My School of Thought

Eating Intuitively

Soon after my diagnosis with Anorexia, I had my first meeting with Body Balance , a team comprised of a Dietician and Mentor.  The goal of Body Balance is to help those who struggle with forms of disordered eating learn how to develop a healthy body-food relationship and be freed from the confines of food/exercise compulsion and create a positive body image.  Check out their website!  Anyways, when I first met with the wonderful Body Balance team, they recommended a book to me: Intuitive Eating.  In a very VERY small nutshell, this book encourages the reader to embrace more of a grass-roots approach to eating, which promotes possibly the most affective diet with lifetime results.  And what might that be?  Well.  The idea of Intuitive Eating is to eat what you’re hungry for when you’re hungry for it, using common sense and listening to your body.  Huh-whaaaaa?  You mean I don’t have to count calories or servings?  I can eat a slice of pizza if that’s what I really want?  But it’s also okay to eat a huge plate of steamed veggies??  This concept completely revolutionized the way I viewed eating.  It had been so long since I listened to my hunger cues rather than dictating them!  This whole concept is still a work in progress for me, but I’m getting better.  Man, I think I want some ice cream.  Haha! 🙂

Healthy Eating is okay!  “Fun” food is okay (in moderation)!

After you’ve been to one extreme with an eating disorder, it’s often hard to find middle ground.  It feels like everyone wants me to gorge myself on burgers and fries and pizza and milkshakes…and I can eat those things if I choose…but I don’t have to.  What I do have to do is eat the foods that make me feel good.  Some of my tasty feel-good foods are things like Greek yogurt, apples, PB&J on whole wheat, roasted veggies, garden burgers…stuff like that.  And it’s totally and completely GREAT to eat those things.  But you know what else makes me feel good?  Ice cream…cookies…cake…CHOCOLATE!  Chips, and the occasional order of steak fries from Red Robin are just bomb sometimes too.  It’s just important to be sensible and listen to my body and give it what will make it feel and operate best. 

More to come later ~