Hi, friends! Before we dive into today’s post, I wanted to announce that I’m officially taking on new online clients again. If you’re interested in working with me, or learning more, please email me at yourtrainerpaige@gmail.com

Also, locals: if you’re thinking about signing up for Wednesday’s boot camp (taught by me, hosted by Naked Juice,) make sure you sign up today! It’s going to be a blast! You can RSVP HERE.

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Intuitive Eating. It’s a fancy term for eating whatever you feel your body needs and developing a healthier relationship with food, your body, and the relationship between the two. Sounds great, right?

However, there’s a couple problems here:

#1 – External motivations are always present. Eating intuitively turns into eating how you think you should feel or how something has made you feel. Intution gets  turned into ‘shoulds’ or the ‘wants.’ Whether it’s a picture of someone’s meal that you saw on instagram or that commercial for the double brownie shake, external sources of influence are a constant.

#2 – It’s damn hard to become in tune with your body! Especially if you’re just starting out with new goals, like losing weight, gaining strength, etc., sometimes “eating intuitively” just doesn’t do the job.

Listen, I’m all for listening to your body, but it’s such a learning process, and one that takes a considerable amount of time, energy, and focus, mainly because of all of the external influence bombarding our daily lives.

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Additionally, a lot of the times we eat in excess not because we’re simply hungry. There are psychological factors, emotional issues, and inactivity that contribute.

Going about achieving these health and fitness goals through intuitive eating might not be the best practice for someone to reach their health goals. Not only would that likely lead to overwhelm, a lack of focus, and eventual dissolution of the goal, but it’d also be a pretty big time waster. Put more bluntly, if your intuition is off, then an intuitive eating approach would be fruitless.

What to Do Instead?

Now, one of the major draws of intuitive eating is you don’t have to obsess over every morsel you put into your mouth, and I am 100% on board with this notion. I don’t have any of my clients counting calories, and in fact, some of my clients don’t count macronutrient grams or calories at all.

First and foremost, a plan is needed. How detailed that plan is with your daily meals and snacks is up to you and your doctor or coach (or your own research, etc.) In an ideal world, this plan would take aspects of intuitive eating, but also provide enough structure for goal success.

The Plan

In my experience, there are several components of a success nutrition ‘plan:’

• knowing what you want to achieve through better nutrition (more energy, better sleep, fat loss, strength gain, etc.)
• knowing how much, what, and when you’re currently eating
• determining what you need to do – and how aggressive your approach should be – to get accomplish what you want to achieve

The Plan + Intuitive Eating

As far as intuitive eating goes, I find the following practices very helpful to incorporate into your plan:

• deciphering hunger from another emotion (boredom, loneliness, etc.) and stopping to ask yourself “am I hungry?” before eating
• recording, or thinking about how  you feel after eating a certain meal: energetic? sluggish? normal? focused?
• deciphering the feeling of satisfaction from the feeling of being “overstuffed”
• accept your body as it is, whilst deciding to make a change for the better
• eating the vitamins and nutrients to support a healthy body

It’s as simple and as complicated as that.

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What are your thoughts on intuitive eating??