This month's Substack post is about Intuitive Eating and how, like a lot of things, it's an elegant concept that is fraught with the reality of modern human limitations. 

 

Intuitive Eating has some noble principles like rejecting diet mentality and feeling your fullness. However, many of us have lost our connection to our intuition, and it takes time to re-engage with it. And in any case, intuition around eating is only useful if we have a template for what it feels like to live in a healthy, thriving body with robust gut health. 

 

 

I've been accused of being an abelist for making statements like this or sharing my thoughts about how disease states start in the body decades before they emerge as symptoms or full-blown diagnoses. And while there are aspects of our health and conditions that are out of our control, there is a lot we can take responsibility for: the thoughts in our minds, our actions, and the things we put in and on our bodies. 

 

One of the things many of us have lost touch with (myself included) is eating at a leisurely pace that gives our stomach time to signal fullness. Modern tools (like a timer)  can help us learn to create spaciousness at mealtime, which allows bodily cues to come back online. You can use an interval timer (there's a free one in the app store), and set three times: 10 minutes, 5 minutes & 10 minutes. Or you can use a regular timer, which is a bit more annoying. It's nice to set it and not look at it again while enjoying a meal. 

 

The basic premise is that it takes 20 minutes before our stomach receives the cues as to how full we are & can tell us to stop eating. If we are wolfing down lunch in 8 minutes, we're basically guessing about how much to eat. The exercise: Eat slowly & chew thoroughly for 10 minutes. Put down your utensils and wait 5 minutes, then resume eating for another 10 minutes. If you feel full before the total 25 minutes are up, you are eating too quickly. 

 

The beautiful thing about this exercise is that, for those of us who eat quickly, it allows us to reconnect with nature's pace of eating, the one our body longs for, that predates clocks and lunch breaks and time-blocked calendars. In doing so, over time, as we practice this, we redevelop good intuition about how long with should be giving ourselves to eat. 

 

It's fine if you need to work your way up with this exercise and start with shorter times. Ideally, you are only focused on your meal, but it's too difficult to be that present you can read some poetry to help fill the time & retrain your body to slow down at mealtime. 

If you are interested in reading more about my thoughts on intuitive eating, you can check out the full Substack article below.