Thank you for sharing your thoughts about what prevents you from having a joyful, confident, and peaceful relationship with food. Now let’s dive into the first of the three stages of transformation for healing your relationship with food and your body: Trust Your Body Wisdom to Overcome Overeating. So what is body wisdom—and why is it so important to interpret and trust what it tells you? And how does trusting your body wisdom help you resolve your most difficult eating challenges?
In addition to answering those questions, I’ll share the basics of a simple tool, the Hunger and Fullness Scale, to help you begin the process of relearning to listen to your body wisdom.
Stage 1: Trust Your Body Wisdom to Overcome Overeating
Transformation Stage 1: Trust your body wisdom
The reason this is the first stage in your transformation to a healthy relationship with food is that when you don’t know how to interpret what your body is telling you, you’ll have to continue to rely on diets, the environment, or emotions to guide your eating. And those are very unreliable!
Can you trust your body wisdom?
You were born with the instinctive ability to know when you need fuel, to recognize when you’ve eaten enough, to eat what you love without being afraid of losing control, to enjoy eating enough to stay tuned in to the experience, and to stop when eating doesn’t hold your attention anymore.
But if you are like many people who have issues with food, you don’t trust yourself anymore.
How do we unlearn such a basic and essential skill to guide our eating?
- Parental messages, like “clean your plate.”
- Societal messages, like eating certain meals at certain times.
- Diet culture messages promoting restriction and deprivation.
What happens when you’ve lost the essential skill of using your body wisdom?
When you don’t know how to interpret what your body is telling you, you may have trouble…
- using your instinctive hunger and satisfaction signals to guide you to eat when you need fuel.
- recognizing when you have other reasons for wanting to eat.
- feeding yourself in an enjoyable way that doesn’t leave you feeling regretful.
The Hunger and Fullness Scale
As I demonstrated in the video, the Hunger and Fullness Scale is a simple tool for helping you visualize how empty or full your stomach is.
Of course, there’s a lot more to teach you about using the Hunger and Fullness Scale for relearning to trust your body wisdom! But for now, just check in before, during, and after eating to see if you can identify where you are.
Learning to trust yourself
Trust is the difficult part because you may not believe it is possible for you.
It is! And I’ve helped 1000s of people rediscover this essential skill!
In my next video, I’ll talk about Transformation Stage 2: Eat What You Love Without Guilt or Loss of Control.