Intuitive Eating isn’t all Unicorns and Rainbows

Since I wrote my post at the end of November about not following healthy living blogs any more, I have been trying to figure out a way of eating that is going to work for me over the long term.  While I acknowledge that blogs can be a great source of inspiration for healthy meal ideas, they are also a hotbed for comparison.  This is why, after careful deliberation, I have decided to only read a very select few (about 5).  These are ones that I don’t find triggering and who cover topics I am genuinely interested in.  I refuse to read any blogs that post all of the food they eat or those that post more than once a day, and if I feel they are starting to negatively influence me I will stop reading them.

Since trimming down the number of blogs I read, I have felt a bit of a void with regards to how I eat; in all honesty I seem to have lost my direction.  When I was attempting to be a healthy living blogger I always knew what my objective was: to eat as healthily as I could.  These days, I really want to eat more intuitively but I find it confusing.  One of the reasons I turned to HLBs in the first place was because I wanted to normalise my eating after being stuck in the restrict/binge cycle for so long but I didn’t want to gain weight doing so.  Trying to eat healthily gave my eating a purpose and because I never truly knew when to eat for myself, I just followed the pattern that most HLBs seemed to stick to – breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner, and possibly another snack/healthy dessert.  I would purposely try and keep all of my meals small to save calories and would eat to a timetable of around every 3 hours, regardless of whether I got hungry sooner.  I can honestly say that I never actually felt satisfied eating this way but I simply didn’t have the confidence to explore what amount of food and eating schedule suited me.  Basically, I was, and still am, scared to eat without a plan.

For the past few months I have been trying to eat much more intuitively but it is really difficult.  There are so many questions I have to constantly ask myself: do I want to eat healthy food?  Do I want to eat unhealthy food?  Am I hungry?  Am I full?  Do I want sweet food or savoury?  Hot or cold?  Spicy or bland?  Am I craving anything?  The list is endless and, quite frankly, it can be exhausting.  It is also very intimidating.  I am constantly haunted by the thought that if I truly give myself permission to eat whatever I like, I will lose all control and never eat well again.  I convince myself I am on a one-track road to weight gain, and this attitude is neither healthy nor helpful.  I just cannot seem to shake the feeling that I am gaining weight (I am not), or am eating in the ‘wrong’ way (whatever that is!).  It is frustrating that the more I try to move towards adopting a healthier, more normalised approach to food, the more frequently the old dieting mentality tries to come back.  I have found myself on each Sunday for the past two weeks saying ‘it’s fine that I didn’t eat healthily this week, I’ll start again on Monday and get back on track with trying to lose weight’.  I have even gone so far as to devise entire food and exercise plans in my mind and set goals about how much weight I can lose by the time I come back to work after the Christmas break.  Believe me when I say that this is not a conversation I want to have with myself. 

I know I have to really get my head around eating normally.  On each occasion that I have told myself to diet on Monday, I have proved to myself that I am not going to give in to these feelings and have never made an attempt to cut calories or change my diet.  I will succeed with intuitive eating and whatever that may bring with it.  I am slowly coming to realise that what I might really need is a major injection of body confidence and I will be working on this in conjunction with intuitive eating.  At the end of the day, weight gain is not the be all and end all of life.  I am not comfortable with making my way through life thinking that I have to eat in a particular way to comply with external pressures to be a certain size, or that I should eat according to some socially acceptable schedule.  For the first time in many years, I want to find out what works for me - what foods I love, what amount of food is satisfying and how often my body likes to eat.  From here on in I give myself permission to eat; food rules no longer exist.

I apologise if this post seems like a regurgitation of many that have come before it and I wish I had something more positive to say but at the moment this is where I am in my journey.  My last post on the topic was probably slightly more optimistic than this one but it is hard not to revert back to previous behaviours.  What I really need to do is figure out why I have started to think I should abandon intuitive eating and why the diet mentality is coming back.  The path ahead is probably long but I know that the sooner I stop trying to get off it, the easier this whole thing will become.  I am committed to eating normally and I am committed to learning to accept my body at the weight it was designed to have.  Life is simply too short to be miserable.

20 Day Challenge

Today is 1^st December which means we are now well and truly into the holiday season.  With just 24 days left until Christmas, the festivities will be starting in full force and the next three weeks will see chocolates and mince pies flowing freely! 

Usually around this time of year, with the dark nights and cold weather, I find that my motivation to workout decreases significantly and I find it hard to get into a nice routine with exercise.  Instead, my workouts are sporadic and I never feel fully committed to them.  I also feel that during the winter I actually need exercise the most to stop me from becoming depressed due to the lack of sunlight……and of course to prevent the mince pies from sticking to my hips too much.  I may not be trying to lose weight but that doesn’t mean I am happy to gain exponentially, so I strive to maintain a happy balance between eating what I like and moving a little to make me feel good.

This year I have come up with a plan to help me stay focussed.  My aim is to exercise for 20 days out of the 24 left before Christmas, meaning that realistically I will be working out for six days each week.  This isn’t a lot but it’s something that I haven’t yet managed to achieve throughout the winter period.  When it’s cold and dark outside, snuggling up on the couch seems so much more inviting.  

This challenge may sound simple – and it is – but it is made slightly more difficult by the fact that I am not a gym member so I don’t automatically have a nice, temperature controlled, safe environment to workout in.  I can either brave the elements outside, or exercise at home, which is why I won’t be making a plan that is too specific with certain activities scheduled for particular days of the week.  There is no point saying I am going to run every Tuesday only to find that on Monday the weather was fine and dry and perfect for running but Tuesday is pouring with rain.  I would rather just commit to exercising a certain number of days per week and then see what I feel like doing on any given day.  Generally I like to have a degree of flexibility and I know myself well enough to say that I will only come to resent a plan that is too rigid.

I have found that my body prefers not to do too much high impact activity, so although I will be making an effort to move for 6 days of the week it will never be in the form of hardcore training like running 10 miles or cycling 30 miles.  That kind of endurance exercise just isn’t for me; I much prefer some gentle yoga, doing an exercise DVD, going for a short run or doing a step workout.  My aim is simply to increase my heart rate and sweat.  It may not seem like a lot but it is certainly enough.

So that is my plan.  Not only will I be counting down the days until Christmas by eating the chocolates in my advent calendar, I will also be doing so with every workout that I complete.