Intuitive Eating: Sustainable Dieting

Dieting is hard. It’s never usually sustainable and can make you unhappy if you’re constantly counting how many coilers you’re consuming. So how do we maintain a healthy lifestyle without counting calories? Intuitive eating.

What is Intuitive Eating?

Intuitive eating is exactly what it sounds like – using your intuition to stay within your daily caloric range. It’s understanding different foods and the potential caloric and macronutrient value they posses.

What Are the Benefits of Intuitive Eating?

The big part to intuitive eating is not having to count calories for everything that you consume. Inconsequently, you don’t have to stress about logging all your foods into your MyFitnessPal app, remembering to write them down before you eat, weigh any food or ingredients during meal prep, or feel guilty for enjoying something with a higher caloric count.

Sounds Better than Dieting, Why Doesn’t Everyone do it?

Simply put, it’s hard to do successfully. It’s very rare for someone to be able to do it without years of experience in tracking calorie and macronutrients. Furthermore, you have to be the right type of person to be able to stay disciplined. It becomes very easy to fall off track or succumb to tasty treats when you are ‘unrestricted’.

Additionally, your caloric maintenance doesn’t stay the same forever. If you start to lose weight or gain weight, your maintenance will change and you will have to adjust your intake to suit your goals. Intuitive eating in this case would become inaccurate.

Are There Other Options for Intuitive Eating?

There are other forms of intuitive eating, and other ways to implement it. Rather than trying to live by intuitive eating, it’s better to alternate between it and traditional dieting. Try not to stick to long to intuitive eating because it becomes easier to fall off track the longer you do.

Another technique that can be considered ‘Intuitive Eating’ is to stick to similar foods and meals for a period of time (eg. week or month). If you maintain similar meals constantly, it becomes easier to stick to your original day of eating, which if it was done properly, would be within your caloric and macronutrient range.

In conclusion, be careful when you slide into your intuitive eating phase. It can be a great mental break, but can also be easy to sway you from your goals.

If you would like to read about some other nutrition techniques, tips and tricks, have a look at one of my other articles on the right.