Are you on good terms with FOOD? Your relationship with food should be priority and you should be fully aware of the nutrition you give to your body. 

Women/mothers go through tremendous hormonal, physical and mental changes that affect their eating habits, the quality of food and the time or way of eating. 

Intuitive eating is about trusting your own body to make choices around food that feel good in your body, without judgment and without influence from diet culture. We are all born with different types of bodies, and one shoe doesn’t fit all. Stop comparing, Cherish your body and nourish it. It’s not about losing weight, its not a new way of getting thinner, it’s about providing your body with what it needs and building a happy healthy lifestyle for you and raising your family towards it.

Let the following principles of intuitive eating sink in and stay in the back of your mind always By The original intuitive eating pros

1. Reject the Diet Mentality

Following diet trends, starving yourself, or eating specific types of food in order to lose weight will take you from frustration to another, ups and downs and feeling of failure every time a new diet stops working when you gain back some of all the weight.

It will prevent you from being free to rediscover Intuitive Eating and staying happy and healthy inside out.

2. Honor Your Hunger 

Listen to your body when it’s hungry, eat enough and eat whats nutritious! Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates. If you didn’t you will probably overeat later. When you starve yourself all your previous intentions of eating healthy and eating well won’t be achieved.

Learning to honor this first biological signal sets the stage for rebuilding trust in yourself and in food.

3. Make Peace with Food

Keep a healthy happy relationship with food. Call a truce; stop the food fight! Give yourself unconditional permission to eat. YES YOU SHOULD!  If you tell yourself that you can’t or shouldn’t have a particular food, it can lead to intense feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings and, often, bingeing. When you finally “give in” to your forbidden foods, eating will be experienced with such intensity it usually results in Last Supper overeating and overwhelming guilt.

4. Cut Your Eat Guilt Thoughts

Scream a loud no to thoughts in your head that declare you’re “good” for eating minimal calories or “bad” because you ate a piece of chocolate cake. These are just unreasonable rules that diet culture has created. 

Stop these negative barbs, hopeless phrases, and guilt-provoking beliefs and thoughts. Once you do, you will start having a smoother eating day with achieving what you want and eating well.

5. Discover the Satisfaction Factor

When you eat what you really want, the pleasure you derive will be a powerful force in helping you feel satisfied. By providing this experience for yourself, you will find that it takes just the right amount of food for you to decide you’ve had “enough.”

6. Feel Your Fullness

Don’t eat too less feeling scared to gain weight and don’t eat more than you can at that moment. Listen for the body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry. Observe the signs that show that you’re comfortably full. Pause in the middle of eating and ask yourself how the food tastes, and what your current hunger level is. 

7. Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness

First, recognize that food restriction, both physically and mentally is actually “emotional eating”.

 Find kind ways to comfort yourself. Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, and anger are emotions we all experience throughout life. Each has its own trigger. 

Food won’t fix any of these feelings. It may comfort for the short term but won’t solve it.

Know your trigger and deal with it in a better way, explore kind ways to deal with your state like talking to a friend, meditating, going out for a walk, reading…etc. find a new way.

8. Respect Your Body

Accept your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect to realistically squeeze into a size six, it is equally futile (and uncomfortable) to have a similar expectation about body size. But mostly, respect your body so you can feel better about who you are. It’s hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly critical of your body size or shape. All bodies deserve dignity.

9. Movement—Feel the Difference

Forget militant exercise. Just get active and feel the difference. Shift your focus to how it feels to move your body, rather than the calorie-burning effect of exercise. If you focus on how you feel from working out, such as energized, it can make the difference between rolling out of bed for a brisk morning walk or hitting the snooze alarm.

10. Honor Your Health—Gentle Nutrition

Make food choices that honor your health and taste buds while making you feel good. Remember that you don’t have to eat perfectly to be healthy. You will not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency or become unhealthy, from one snack, one meal, or one day of eating. It’s what you eat consistently over time that matters. Progress, not perfection, is what counts.