There is an approach to nutrition that sounds like the complete opposite of what we have learned regarding diets. It seems like something super new, but the reality is that it has its origin in 1995. It is called “intuitive eating”, and it emerged from the work of two nutritionists, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, who were tired of seeing how the diet model Without nutritional education, he made his patients return to the doctor once more and once more, because they had regained the lost weight, and in the worst case, they had gained a little more. Fed up and frustrated with the dependency relationship they established with their patients, they decided to investigate another way to address the problem.
They worked, at first, like any nutritionist who had just graduated from school (at least, I started that way too). In nutrition they focus on weight loss, and they put it in our heads that everything is a matter of will. When you start working in consultation you realize that the reality is different, that you cannot live on a diet forever and that diets fail. It is not the patients who do not comply, it is that the basic approach is erroneous.
One approach pesocentrist It makes people believe that weight is something that can be controlled, when it is not a behavior. This approach does not take into account mental health, the consequence of restrictions and prohibitions on a physical or emotional level, nor the socioeconomic and environmental conditions of the individual. Therefore, it suggests that health is achieved individually, when access to it should be included in public policies so that we all have the same access.
Intuitive eating aims to establish a healthy relationship with food, with the body and with the mind. Starting from a neutral weight model, it does not focus on body size, but rather on healing the relationship with food, since we cannot live turning our back on a physiological need such as eating. This approach does not promise bodily changes that, if they occur, will be as a consequence of the application of the principles of intuitive eating. We go with them:
- Reject the diet mentality: in general, what the population knows regarding nutrition is focused on weight loss and are usually myths and beliefs that, through repetition, have become truths.
- Honor the feeling of hunger: Diet culture has made us believe that being hungry is something negative, a symptom of weakness, it has made us fear hunger. The reality is that hunger is a signal that our body sends us to replenish energy, the same as when the car’s signal goes off because it is in reserve. Learning to identify hunger and address it appropriately is what this approach proposes. In patients with anorexia, the hunger signal is inhibited by the body, since they are in a state of energy reserve and, as the body knows that it will not be satisfied, it stops sending it so as not to produce energy expenditure. unnecessary. When these patients recover, the signal returns, it is an indicator of improvement. Therefore, hunger is a sign of life.
- Making peace with food: in consultation I see that most of my patients live in a dichotomy, in which food is a reward and a punishment at the same time. During the day they spend a lot of time and energy thinking regarding food, it is a basic mental noise. When you can make peace with food it is very liberating and food becomes just another thing in life.
- Challenge the police food: the police are that little voice that tells you not to eat that if you are not going to be able to play sports, that yesterday you already ate sweets, how are you going to have rice for dinner, that a whole banana is too much, etc. Identifying all those patterns and breaking them down will help you lower the mental noise around food.
- Discover the satisfaction factor. Return to pleasure, not justify our food choices, enjoy food away from calories and guilt. Eating is a pleasure that is always at hand and diet culture ends up turning it into a crime.
- Perceiving the sensation of satiety: we live so disconnected from our body that we do not know if we are satiated until we can hardly even move. Using some tools you can get back in tune with it.
- Confront emotions with kindness: in this society less pleasant emotions have no place, we are uncomfortable with sadness, our own and that of others, boredom… We are taught to patch them with food, and there is nothing wrong with this, the problem is not have more resources to deal with it.
- Respect the body: diet culture and aesthetic canons have taught us to want to change our body, generating dissatisfaction and body shame. From this approach we consider accepting and respecting our body, it does not focus on beauty, but on functionality.
- The movement: feel the difference. Our body is made to move, if there is one thing it is not made for, it is to sit for more than 8 hours. Diet culture has always considered exercise as a means to modify our body; Here movement is proposed as a source of well-being. If dancing is your thing, go ahead, don’t focus on strength training or cardio, in the end the best exercise is the one you do, as my partner Sara Tabares says.
- Honor health: moderate nutrition. Choose those foods that make us feel good and give us energy. Healthy and flexible eating is promoted.
NOURISH WITH SCIENCE It is a section on nutrition based on scientific evidence and knowledge verified by specialists. Eating is much more than a pleasure and a necessity: diet and eating habits are now the public health factor that can most help us prevent numerous diseases, from many types of cancer to diabetes. A team of dietitians-nutritionists will help us better understand the importance of food and debunk, thanks to science, the myths that lead us to eat poorly.