I’ve been having a lot of really fantastic conversations lately on IG with some pretty amazing women.
Through these conversations, I’ve come to find that a lot of these women, and likely many others like them, struggle with feeling like they know how to trust their intuition around food.
Which they’re not wrong in this assumption at all.
What’s happening is that so many of these women have been on some sort of diet for the majority of their life. The diet has created this internalized feeling that your body can’t be trusted. You can’t create healthy habits without a specific diet or plan to follow.
I see it time and time again with clients, women I’m friends with, and honestly even with myself. Putting so much faith in our diet being the ultimate source of truth around food is what’s creating this ultimate belief that we can’t trust our own bodies.
This internalized feeling or belief is what’s overriding your intuition.
The good news is that we can absolutely learn how to get our intuition back. We can begin to reverse years of thoughts around what our diet has told us to be true and begin to trust our own bodies again.
There are three key points that I’ve come to know to be absolutely true if you want to learn how to trust your intuition again.
Three ways to learning how to trust your intuition
Be willing to try something new
As mentioned earlier, spending years on different diets has started to override your intuition. So to get it back, you’ve got to be willing to try something new.
That something new is not another diet. It’s not intermittent fasting or a cleanse or supplement.
All of these continue to instill beliefs of quick fixes and that each of them have rules you have to follow.
Those rules still override your intuition.
Instead, being willing (which is a big piece right there) to try something like intuitive eating will help you start to trust in your own intuition.
It’s because intuitive eating takes the approach that our bodies know what’s best for us. When we really tune into what our bodies have to say and trust that gut feeling around food, we’re able to start to create improved healthy habits our own way.
But the biggest caveat here is that trusting that gut feeling around food can take some time. Again, intuitive eating is not a quick fix. It’s going to take time to unlearn everything you believe to be true about food and your own body.
That doesn’t have to be scary. We’re just taking the first step here in being willing to try something new. That willingness is what gets our brains on board to start to listen to what our bodies need.
Start to tune into that little voice
You know when people talk about a gut feeling and there was a little voice that kept nagging at them? Or maybe they felt something deep in their gut that just didn’t feel right in a certain situation?
That’s actually your intuition at play right there. And it can come in handy when you’re beginning to listen to your intuition when it comes to creating improved healthy habits and self-confidence, your way.
When I first heard of intuitive eating over five years ago, I honestly thought it was a whole bunch of BS. That there was no way you could listen to what your body needs without going overboard on food.
The longer I thought about it, and the longer I was on Weight Watchers, I kept hearing this little voice in the back of my head saying, “well what if we just gave it a try?”. So, after three months of hearing this voice, I decided to just give it a try.
That willingness triggered to my brain that I was ready to start trusting my intuition around food. In the beginning I wanted all the things I was told I couldn’t have while on a diet. But then the longer I practiced, the more in-tune I got with what my body actually needed.
I always find that to be the biggest misconception with intuitive eating. It’s this thought that because we’re allowing ourselves to eat whatever we want, that we’re not healthy or we’re eating “junk” all day. Which that just is not the case.
Our bodies are so much smarter than we give them credit for. When our bodies are in need of certain nutrients, we’ll crave certain foods.
Tuning into this voice, learning how to trust my intuition and understanding what my body needed helped me to actually create even better habits around food and my self-esteem increased tremendously.
Be willing to ask for help or guidance
I know this seems a bit odd to be asking for help when you’re learning how to trust your own intuition, but it truly makes such a difference.
It’s the same reason you hire a personal training or a nutrition expert. It’s because they’re an expert in their field and can help guide you to where you want to go.
The same is true for when it comes to learning how to trust your intuition.
When you first start out eating intuitively you’ll likely have a couple things come up:
- Your cravings might feel out of control
- You may feel like you’re overeating
- Diet thoughts might creep back in
- You might initially see weight gain
- You may worry that you’ll never stop eating
- You’ll question if this was the right choice
While many of these reasons may feel scary at first, this is why asking for help and getting guidance around all of them is so necessary.
As an intuitive eating coach it’s become my mission to help guide you through all of those (and many more) that are likely to come up when you start eating intuitively.
I’ll be there to reassure and guide you through each step of the process so that you can start to create those healthy habits. So that you can start to feel good about yourself from the inside out. So that you can slide into those jeans or put on a bathing suit and feel sexy as hell.
Ways to receive help and guidance
I have three really excellent ways to take this blog post a step further:
- A free 6-step guide to help you start to create these healthy habits on your own so that you can start feeling less crazy around food and your body.
- A free intuitive eating coaching session to help figure out where you’re at with food and your body and an actionable takeaway step to get you started with intuitive eating.
- Eat for Life Collective: the supportive intuitive eating membership that helps guide you through every step, question and diet thought that comes up for you when you start this journey.
Each one of these steps will help get you closer to learning how to listen to your intuition so that you can start to create improved healthy habits that feel good to you. And so that you can get back that mojo (self-confidence) you may have felt like was missing.
I can’t wait to see what direction you go and I’m always here to support you!
