Blog Post Title One: Intuitive Eating

I was recently doing some mindless scrolling when I came across a “nutrition” influencer talking about how intuitive eating didn’t work. I was curious, so I listened and by the end of his segment I was like “why not just say you don’t understand intuitive eating?”. He said it didn’t work because you can’t trust listening to your body when your body is the cause for your overeating. Well, I highly disagree, so, I’m gonna blog about it.

Let’s start with what is intuitive eating? It’s literally the practice of listening to your body’s cues when it comes to food. We all already do this to some extent. When we’re hungry, we eat. When we’re full, we (usually) stop. When we’re tired, we take a nap or go to bed. When we want a sweet treat, we indulge. I could go on and on but literally every day we are listening to our body’s cues. It’s just that some cues we’ve not been taught to get in-tune with, and that’s the goal of intuitive eating.

A little personal story here for some understanding:

When I was in my early 20s, I had to have emergency gallbladder surgery. I had started having indigestion issues a few years prior but the symptoms were brushed off as “heartburn”, even though having heartburn when you’re in your teens isn’t entirely normal. So after a few years of medicating with Tums, my body finally caved. I didn’t have a great diet and I LOVED to drink - I was in my 20s after all, so finally my gallbladder said “I can’t do this anymore” and stopped working. This caused me to have an intense gal-attack, something I still remember to this day. I was out with my friends getting cigarettes from a gas station about a mile from our dorms when all of a sudden I doubled over in the most immense pain I’d ever felt. My friends immediately showed concern but I tried toughing it out, saying I just needed to get back to the dorm to lie down. And yes, we literally walked the mile back, me doubled over the entire time cause I literally couldn’t stand straight and I went up to my friend’s room with her and laid on her floor, thinking that resting would be enough. But it wasn’t. The pain kept getting worse and worse until finally I told her I needed to go to the ER. She relented and on our way out of the dorm, we came across another of our friends who saw me and said “oh my god, what’s happening?”. She ended up ditching any plans and coming with us to the hospital, so I knew I must have looked pretty bad. Now, the hospital wasn’t the best so I waited way too long for someone to come take care of me and I was in and out of consciousness by the time I finally got into a waiting room where I was given pain medicine that made me so ill I ended up trying to make it to the bathroom at the end of the hallway and passed out before getting to the toilet.

What happened after that is a blur, but I remember being told I needed to have surgery NOW to remove my gallbladder. I opted for in-patient treatment because the way I felt, I did NOT want to go home. I was there for about 4 days, including the procedure, and then was released and told to take the usual post-surgery precautions until I felt 100% better.

Here’s the thing though - nobody explained how my digestive situation would change without a gallbladder. If you don’t know, the gallbladder secretes bile, which is produced by your liver, into the small intestine. However, without a gallbladder, it flows continuously, and can sometimes get backed up into the stomach, causing the symptoms of acid reflux. So after such a surgery, a change of diet is usually necessary to ease the body in recovery and getting used to this new digestive situation. But nobody told me about this. Nobody warned me that my usual diet of boxed, heavily processed, greasy foods was going to cause my body to revolt in the most unsavory of ways - which made dating more of a journey than ever before. That I would continue to have indigestion issues if I didn’t stop drinking heavily or smoking or start exercising regularly. I was not told that certain foods would become my enemy for a time, and that if I didn’t want to be in the bathroom more than I was out living life, that things had to change drastically.

Now would I have listened? I’ll be honest here, I don’t know. I am a pretty stubborn person, even more so when I was younger. But would that information have been incredibly helpful? YES!

So without that knowledge, it was up to me to start learning my body in a deeper way. Now, it wasn’t overnight, or even a few years later - it was quite a number of years later when I decided I wanted to stop feeling so sick and weak all the time. And I didn’t want to have a string of bathroom emergencies when I lived with three other people in a one-bedroom situation, that I started trying to notice my body’s cues when it came to food.

It started with an “ah-ha!” moment of realization where I started noticing that anytime I looked at certain foods, my stomach would respond. Either it wouldn’t have any response, I would feel a little hungrier for the food, or it would cramp. And I mean CRAMP. Like the biggest warning cramps ever. My body was literally telling me “no, don’t eat that. If you do, we will revolt”. It was exciting (to me) and started making me more and more curious about what else my body had been telling me that I wasn’t hearing - because I didn’t know how to listen.

So intuitive eating has gotten me to where I am in my health journey, even though for many years I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. Now, I’m no pro at it, believe me. I know there are things I should avoid but I don’t and I end up paying for it. But I’m also not torturing myself by ignoring cues all the time. Most of the time, I will do as my body tells me, and avoid suffering consequences for disobeying the cues.

ALL this to say - intuitive eating is a practice that takes time, patience and mindfulness. I know, I know this probably is a “this sounds woo woo af” moment but whatever, maybe it is, and that’s fine! Woo woo isn’t bad, it’s just different and usually more 'holistic’ - literally meaning, taking the whole into consideration. Also not a new practice - there are many cultures who work on seeing the body as a whole and working to fix a problem by including all the factors in the body rather than just treating a symptom.

So start small. Start by noticing how your body responds to different foods. Is your morning coffee triggering more bathroom breaks than you’d like? Maybe you gotta warm up with some tea or something non-caffeinated first. Does dairy send your intestines into a tizzy? Alright, well it’s not fun but may be time to ask your doctor how to know if you’re lactose intolerant. Are you eating so much you feel miserable after almost every meal? Then just cut back a bit! Maybe wait 20 minutes before going for seconds, then determine whether you’re still hungry or are, indeed, satiated and can have your fave food as a leftover for lunch the next day.

Intuitive eating isn’t hard. It’s not scary and it WORKS. You just have to put in the work - as with anything!

Until next time, happy eating!