Ep - 73 - Discovering Intuitive Eating Tapping Into Your Bodys Needs For ‘Weight Loss’

Hello, hello hello and welcome to Episode 73

Discovering Intuitive Eating: Tapping Into Your Body Needs For ‘Weight Loss’

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Today we are going to take a closer look at our physical body. I'll be talking about how you can tap into and really listen to your body, and well also bust some myths about your hunger and satisfaction levels along the way.

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When I started my 'weight loss' journey I had zero clue about how my body actually worked and ticked. My eating habits, how I interacted with my bodies physical needs I just thought I was either hungry, not hungry or full but I didn't really listen to it or pay attention to what the whole of my body was trying to tell me.

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Dieting also can throw these signals out of wack too and we can be told things like you can eat as much as you want as long as it is xxx type of food or, eat what you want as long as it is in your calories or points but if you are not hungry you are overeating so it is no wonder some of these methods don't always work.

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We also have the tendency to try and stretch the parameters when on a 'diet' as we feel so restricted and the little cracks start to show but often these are given no thought as we go about 'weight loss' mindlessly.

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With intuitive eating and mindful eating you can quickly and easily identify your patterns and triggers and with that awareness step into action to get shit done.

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So let's crack on.

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Listening To Your Body

So what does listening to your body actually mean?

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It's about really listening and I mean really listening to your body, to her signals and cues regarding hunger, fullness, and satisfaction but also checking in with your mind and soul too as all of these could be impacting the physical.

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It involves being aware of the sensations that arise in your body before, during, and after eating. Instead of relying on external rules or guidelines, such as, portion sizes, points or calorie counting which can be misleading. Intuitive eating encourages you to trust your body's internal wisdom.

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As you become practiced at listening to your body, you become attuned to her unique needs and preferences which not only then helps you with your 'weight loss' but it can also help you to understand more about other things like your energy levels, your emotions, your hormones, what works for you and what doesn't as you start to view yourself as a whole being.

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At the end of the day, intuitive eating is a holistic approach it is an act of self-care, you learn to respect yourself and your body and it is a gateway to feeling bloody amazing as you work through each little hurdle and limiting belief one bite at a time.

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It also brings joy as you feel less restricted and get in tune with your mind, body, and soul or maybe as you use mindful eating to savor each bite, fully experiencing the taste, texture, and aroma of the food rather than snaffling food down for the sake of it.

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In the membership, you have various resources to help you tap into body and quantity levels and overcome some of the common issues that can arise around food quantity, such as 'The Physical Need Scale', The Clean Plate Club', 'Mindful Eating', 'Clock Eating' and this week there are 2 new resources for members 'Listening With a Little Heart and Soul' and 'Testing Your Body With Kinesiology'.

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The key to finding more joy, finding your balance, and the sweet spot for 'weight loss' with love is curiosity and loving experimentation. You are the detective of your mind, body, and soul and you can super sleuth your way to lasting 'weight loss' and more joy in the process.

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Let's now take a little dive into each end of the satisfaction scale and see what comes up for you.

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The Hunger Games

Dieting is often associated with deprivation, restriction, and hunger. If you are a calorie counter the word 'deficit' is often used. If you are a point counter you can only have certain points or food. If you work on elimination you can't have certain food or maybe you are into shakes and potions and so you can only have those.

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Sometimes working on 'weight loss' can feel like you are Catness Everdean fighting for survival out in the wilderness with little support but your own grit but it doesn't have to be that way.

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As an intuitive eater, you work on upping food quality as covered in episode number xxxx and on eating when you are genuinely in physical need of food and stopping when your body is physically satisfied to get you to your next meal. You are not starving and ravenous but just making sure we are in need of sustenance. It is all about finding balance. Not letting ourselves get too hungry and not going to the other end of the scale and overeating beyond our needs too.

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You will gather awareness about all of the fake signals our body can give us telling us we feel hungry and need food even when we are not really physically in need, and so at this end of the physical need scale it is about identifying which it is.

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Are you really in need of food or is this faux hunger?

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We can get faux hunger for a number of reasons all stemming from our thoughts as I covered this in episode xxx and the 5 E's of eating. The 5 E's being xxx but I added another in a later show of Environment. WHAT ABOUT PHYSICAL TIGGERS LIKE SUGAR. Stay tuned as I will cover this more later.

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These are all practical approaches you can take to 'weight loss' and in doing so you start to shift your beliefs so that you think, feel, and act differently.

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But we can go deeper too.

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What I really want to explore today is what comes up for you when I say the word hunger level? Tell me in the chat, free group, or membership what comes up for you?

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Notice with love and curiosity if you feel triggered if you feel worried when talking about hunger, being hungry, feeling restricted, stopping, or having enough.

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If you are feeling triggered this needs to be explored if you want to heal your relationship with food.

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If you fear getting belly rumbles, feeling hungry, and any other associated sensations you may have developed a habit of eating as a preventative measure.

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Conversely, you could be taking your hunger levels too far if you have beliefs after years of being stuck in the diet cycle that this is the only way you can 'lose weight' which is also not true.

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Both of these impact your relationship with food, your life, and you and could be preventing you from showing up with love, compassion, and respect for yourself as self-judgment is likely to come up when you don't do the thing you believe you should be doing.

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I have recently explored this in myself with Belief Coding®️.When I was a baby, as the story goes I was physically sick a lot. Feed me and I would vom. My family had to go around wearing bin bags it was so bad and apparently they had to throw away the sofa! When I was exploring this with some Belief Coding®️ and how this impacted my physical needs it was super interesting. I have for years said that I don't like feeling sick. That I would rather be sick than feel sick. I would say it with conviction but never really knew where it came from as I didn't recall a time when I had been poorly. However, Belief Coding®️ helped me explore this. Age 0 - 10 are our most formative years for creating beliefs and so when I tapped into that little me she was scared of eating and hated feeling sick. She was worried about being sick, feeling hungry, and confused as to why everyone was going around in a bin bag. But with the Belief Coding®️ process, I was able to unpick and heal that moment in my life.

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So put that into the context of eating. I did have a fear of being hungry. I worried about getting too hungry and feeling nauseous as a result. What this would mean is I would eat as a preventative measure to make sure I didn't feel uncomfortable and in doing so I was putting more into my body than required.

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Likewise, there were other habits I formed that I found out through coaching. I have a habit of eating by the clock (aka 9 - 12 - 5 out of habit/routine); eating with family to suit their timings, not my body; I procrastasnack when I am uncertain about something and head to food/coffee as a distraction; I associate watching films and long car journeys with snacking; I want to try new foods; going to the kitchen and supermarket shopping makes me faux hungry and these are just the few I could think of off the top of my head.

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You may have others, maybe you have a snack before bed because you worry you will be hungry in the night or wake up possibly because you were encouraged to have supper as a kid.

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Maybe you eat enforce you go out or think you have to have breakfast before going to work because you don't know the next time you will eat.

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Or perhaps you come home from work and head to the fridge as you were encouraged to have a nibble when you came home from school.

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If any of this sounds familiar then this is something we can work on with coaching or Belief Coding®️ and you can start with grabbing your Backstage Pass today.

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I Can't (can) Get No Satisfaction

Let's flip to the other side of the coin. Stopping at enough. Enough is when your body is physically satisfied and has enough energy and nutrients to get you to your next meal. Sometimes when I see intuitive eating talked about I hear the word 'full' used but 'full' has a different meaning to all of us and if you want to heal your relationship with food and work on 'weight loss' with love, getting to know your fullness signals, what being full feels like and means to you as well as what comes up to take you past satisfied is a must. Again whether we are using coaching or Belief Coding®️, we can work on rewiring your beliefs and habits around food.

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Food and our relationship with food is complex. There is no magic wand, one size fits all approach. How I behave and you behave, what we eat, how much, why, when, who with is all very personal. It is your own personal recipe. This is why for lasting success you have to build your own process and have your life and your 'weight loss' your way.

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I can't tell you what your body feels like when it is at enough, satisfied or full, what you will think, what you will then do but I can walk alongside you and give you some guides to help you figure it out.

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This starts with your relationship with food. It is one of the starting modules of my food freedom course. Food can be a source of fuel, a source of pleasure or comfort and it can also be a source of doubt, fear, and upset.

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Just like with hunger and feeling ready for food where you have reasons for eating when you are not hungry, you will have reasons for overeating and going beyond what you physically need and if you want lasting success you have to find all of these little habits and traits and work them through one by one.

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In my Food Freedom Fun-Da-Mentals course I talk about the metaphorical jigsaw and how I think life and weight loss go together like a puzzle, that we have a number of pieces to this puzzle. We have the corners and straight edges which are easier to place, the bits in the middle some are easy some are harder and then there are the missing pieces the pieces that we cannot find ourselves the ones that are hidden, fell on the floor or never found their way back to the box.

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Within the membership, with coaching and Belief Coding®️ we can get all these pieces out and start to put them together and I want to get you started today.

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So what does 'enough' and satisfied look like?

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When you have reached the state of enough, you feel content and balanced. You are not questioning if you have overeaten. you are not claiming to be full, undoing your trousers and telling anyone you are in a food coma. You feel energised and can go about your day freely and know you will be fine until your next meal and you can trust that your body has you.

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Getting to this point is again all about some loving experimentation.

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When you have been on 'diets' have you ever really stopped and looked at what you were doing and why? I didn't I was so focused on whether I was on my plan with points, calories, shakes etc that I didn't look beyond this.

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I went around with diet blinkers on thinking that if I just eat what I am told and try and move some I will lose weight.

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Sure this can work and again the advice is always, eat less, move more but it is often not as simple as that in reality. If it was we would all be at our goal weights.

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Diet blinkers is anytime when you are not really seeing the big picture in your 'weight loss'.

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We can get diet blinkers for a number of reasons.

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We have habits that we have formed for years, underlying beliefs from childhood and past experiences some of which is even encoded at the DNA level and we have LIFE. Life and her curveballs can easily take is off track.

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Eating to satisfaction is no different.

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Throughout my weight loss journey, I have overeaten many times and will likely do so from time to time. At the end of the day, I am human, you are human, we make mistakes, we have slip-ups, and do things that don't always suit or serve us. We don't do it on conscious purpose it can sometimes just happen but you can still continue to use the Triple-A-Way Food and Life Freedom Method™️ to super sleuth this aspect of our weight loss.

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So what what is your definition of enough/satisfied/full and belly-busting. As I said earlier in the membership there is a physical satisfaction scale that can help you identify this ranging from a 0 being so hungry you are going to wither away any second to a 10 so belly-bustin full you can't think about eating for a week.

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Where intuited eating comes is in the middle, you start eating when you are physically in need but don't let yourself get too hungry and you stop when you feel like you have satisfied your physical need and are in the Goldilocks sweet point.

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For 'weight loss', we need to experiment with this with love. We can try leaving bites behind, we can be mindful of our preconceptions of foods e.g sandwiches always having two rounds of bread, check things like bowl/plate sizes, we can experiment with serving less, leaving more and seeing how we feel.

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Some of the things I have identified in my 'weight loss' journey that can impact my satisfaction level, include: having something sweet after dinner even though the main was satisfying, cleaning my plate, eating as per the bag size rather than packaged recommendation or for hunger, bigger plates does not always mean bigger portions, thinking I deserve food after a long day, zoning out whilst talking to friends/family/doom scrolling/eating at my desk, saying one more bite won't matter, saving best bits, testing and picking at food whilst cooking/serving or cleaning the kitchen.

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Underlying all of this once more is our beliefs and the habits we have formed through our beliefs and actions over the years. I talk often of being a lunch box kid so when I have a sandwich my brain thinks in order to be satisfied I have to have a pack of crisps and a chocolate bar.

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If I go out I am conditioned to believe I need to get my money's worth.

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Or if you have been cooked for you should eat it all to show your appreciation.

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All of these factors of how we tick and operate can go into whether you are overeating and may not be listening fully to your mind, body and soul.

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But they can be figured out and worked on and new beliefs and habits can be formed.

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Listening with a Little Bit Of Heart & Soul

As mentioned this week's members resource is 'Listening with a Little Heart and Soul'. A homage back to the band T'Pau. Part of the lyrics is 'Give a little love to grow'.

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This resonates with me and it's what I want you always to take away from the show. If you are going to do something, do it with love.

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Loving yourself deeply and giving your mind, body, and soul what it needs is the ultimate self-care. Self-care is not selfish. It is 1000% true that you cannot give fully from an empty cup and therefore you have to look after yourself before you can look after others.

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A flower will bloom from a seed if you plant and nurture it, if it has the right environment that suits its unique needs. If it is given nourishment and love.

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You are the seed but you are also the gardener whether you bloom or not depends on how you nurture and care for yourself.

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Wrapping Up

Right, that's it folks, time to wrap up.

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In today's episode, I delved into part of the world of intuitive eating and learning how to listen to our bodies' hunger and satisfaction signals. We busted some common myths around food quantity and discovered the power of loving experimentation for lasting weight loss with love.

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If you are in the membership, dive into the complimentary resource and be sure to reach out for support or coaching.

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Not in the membership yet and ready to embark on a transformative journey towards food freedom and embracing your inner intuitive eater, I invite you to join us link is in the description.​

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Inside, you'll find a treasure trove of resources, including all the ones I mentioned today so don't miss this opportunity to super sleuth your way to a more joyful and balanced life as we bloom and grow together.

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This week's bonus member resource:

'What does this mean about me?' A mini exercise to help you process and release some stinking thinking.

Members <<<Click Here>>>

Not a member and want this resource get instant access 👇