The Intuitive Eating Approach

What Is Intuitive Eating?

The intuitive eating approach to nutrition is about making peace with food and honoring your body’s ability to recognize hunger and the sensation of fullness.

The goals of intuitive eating are to reduce anxiety, body image concerns, obsessive thoughts, and food guilt, and to promote body acceptance, discover satisfaction, and take back your relationship with food.

Intuitive eating is not a diet or weight-loss plan, but a holistic approach to achieving well-being.

How Does Intuitive Eating Work?

Intuitive eating makes you the boss of your own body. Intuitive eating is eating when you are hungry and stopping when you are full. While this is easy for some, it can be difficult for others. Developing a healthy attitude about food and a positive body image is fundamental to intuitive eating and can be achieved with the proper support of a qualified team of experts including dietitians, physicians, psychiatrists, exercise physiologists and others who you can trust. You will discover, and feel, the satisfaction of being full and knowing the difference between eating simply for the sake of eating.

Intuitive eating is a philosophy and practice that teaches you to follow the cues your body is wired to send you. It is not a traditional diet that relies on depriving yourself, restricting your food intake, or eliminating foods you prefer. Intuitive eating does require some learning and training so that you can distinguish between physical hunger, emotional hunger, and mindless eating. By incorporating intuitive eating into your daily life, you can come to healthy terms with food and create a healthy relationship with eating, mind and body.

Intuitive Eating Principles

Intuitive Eating principles include:

• Reject the diet mentality and honor your hunger
• Make peace with food and challenge the food police
• Feel your fullness and discover the satisfaction factor
• Cope with your emotions and respect your body
• Exercising and honoring your health with gentle nutrition

Our board-certified obesity medicine physicians, Sheenagh Bodkin, MD and Lucia Larson, MD, are assisted by an exercise physiologist and health coach, and a registered dietitian. Our team will work with you to break the cycle of dieting and help you achieve your healthiest lifestyle. Once you become an intuitive eater, we will reassess your health measures.

Watch the videos below for an introduction to the 10 principles guiding the intuitive eating approach to greater wellness.

Intuitive Eating Dieticians Near Me in Rhode Island

The Intuitive Eating Program is conveniently located in Providence, Rhode Island at the Lifestyle Medicine Center.

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