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We've probably all heard of "intuitive eating", but what actually is it? Is it possible to lose fat or do any body recomposition while eating intuitively? How do you start if you've never really paid attention to your hunger and fullness cues? I'll dive into these questions and more, so let's get started!
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Hi, my name is Brady and I'm a longtime fitness professional and Midwest girl turned mountain living hiking addict. And combining my knowledge of fitness and passion for hiking, I've helped hundreds of women get lean and strong for the trails. Think of this as your one stop shop for both education and inspiration on all things female wellness, trail talk and adventure. Hiking, female metabolism, motherhood, nutrition, travel and fitness are all topics you'll hear discussed here. If you are outdoorsy and active, looking to level up your health, unlock your potential, and become inspired to live your most vibrant life, you're in the right place. You're listening to the fit for Hiking podcast. Hello everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the fit for Hiking podcast. This is your host, Brady, and today we are going to be diving into the super fun topic of intuitive eating. So we're really going all in with nutrition today and kind of talking through the mindset component. That is such a big part of healthy eating and nutrition and how we're feeling our body, because obviously a lot of us know that certain foods are less healthy than others, and we should be eating more veggies and more protein. However, it's the act of actually following through with these things and not just jumping from one extreme diet to another. That is easier said than done. And so I want to talk about intuitive eating, what that looks like, some steps to actually move towards a more intuitive approach with your nutrition. And then how does that work when you have a goal, maybe of body composition, you want to gain muscle, you want to lose fat. Um, can you also still intuitively eat in tandem? So let's talk about it. Intuitive eating is simply listening to one's hunger signals and eating accordingly. So there's no diet regime rules or off limits food. Um, ideally, intuitive eating is a place where you feel really balanced and healthy in moderation, right? Like you feel like you're eating healthily for the most part, but you still have the moderation to say yes to things that are celebratory and maybe considered a little bit less healthy, right? Things that diet culture might say, oh, you can't eat that if you're trying to follow a healthy diet. So like with anything, nutrition is very much not one size fits all in the sense that everybody listening to this episode right now is coming into this with different dieting history, mindset blocks, food triggers, preferences, allergies, schedule, energy needs, metabolic baselines, etc. so while I hope that this episode will provide some clarity on how to move from diet hopping to a more balanced, intuitive approach, you might may find that you need a more personalized approach that will really kind of meet you and your unique situation. So if that's the case, or you've already tried everything without success, that's what our coaching team is here for. So let me just say that right off the bat, if you're struggling to do this on your own, that is why we're here. So you can apply at the link in our bio. And as a listener of the podcast, your first first month will be half off. If you mention in your application or when you're chatting with me that you're coming from the podcast. So don't forget to drop that line so you can get half off your first month coaching. Okay. So let's talk about how one moves towards a place of intuitive eating while still also moving the needle towards one's fitness goals. Because I do think that there's a bit of a fine line here between intuitive eating and just kind of eating whatever you want and saying that you intuitive eat right? We still want to be eating in a way that's supporting our ideal body composition, our health, fueling our activity, and ultimately allowing us to be in our optimal health. Right. So let's talk about the first thing. Number one is you really do need to kind of get clear on your current goal around fitness, body composition and food. So maybe your goal is simply to work on your relationship with food because you know that unless you address that, you're probably just going to spend your wheels. So if that's the case, you can really fully work on just intuitive eating without any conflicting pressure to modify your food intake to reach a certain body composition goal. Because you need to understand that working towards both like a body composition goal and intuitive eating in tandem may be hard initially because in order to pursue like a fat loss goal, you've got to restrict your intake, potentially going against your initial hunger cues for a period of time. And the whole goal of intuitive eating is to listen to and honor your hunger cues. So I recommend working on your intuitive eating in a place of maintenance where you're really not trying to change your body composition in any big ways at the time, because it is really hard to do both in tandem. If you're trying to work on intuitive eating, but you're also trying to work on losing weight or work on adding muscle, because you're just going to have to be a lot more aware of what you're putting in your body if you are trying to alter body composition. Okay, so first, get clear on your goals and make sure that you can really focus on working on your relationship with food and moving towards a place of intuitive eating before you're also trying to add in all of these other goals that will make that a little bit tougher and just kind of muddy the waters. Number two is to have an understanding of how much food you're generally eating, and the calorie amounts in the food that you have on a regular basis before you move towards intuitive eating. Okay, so hear me out here because some people are super against. Calorie tracking. They find it very disordered. Um, they think it's very negative. However, I do think that there's something to be said for having awareness at one point in order to move to a place of eating intuitively, because if we have no clue how much protein is in the foods that we're having on a regular basis, how are we going to know that we're getting sufficient protein to meet our needs as as women, especially if you're active, you're lifting weights if you want to gain muscle, which we should be trying to maintain or gain muscle for our optimal health, especially as we get older. So yes, we don't want to be tracking to the point where we're neurotic about it or it becomes super unhealthy. But having a general awareness of the calories that you're consuming on a daily basis on average, or your protein intake or your veggie intake, that is just helpful as a baseline to know, hey, where do I need to maybe adjust? And just using that information moving forward. So this kind of allows you to move towards eating intuitively, while still being aware and informed of how much you're actually consuming. The two don't need to be at odds with each other. I feel like there's two camps with this whole thing. It's like either you're an intuitive eater and you're very anti tracking your anti MyFitnessPal, or you are all about the tracking and intuitive eating doesn't work. And it's just. A farce and it's not realistic. And I think that there's something to be said, that you can really bring the two together, and they don't have to be at odds. You can use both as helpful tools at different times. In fact, I find the most success when I have calorie awareness and intuitive eating kind of ebbing and flowing together during different seasons of my life. So think about it like following a GPS until you know how to get to the destination. That's kind of how I view tracking for a season of life. If I had never, ever tracked before, I would have no clue what were like actually good high protein foods. I would still probably think that peanut butter was a great high protein option. You know, like you need to kind of have that awareness where you actually look at your food labels for for one season of life at least, so that you can see, okay, wow. That's like actually mostly fat or that is mostly a carbohydrate carbohydrate focused food. Not really very much protein in that. And that's probably why I'm so hungry. Two hours after I have that breakfast. Maybe I should try to add in some of this, because that gives me 20g of protein. And that's going to keep me way more full and satiated until lunchtime and also stabilize my blood sugar. So there's a lot of benefits to having that awareness before you move towards intuitive eating. And that's exactly what I had to do. I had to go through a phase where I was tracking to then move to a place where I could intuitively eat, but still maintain a healthy body composition along the way. Okay. Number three is give up the notion of cheat meals, off limits food, off limit foods, or demonizing foods in general. Okay, this is so important if you're going to move towards a healthy relationship with food and intuitive eating, if you're someone who typically doesn't allow for any treats until the weekend, or you feel out of control around certain foods, you really need to start implementing moderation with these foods. And I know it's easier said than done. This is definitely a process, but start by making them available to yourself on a daily basis. So like if there's some foods that you're like, I can't even keep that in the house because I'll just like, eat it all or I'll binge on it. Or then if I go in public and I see that food, then I have to have like five helpings of it. That might be something that you want to start keeping available to yourself and having some every single day until you're like, oh, this food doesn't really have any power over me. It's available to me whenever I want to have it. I don't need to have it all the time, though, because then you're kind of breaking that power where you don't feel like out of control around a certain food because you know you can have it any time that you want, but there's going to be days where, like, maybe you just really don't want any, where you can have a small amount and feel satiated by that. So just a little disclaimer. You might find that during this stage, you either gain weight or you lose weight and it's different for everyone. Some people might tell you, oh, I started intuitively eating and I lost all this weight. Or, you know, it might be the opposite for you. Maybe you go through a phase where you're eating all of the things because you've been restricting for so long. If you've been in really intense, like dieting or like not allowing yourself certain food groups, cutting carbs, cutting all sugar, then you might find that this in-between phase is really tough for you, and you might gain a little bit of weight during this time because you're eating all the things that you've been restricting for so long. However, it will even out okay. Right now you're adjusting to not having food rolls. It might feel a little bit out of control. You're trying to figure out this whole moderation thing, but it will even out as your brain and body start to trust and fully understand that that food is always available, and so you don't need to approach it as all or nothing. It really is like an act of trust with your body and it takes time. It took me a long time to get to this point because I had a pretty crappy relationship with food of like, always feeling like I needed to be on a weird diet with a name, or cutting out a specific food group, or eating perfectly Monday through Friday and then bingeing on the weekend. So I think the more of a dieting history you have, the tougher that this can be, and it just might take a little bit longer. Number four is to know that if things ever feel unbalanced, you have tools that you can apply and get back to where you want to be. So what I personally do and recommend for my clients is if they find that while they've been intuitively eating, they're starting to gain a bit of weight. Or maybe they just like kind of aren't tracking right now. Life's pretty crazy. And then after a few weeks, they're like, crap, I like gaining weight. I need some help here. Like, what do I do then? I always recommend going back to tracking, even just for a few days. Use it as a tool, see where you're at, see what your baselines are, what is the calorie amount that you're eating to maintain or gain weight right now? And then you have some awareness of, oh my gosh, the snack that I've been eating every single day is actually like 500 to 600 calories. That's probably why I'm a lot higher than I should be, and I'm gaining a little bit of weight. Or oh crap, I've been like having way more alcohol than I thought and the calories are really adding up. Just having that awareness to look at realistically what is what's causing the shift. Why is that gain happening? Because it's always due to an energy imbalance. If you're gaining weight, it's because you're eating in excess. If you're losing weight, it's because you're not eating to meet your body's. Basic needs for maintenance. Right? So we have to look at that information and say we got to adjust something. We can't know what to adjust until we look at the data. So that's really what you think of when you're thinking about tracking for a season. You're looking at the data okay. So if you have a goal of fat loss, you might have to pull back from the intuitive eating for a little while and track and then move back towards it. And that ebb and flow is a really great place to be where you are like, okay, I it's okay if I don't have to. It's okay if I'm not always, always just eating intuitively, I might have to realistically look closely at my nutrition if I want to make changes in my body composition, whether it's to try to gain weight, gain muscle, or to lose weight. If you're someone who's naturally really thin and you struggle to keep weight on, if you are wanting to gain weight, you might need to eat more for a while. My husband is totally like this where like at baseline, he is a super lean guy and if he's wanting to gain muscle, he really has to start tracking what he eats because otherwise he just doesn't eat enough to gain muscle and to gain weight. And so it's just something where most of the time he's not paying attention to really what he's eating. He eats fairly healthily. He eats intuitively. He has a really great, like, balanced approach. But when he's wanting to focus on muscle gain, he does have to track for a while at least to gain an understanding of what are his typical baseline numbers and where to go from there, to make sure protein is high enough and calories are high enough to create more muscle. Okay, so know that it can ebb and flow a bit. Um, and just understanding that you can eat intuitively most of the time, but still use tracking as a tool when you need to kind of button things up a bit. Number five is to have some standards and portion goals or targets. Potentially, if you find that you are just totally going off the rails because like we talked about before, some people will use intuitive eating, kind of like a get out of jail free card. So really just eat whatever you want and then you'll feel the aftermath and it won't be great. Like you'll be not feeling your best frustrated with your body composition. Um, just not eating to fuel your body, right? We want to make sure we're not just saying yes to every fun food that comes our way, because we're intuitively eating and our body wants to have that food. It's more about honoring the portion sizes and pursuing what's healthiest for us while still being balanced. Okay, so having some simple targets like, okay, I'm going to always have two portions of veggies every day, 1 to 2 portions of fruit a day or a fist size of protein 4 to 5 times a day. Protein with each meal protein first thing in the morning. Simple targets like that are going to go a long way. If you find that you're kind of veering off course here and not really eating in a way that's fueling your body, um, also kind of just shooting for less processed foods that you're cooking at home. So you have awareness of what's going into your meals, how much butter and oil are being used? Um, about 80 to 90% of the time. And of course, this is going to fluctuate a bit based on your social events, based on kind of what's going on in your life during each season. But if you can kind of hang out in that 80, 80 to 90% range, then you're going to ensure a good balance of moderating fun foods while still appropriately fueling your body. And I'm just having some of those targets every day. Like in general, if you go a few days and you're like, I have not had a single vegetable, then that's a good thing to just kind of look at and say, all right, I need to start to pay attention to this a little bit better. So in conclusion, intuitive eating is a process, okay? It can really take years to perfect. And even then you might find that the journey is not linear. So be patient with yourself in this process, because there's going to be times when you feel like you are not making progress, or you're falling back into old mindset habits, and that is totally normal. But remember that the goal with intuitive eating is kind of finding that perfect cross-section of pursuing your health while also pursuing balance, and something that you can do for the rest of your life. Right? If you're stuck going from crappy diet to crappy diet, that's no way to live long term. So you really want to think of this as a long term solution, and know that it might ebb and flow a little bit with bringing some awareness back to what you're eating, to make sure that you're still staying in a place that's healthy and supporting the type of life you want, the activities you want to do, and healthy body composition. All right you guys. So like I mentioned before, if you are feeling like you need some guidance in this area or you just have no idea where to start or why you're not seeing progress in your fitness and health, maybe you feel like you're doing a lot of the right things and you're still not seeing results. This is what our team is here for with Mountain Metabolic Coaching. So definitely check our, um, show notes. That's where we have our application. You can apply there. And remember to let us know that you are a podcast listeners. So you can get half off your first month. Um, you can also, uh, just send us a message at the Fit Underscore for Hiking Instagram page. Let us know you're a listener. Let us know if you have questions or want to learn more about coaching. Or just tell us, like, if you're enjoying the show, um, we'd love to hear that. We'd love to hear topics that you guys are wanting to hear on the show. So your feedback is always appreciated. All right, you guys, thanks so much for tuning in today and I will chat with you in the next episode. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the fit for hiking podcast. As always, I hope it leaves you feeling inspired and informed on how to take your health and adventure into your own hands. For more content like this, be sure to follow along with my daily posts at Ponytail Underscore. On a trail that's ponytail underscore on a trail. You can also stay up to date on my new episodes being released at Fit Underscore for hiking, and find more free resources at Pony Tail on a trail.com. Happy and healthy trails.