Welcome to How to Love Your Body - on today’s episode we are going to bring it back to the basics and talk about What is Intuitive Eating? We want to share the 10 principles with you that were created by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch - These are amazing principles! We also want to share that there is more to these principles in this work. In the work that we do at the body love society we use two terms, UnDieting and intuitive eating. In essence they’re really the same thing, getting away from dieting and listening to your body so you can take great care of yourself without the focus being on weight. At the core it’s really about thinking in a new way that is based on science, compassion and sustainability. A life of wellness that isn’t fuelled by diet culture’s obsession with thinness. The reason this is important work is because it can be so easy to live in diet culture, diet decade after decade, have it not work long term, feel like a failure and keep going around and around in the diet cycle without ever KNOWING there’s another way, without questioning if this is actually damaging our bodies and mental health. That being said - what is intuitive eating? It is the base of our work so it’s important to talk about. Intuitive Eating is a concept by registered dietitians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, first published in 1995. They put it together into ten principles and laid it out so people understand it but it TRULY is intuitive. Many people do these things naturally if diet culture didn’t mess them up too much. So it is a naturally occurring way of being but Evelyn and Elyse put it together beautifully so we can all benefit from it. The 10 principles of IE are: Reject the Diet Mentality (THE MOST IMPORTANT!) Throw out the diet books and magazine articles that offer you the false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently. Get angry at diet culture that promotes weight loss and the lies that have led you to feel as if you were a failure every time a new diet stopped working and you gained back all of the weight. If you allow even one small hope to linger that a new and better diet or food plan might be lurking around the corner, it will prevent you from being free to rediscover Intuitive Eating. 2. Honor Your Hunger Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates. Otherwise you can trigger a primal drive to overeat. Once you reach the moment of excessive hunger, all intentions of moderate, conscious eating are fleeting and irrelevant. Learning to honor this first biological signal sets the stage for rebuilding trust in yourself and in food. 3. Make Peace with Food Call a truce; stop the food fight! Give yourself unconditional permission to eat. If you tell yourself that you can’t or shouldn’t have a particular food, it can lead to intense feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings and, often, bingeing. When you finally “give in” to your forbidden foods, eating will be experienced with such intensity it usually results in Last Supper overeating and overwhelming guilt. 4. Challenge the Food Police Scream a loud no to thoughts in your head that declare you’re “good” for eating minimal calories or “bad” because you ate a piece of chocolate cake. The food police monitor the unreasonable rules that diet culture has created. The police station is housed deep in your psyche, and its loudspeaker shouts negative barbs, hopeless phrases, and guilt-provoking indictments. Chasing the food police away is a critical step in returning to Intuitive Eating.  5. Discover the Satisfaction Factor The Japanese have the wisdom to keep pleasure as one of their goals of healthy living. In our compulsion to comply with diet culture, we often overlook one of the most basic gifts of existence—the pleasure and satisfaction that can be found in the eating exper