Intuitive Eating and Liberation Martial Arts
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The intuitive eating approach to nourishment goes beyond Western normative dieting, emphasizing listening to your body's signals and fostering a healthy relationship with food.
Intuitive eating is about reconnecting with your body's natural hunger and satiety cues. It's a practice that encourages you to trust your body to tell you when to eat, what to eat, and how much to eat. It's Wayfinding eating.
Unlike crash diets or restrictive eating plans, intuitive eating promotes a positive relationship with food and respects your body's needs. It removes the guilt and judgment often associated with eating, allowing you to enjoy food for nourishment and pleasure.
Connecting to self-determination theory
Self-determination theory (SDT) emphasizes autonomy, competence, and relatedness as essential components of motivation. Intuitive eating aligns perfectly with these principles. By trusting your body's signals, you exercise autonomy over your eating habits. You develop competence as you learn to interpret and respond to your hunger and fullness cues effectively. Lastly, intuitive eating fosters a sense of relatedness by encouraging a compassionate and respectful relationship with your body, reducing anxiety in social situations, and decreasing social isolation.
Embodied cognition
Embodied cognition is the idea that our thoughts and emotions are deeply intertwined with our physical experiences. Simply put, our mental and emotional well-being is closely connected to how we physically experience the world. When we practice intuitive eating, we engage in embodied cognition by tuning into our body's signals and using that information to guide our eating behaviors. This practice helps create a harmonious relationship between our senses and behaviors, promoting overall well-being.
Trauma
Trauma, negative self-image, and judgment can severely impact your relationship with food and your body. These experiences can lead to disordered eating patterns and a disconnection from your body's signals. Food becomes a source of stress and guilt rather than nourishment. Over time, this disconnection can cause psychological and physical harm, creating trauma cycles that are difficult to break.
Similarly, crash diets and weight loss drugs can distort your body's natural signals, making it difficult to recognize hunger and fullness cues.
When you've been taught to mistrust your body through restrictive diets, judgment, or past traumas, it takes time and patience to rebuild that trust. This journey is not just about learning to eat intuitively but also about healing your relationship with your body and food. The same is true for Wayfinding more broadly: learning to find your way through your body and the world means healing your relationship with your body, rebuilding trust in your senses, and nurturing your self-confidence.
Connecting to early development
For parents and educators, intuitive eating mirrors gentle parenting, self-directed learning, and autonomy-supportive parenting. These approaches view children as individuals who can think and learn rather than as mindless robots that memorize instructions. While these methods are supported by modern scientific understandings of how the brain and body work, they have long been practiced in Indigenous and non-Western cultures. In other words, it's the West using science to revive something it had supplanted.
Gentle parenting emphasizes respect and empathy, values that align with the compassionate approach of intuitive eating. Autonomy-supported parenting encourages children to make their own choices and learn from their experiences, just as intuitive eating encourages individuals to trust their bodies. Self-directed learning, which focuses on allowing children to guide their own educational journeys, parallels the self-guided nature of intuitive eating.
Conclusion
How you do one thing is how you do all things. Trusting your body means trusting your body. Fostering compassionate relationships includes being compassionate with yourself. Engaging with the world around you also means engaging with food. Experiencing life fully includes experiencing food mindfully.
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