How to Practice Intuitive Eating while Balancing Ethics
As an intuitive eater, we know not to restrict ourselves from any type of food. Therefore, it might be challenging to implement intuitive eating when you have personal dietary preferences in your life. This might conflict with the original intuitive guidelines.
You can be both a plant-based eater and an intuitive eater. This is called intuitively plant-based. One of the guidelines in intuitive eating describes that no food should be restricted. However, it does not mean you have to eat all available foods. Just like some people do not enjoy peanut butter, they can simply choose to not eat it. Therefore, if you have chosen, for personal reasons, to just eat plant-based, that is your choice and enjoyment. You become an intuitively plant-based eater, and plants are a part of your food environment. Hence, the plant-based lifestyle is within the alliance of the intuitive eating guidelines.
Now that we've figured out than you actually can be both, we can now dig down even further and explain what it means and how to do it.
What is Intuitive Eating and Plant-Based Diet?
Intuitive Eating
Intuitive eating (IE) is not a diet, on the contrary; It's an anti-diet lifestyle. IE is an idea that is predicted on interoceptive awareness. It is the process of listening and connecting to the physical sensations in the body and obeying it. Why? Because the body knows what is best for itself. For example, you will feel hungry and eat, but stop when you are full. Hence, it means that the body has a way of regulating its activities. Instead of following a laid-down eating pattern; intuitive eating allows flexibility. It is the practice of learning to make decisions about food after listening to your body signals. Most people on a diet are stuck in a loop of constant anxiety over what they eat and when they'll eat.
Questions like: Will this make me fat? Or will this cure me? Are amongst few of the ones that are on our mind. Therefore, we intuitive eaters will not restrict ourselves of any food. When you give up dieting and restriction, you focus more on the things that bring purpose and joy to your life, and not on macro counts and the number on the scale.
Intuitive eating, as mentioned, is more like a lifestyle with a self-care eating framework. While using your emotions, hunger instinct and rational thought you introduce several principles into your life. These include principles such as respecting your body, honouring your hunger, discovering the satisfaction factor, reject the diet mentality and so much more. These principles will help rise your physical and mental awareness around your senses, as well as remove distractions and obstacles.
Plant-based eating
Just like intuitive eating is not a diet, plant-based eating is not a diet either; - Rather a choice of lifestyle. Unlike many other types of diets and lifestyles, there is no general definition of what it means. The reason for this is because the lifestyle varies from one person to another. However, the primary principle is an emphasis on a whole, minimally processed diet. The diet focuses mainly on vegetables, whole grains, fruits and other plants. On top of that, you can also decide whether you want to avoid, reduce or include some animal products.
Plant-based (PB) or whole food plant-based (WFPB) eaters typically reduce the intake of refined foods and processed foods. In its place, they pay attention to the food quality with emphasis on locally sourced organic plant foods. As a result, it is often confused with a vegan diet. On the surface, both diets look the same; however, they are different. Plant-based food is more flexible, in that followers can eat plants and mix them with animal products if they want to do so. Also, there's nothing wrong with eating some processed and refined foods as well. It's all in the choice of the persons own preference. Therefore, just like intuitive eating, you make a choice to eat what you want. As a plant-based eater, you have made the choice to include more plants in your diet, rather than excluding something else.
Why plant-based?
The choice of eating plant-based and whether you've chosen to do so based on personal reasons or not, is important to understand before we move further down this article. There are different types of plant-based eaters. Some people change their diet to a more plant-based pattern based on one or more of the following reasons: Plant-based for the health, environment, economy or for ethical reasons. If you eat PB based for one or more of these reasons, you have made a choice based on personal beliefs and values.
However, if you follow a plant-based diet, just because some influencer on social media said it will make you "loose fat", or you do it just because it's the new "hot trend", you are doing it based on the wrong values. Is it even your choice? And is dieting for weight loss really sustainable for your longterm health and happiness?
The Conflict
Because the plant-based diet, might not "allow" certain types of foods, we can understand why it conflicts with the guidelines of intuitive eating. Here's the problem:
Diet Mentality
When we talk about IE and not restricting ourselves from any type of food, we are really trying to solve a much bigger problem. In essens, intuitive eating was created by two registered dieticians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch to, among other things, reject the diet mentality.
Diet mentality is the mentality in your head and/or in our society which categorise food into good or bad, Diet mentality also advocate different food rules on WHAT to eat and WHEN to eat. Our society and social media have not done the problem any better by constantly rewarding or punishing "good" and "bad" diet behaviour. Tummy rolls, acne and cellulites gets demonised, bullied and airbrushed away.
The pressure we experience could arguably contribute or might be the main reason to the major rise in eating disorders, stress and anxiety amongst adults and teenagers, but also amongst children as well. If we eat a bar of chocolate, we experience a tremendous amount of guilt and self-hate. Since dieting is a form of starvation and restriction, the experience is often intense and uncontrolled when you are privileged to eat. This desperate act will quickly intensify and spin out of control. It is a perfect environment for developing different eating disorders and an even worse health problem than you had to begin with.
Restriction on a plant-based diet
In PB diet, processed and refined foods include foods such as chocolate, candy, ice cream, processed oils, refined sugar, etc.. Some people would argue, that by restricting yourself from these types of processed and refine foods, as well as some animal products, is not to follow the guidelines of IE. Instead of honouring the principles of intuitive eating, some people will argue that you follow the diet mentality instead. However, I will argue otherwise.
If you follow a more plant-based journey, you hopefully are doing so based on a thoughtful reason. If you are happy with your choice, are thriving and supporting your body, beliefs and values, you are actually on the path of intuitive eating. You deserve to be happy, but you also deserve to be healthy. Therefore, if the plant-based eating supports your body (both physically and mentally), and supports your personal reasons, beliefs and values, it will also support your happiness. It becomes your food environment.
The solution
Intuitive eating is all about making peace with food. Therefore, just like some people don't like peanut butter, and simply choose not to eat it, you can make peace with plant-based food too. It's all about taking the journey by yourself, finding out if plant-based eating is for you, why you do it, and which types of food you want to include rather than restrict. There should not be any rules.
Own preferences, beliefs and values
One of the many principles in intuitive eating states that you should honour your feelings. Hence, you need to be true to your own feelings, values and beliefs. Some people eat plant foods based on their own beliefs that non-plant food (such as animal products, etc.) are NOT food. They are considering themselves as ethical vegans or vegetarians. Ethical vegans and vegetarians consider eating animal foods or some animal foods unethical. This is based upon their own beliefs and values. If they don't want to include animal products to their food environment, that should be okay. In conjunction with ethical vegans, we also have people like myself, who eat plant-based because of the animals, but also because of the environment. Additionally, some people have chosen to exclude some animal products from their diet simply because I don't like it.
In some countries like India, they consider cows to be holy, therefore, they don't eat it. That does not mean they're not intuitive eaters. There will always be people out there with their own preference, beliefs and values on what to include in their diet. In conclusion, we should always consider what we want to include in our own food environment, as long as it's based on what makes us happy.
When you choose to restrict yourself from a certain food, although you really enjoy the food, you will experience a conflict around who you are. For instance, an influencer you follow tells you the misbelief that carbohydrates (pasta, rice, bread, etc.) makes you fat. - Although you love your pasta carbonara, you choose not to eat it because somebody else told you it's "bad". That is not intuitive eating based on your own values, beliefs and enjoyments. We need to be more authentic.
A Quick beginners Guide: How to start practicing intuitive eating while balancing ethics
Now that we've cleared the conflict out of the way, we can now start to focus on the specific guidelines of how to eat intuitively plant-based. I've broken it down in 3 easy steps, of how I like to do it:
1. FIND THE PURPOSE
As mentioned above, it's super important to find the purpose on why you choose to eat like you do. If you have a preferred menu based on a belief you highly value, you are set to go on listening to your body and treating you self for what you actually want. This purpose can be beliefs, values and wishes such as:
- Eating plant-based for the animals or environment.
- Excluding some food and ingredients (such as nuts, gluten or lactose) because of allergies and sensitivities.
- Diet recommendations from your medical practitioner, based on own medical conditions.
- Having a menu based on own likes, dislikes and favourites.
- Eating or excluding other types of based on other beliefs, religions, etc.
There are obviously more examples here too, but these are just some of them.
You need to find out the purpose of why you might want to choose a plant-based lifestyle. We as humans make choices based on what we love, and we should not make them based of what we think we "should" do or just because someone else said we should. It's your body, and your life, so the choice should come from yourself. If you find your purpose based on own values, you won't feel restrictive, rather an abundance of experiences and joy by eating the way that you've chosen. No guilt and no reason to explain yourself. You deserve to be healthy, but you also deserve to be happy, and if your existing diet, whether it's plant-based or not, is not making you both happy and healthy, you need to redefine your purpose and lifestyle. Maybe the plant-based lifestyle isn't for you, but rather a more flexible daily diet instead?
2. NO RULES
I think the most important thing with eating intuitively plant-based is to have no rules. By rules I mean having mental rules for yourself that by eating a certain type of food, will make you a bad person, or a failure. Remember what I wrote in the beginning of this article; We need to dismiss the diet mentality and stop labelling food as "good" or "bad".
This struggle might be challenging, especially if you consider yourself an ethical vegan. I, myself, wish I could go all in and be fully vegan, because I love the purpose of saving animals. However, I've experienced too many times that my body crave eggs, cheese and sometimes fish. By rejecting those foods, I personally just triggered my eating disorder and did more harm than good, both to my body and the animals I wished to save. Therefore, I will encourage you to have no rules, and allow yourself to include different types of food. It's okay to not be perfect either. Some people love the fully vegan diet with no cravings, and some people are more flexitarian. Maybe you will end up like me, by simply allowing them, you will just end up not craving them anymore.
Think of the basic human psychology; What you can't have, you want even more. By getting rid of these rules, you're not only helping yourself heal your relationship with food, but you will also make peace with it. Feeling guilty will not do any good. Stay true to what you believe in, and accept that we as humans can't be "perfect" all the time. You are deserving of happiness, health and love, regarding what society and people around you see as "right" or "wrong".
3. BE OPEN
Be open to change. By that I mean that you might need to accept one day, that your body needs change. Right now, for some of us, plant-based is the way, and all though we're thriving on it and loving it right now, our bodies might need us to change some day. By truly living intuitively, we also need to listen to our bodies, despite what our head tells us about ethics, morals and beliefs.
Therefore, be open to finding your own groove. This point is connected to the section above; No rules. One size does not fit all, so you need to be open to mix and find out what works for you. If that is not 100% plant-based, because you love your eggs for breakfast, or you enjoy a sushi-date with friends sometimes, that is okay! Maybe you're like me, some days or seasons I'm 100% plant-based, and some days I'm only 10%. I've stopped feeling guilty, because I know my body is trying its best to keep me alive and thriving. That is what I trust.
Always remember; It's your life, your body, and you are deserving of all the abundance that life can bring. But to achieve that, you need to be true to yourself, your true values; Your intuition.