guest contributor at jennacorsinutrition.com or continue the conversation with Jenna via email at jennacorsird@gmail.com