What do you feel like....?

I am reading 'Intuitive Eating' by Evelyn Tribole, MS, RD and Elyse Resch, MS, RD, FADA and it's inspired me to really consider how infrequently we, as members of a western society in the year 2009, actually check in with our bodies to determine if or when we are hungry. Let me explain.....

It makes sense that we would let our internal cues guide us on when we want to eat, what we want to eat, and when we've had enough of that food, right? I mean that's the idea behind having the highly sophisticated bundle of biology, chemistry and physics that we name our 'body'. However, we are so often pressurized and influenced by clever marketing, social expectations, past associations and even the time of day, that I have found that we rarely tap into these cues. Instead, we continually override them in order to conform to something either predetermined by our mind or externally influenced.

Now, I'm not suggesting a movement to disrupt the conventional rhythm of the breakfast-lunch-dinner-day, nor do I recommend walking through life with a permanent nose-bag on our hips, but surely there's a happy medium somewhere, which allows us to channel what we feel into driving what we want, rather than determining what we want intellectually and ignoring what we feel??

We all know that it only takes an involuntary shiver to convince us a hot cup of coffee is a good idea, or a whiff of freshly baked bread to suggest that we are hungry.....there are a million external cues out there, and 'Intuitive Eating' states that the more we use them to determine our eating behaviours, the more our internal cues are supressed and silenced. Maybe that's why we've all come such a long way from only eating when we are hungry?

Just for a day, an hour, a minute, try and strengthen your internal cues. Take a second to think about what your body is telling you, and act accordingly.

It's amazingly satisfying.