Intuitive Eating – How Could It Benefit You?
Friday, September 18th, 2009This week Charly and I had an amazing conversation with Gillian-Hood-Gabrielson whose specialty and passion is to teach women about “Living now, instead of waiting to lose weight” , “Taking back power over food” and to “Re-ignite the relationship with your body”. This is very much in alignment with yoga – living in the present moment, becoming aware of your body and establishing a good, healthy and respectful relationship with it are some of the foundations on which yoga is built.
Gillian comes from a personal training background and her relationship with food was fraught with difficulties from an early age. She finally discovered “intuitive eating” and has been on that journey ever since.
A lot of us have a love-hate relationship with food, we know what we should be doing and eating and yet – somehow it just doesn’t work, we don’t manage to follow through.
Intuitive eating is not a diet, healthy eating or lifestyle. In a nutshell it means “eating when you are hungry and stopping when you are full”. Sounds so simple, doesn’t it? For a lot of us it is not simple because we have been conditioned to believe that we have to “Finish everything on our plate”, to “eat because otherwise the cook is unhappy, we don’t love her any more when we don’t eat lots of her food” or similar things. Often food is used to suppress emotions. “You are hurting – go and get an ice cream, it will make you feel better”. These childhood patterns continue to shape our attitude towards food and our behaviour around food all through our adulthood. Often we are not even aware that this is happening.
Intuitive eating means to become consistent – to eat when we are hungry and to stop when we are full. It is that simple. All food is permissible, there is no guilt. We gain gradual freedom.
Gillian also talked about the hunger-scale from 0-10. When we reach 0-1 we are extremely hungry, our blood sugar levels are low and the brain goes into emergency mode. When we are in this state we are most likely to overshoot the mark. We eat too much and instead of getting to a 6-7 which gives us a good feeling of satiety and just enough food for our needs we overeat and end up at number 10, feeling awful. The lesson here is to try and avoid to get to this 0-1 level. It is interesting that yoga should not be practised when we are extremely hungry or after eating a huge meal. The body should be balanced and in good condition when we start our session so we can gain the most benefit and the body and mind do not distract us too much.
We talked about other interesting matters relating to food, eating, tiredness and stress management.
Listen to the full interview to find out.
You can find out more about Gillian by going to her website which is http://www.healthieroutcomes.com
At the moment she is selling her e-book “Four Weeks to a New You” for 50% off. Grab it before the end of September for that price.
Here is to a New You!
Connie,
Your Yoga Partner
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What an amazing blog talk radio show we had today with Margit Robson! Make sure you listen to the whole segment, Margit shares some amazing and profound insights and she explains everything in really simple terms. She uses the KISS principle – no, it is not what you think it is – Keep It Simple Spirit. At times my business partner Charly and I were lost for words because what Margit had to say resonated to strongly with us. Listen to our talk, you will get some great insights.
