The diet mentality is the result of having done many diets in your life, of constantly gaining and losing weight and of never being satisfied with your weight or your body. This mentality keeps you thinking that with a new diet you can lose weight quickly and permanently and that finally you can be happy or be confident and that you will be able to appreciate your body.

Intuitive food completely takes you away from this mentality and asks you to throw away all your magazines and books that talk about diets once and for all, forget about the scale and stop thinking that with a diet you will achieve the ideal weight and achieve what you have wanted so much for a long time.

Just by keeping this idea that you can go on another diet and will help you to lose weight or reach your ideal weight in less time, will take you further and further away from intuitive eating. After all, how many diets have you made? How many of them gave you the result you wanted and helped you maintain it? Were you really happy once you’ve achieved that weight? Or were you in a constant frenzy because you didn’t want to gain that weight back?

It is time for us to accept that we have tried the same strategy over and over again and it has not given us the result we wanted. And somehow we continue to use the same strategy, thinking that the next diet will be our magic recipe to lose weight once and for all and be happy.

Sometimes we have spent so much time going on diets that we no longer know when we are really hungry. We no longer notice that we keep eating even though we are satisfied, and this is because the diets have left this reaction to limitations and the famine we have put our bodies subjected to.

Intuitive eating is to listen to your body cues again and nourish it when it needs to be nourished. It means that when you feel the first signs of hunger is best to eat, otherwise, when you are really hungry you will tend to eat much more and you will not be able to enjoy your food or you will eat whatever you find at hand.

If you have spent a lot of time dieting, this is a process that you must learn to develop and take some time to rediscover your body cues so that you are aware of them and tend to them.

I know that after so many diets out there and so much information about foods that are good, what is not, those that help you lose weight and those that do not, it is difficult to think that food is your friend. But this is an essential step if what you really want is to forget about diets, food is your friend and we can no longer be thinking that one food is bad and another is not, because that generates feelings of guilt and makes you have cravings about those things that are “forbidden”.

It doesn’t mean that we are going to eat junk food or processed food all the time, instead, we are going to focus on the positive, what’s good for your body, what makes you feel good. At first, you may want to eat all that you could not eat while you were on a diet, but little by little you will see that this desire diminishes. Just by not limiting or prohibiting food will take away the desire to eat junk food or things that do not make you feel good.

Of course, by this moment, the thoughts of guilt or reproach regarding food are almost automatic, so it is necessary to develop a higher consciousness about our thoughts and stop them. Let’s try to stop thinking about all these rules that you have imposed on yourself and that is now part of your inner critic and what you use to remind yourself to follow these diets and restrictions.

Work on managing and limiting that negative internal conversation, this will not only help you improve the relationship with food but with yourself. It will help you with your self-confidence, self-esteem and your self-image.

Eliminating all this negative self-talk and rules about yourself and your body will make you feel free, more confident and beautiful.

Be aware when you feel satisfied and stop eating. When you are dieting, it is necessary to stop eating based on what others tell you (according to the diet or the expert or a doctor), therefore you don’t really pay attention to what you feel and what your body is telling you. It happens frequently with people who have already spent a lot of time on diets that they no longer know how to read the signs of satiety, and they eat until they get tired and sometimes even after feeling full they continue to eat.

Also, you may be used to eating everything that is on the plate, to me personally when I was little I was not allowed to get up from the table until I finished everything on the plate. So this habit causes you to eat even when you are already satisfied, and you keep ignoring your body cues.

This is why it is important that now that you no longer have a diet mentality (or are working on it), you start to listen to those cues and respect them. Stop eating when you are satisfied and you will again achieve a balance in your body. Your body will no longer feel that you are going to put it on a diet and you will not have that desire to eat everything on your plate or everything in your pantry.

The main objective of eating is to nourish our body but we tend to forget that eating is a pleasure. When we are on a diet we are not allowed to enjoy food, mostly because we think we are eating what we don’t like. After so much time behaving this way you tend to forget that you deserve to enjoy eating. When we still have a diet mentality, eating becomes an exercise in eating what is forbidden and satisfying that lack, rather than in truly enjoying the food.

Ask yourself, when was the last time you enjoyed your meal? That is when you felt the real pleasure of eating with all your senses. To see how it smelled, the texture, the temperature, if it was beautiful to the eyes, and so on. I think sometimes we use food as a means to satisfy our emotional needs, and then it is no longer pleasure in itself, but rather a means to not feel so bad.

With intuitive eating, you will let yourself enjoy eating, you will feel the satisfaction of eating with your senses. When you eat, you will really want to eat and pay more attention to do it comfortably and in a place that allows you to pay full attention to the fact of eating.

Find ways to work on yourself, to really discover what your emotional needs are and then you will be more aware of how to satisfy them without using food as a means. Develop emotional intelligence that will keep you in balance and make you handle uncomfortable situations in a healthier way.

Little by little you can eliminate the habit of eating when you feel bored, worried, alone or another emotional discomfort. This will not only help you improve your health and your body but also you will feel much better with yourself and you will see that you react differently to the situations that are presented to you in life.

We are so used to seeing what we do not like about our body, to try to take off those extra pounds and to compare ourselves with what is now fashionable that we forget how wonderful our body is. The many things that it allows us to do, and that in itself is a great system.

It’s hard to feel good if all your focus is on what you do not like. Many times when you are very focused on losing weight, we tend to isolate ourselves, we tend to think that other people see the same thing that we do, meaning the negative parts of ourselves. So it is important to begin to develop a better attitude towards your body and improve the relationship you have with it. Your body will not look good if all it receives is a bad treatment (lack of food, bad thoughts, lack of self-care).

Intuitive food helps you heal and repair that relationship with you and your body, focusing on how good it is and how much it allows you to do.

Does it happen to you that when you think about exercising you hate it and don’t want to do it? Do you exercise only when you are on a diet?

When you have a diet mentality you tend to think of exercise as something that MUST be done, and therefore generates a feeling of hatred. It is thought that you have to do exhaustive activities to be able to burn calories and thus to be able to lose weight faster or you have simply developed a bad relationship with exercise because you think you should do something you do not like.

When you adopt an intuitive eating approach your focus changes to what satisfies you and what makes you feel good. So in terms of workouts, the focus should be on finding something you enjoy and something that makes you feel good. Also, as you have already begun to eat better, without restrictions and your body finally begins to have a balance, you begin to have more energy, which leads you to look for other activities and that is where the love for exercise begins to emerge.

Nobody said that exercise should be something painful, on the contrary, it is something that you enjoy. When you have the energy to do it, your body and mind begin to respond in different ways to it. You will discover a way to exercise that you love and that you do not even have a hard time doing it.

Learn to move your body in a way you’ll enjoy. Figure out what kind of activity feels good for you and do it because you love your body, not because you want to change it.

At the beginning when we hear about intuitive eating and its principles we think that by giving us permission to eat everything and without limits we will gain weight or that we will eat until we are very full or feeling sick, and the truth is that it is not so. What intuitive eating teaches you is to choose things that really make you feel good emotionally and physically. And guess what, those cupcakes, the excess of bread, fried foods and soft drinks do not really make you feel so good and progressively you will avoid them, not because you have to but because they don’t make you feel good physically and emotionally.

Natural and less processed foods will make you feel better and even keep you satisfied for longer, so the tendency will be to eat healthy and unprocessed foods.

Of course, all this is a process, in the beginning, it is important that you take care of your body and learn to recognize the natural signs that you have already forgotten, and little by little you will improve your choices and your health.