“I’ve been dieting for a long time, losing 5 kilos and gaining 3 kilos back.” With the application on my phone, I track everything I eat and drink, but somehow I can’t eat properly.” “I cut carbs, but I want incredible baklava”If you are making these and similar sentences, Intuitive Nutrition is for you!Intuitive nutrition is the way your body perceives the hunger-satiety responses that your body gives you and eats in line with its needs. It is basically against the traditional diet. The basic idea is to eat when you are hungry and stop when you are full. But this is not as easy as it sounds because most of us want a nice after-dinner dessert, right? So how do we decide whether to trust our intuition or not to eat? Recognizing our hunger. There are 2 types of hunger; physical and emotional hunger. Physical hunger is a biological urge. It gives signals that cause our blood sugar to drop, noises from our stomach, and fatigue. We cannot say that I have taken too much while breathing during the day, I will not take some or I will not go to the toilet too often, and we cannot refuse food against physical hunger. Getting hungry and eating is a need just like breathing and going to the toilet. Emotional hunger is based on emotional needs. Sadness, stress, loneliness, traumas, and sometimes joy are emotions that can create cravings for food. There is guilt or a temporary state of well-being after eating. If a person recognizes his/her hunger, he/she can easily respond to that hunger with intuitive nutrition. But recently, the striking news about nutrition in the media channels “carbohydrates are harmful.” Due to wrong and sharp sentences such as “fat milk should not be consumed”, our minds are full of misinformation about nutrition. Foods that have ensured the continuity of the human race for centuries are not our enemies. In order to eat intuitively, it is necessary to make peace with food. In this way, no food should be described as bad, unhealthy, dirty or clean.In this way, no food should be described as bad, unhealthy, dirty or clean. Although eating is an enjoyable activity for all of us, if we really open our senses and listen to our bodies, we can receive messages much better and get real pleasure from eating without regret. The most important part of intuitive eating is to put aside wrong eating behaviors and tendencies and make peace with food. It should be noted that the idea “I should never eat carbohydrates” is a diet police idea and supports black and white thinking. However, life is a rainbow that contains all colors and emotions, and gray ideas should be included. Another teaching on this path is to feel your satiety. A person who has grown up with the idea that every food placed on a plate since childhood must be finished will at first realize how counter-intuitive this is to the practice of eating. This situation may cause us to ignore our sense of satiety, which is a very simple physiological response, and to finish it conditionally, just to finish it.Another misbehavior is to be afraid of getting hungry and to prevent the secretion of satiety hormone by consuming too much or eating too fast. To support your intuitive eating, you may occasionally ask yourself how I feel right now, how does this food taste, do I want to continue, etc. You can strengthen the practice by asking questions. Coming to another topic, emotional eating behavior, it is obvious that it is a little more difficult than physical satiety development practices. Because we must first learn to deal with our emotions without using food. Even if the foods we eat satisfy us in the first stage or make us forget our unhappiness and anxiety, they are not a permanent solution. If it is not possible to solve the practical problem that can be done for this, listening to music, going for a walk, talking with your friends or meditating can provide relaxation and prevent the act of eating for the moment.Intuitive nutrition, which was first researched by Evely Tribole and Elyse Resch in 1995, has been a subject frequently added to research in recent years for human beings who have distanced themselves from our own selves with modern life. I don’t know what the effect of intuitive eating practices will show us in future research and what benefits will come out, but as a nutritionist, it definitely helped me decide whether to have dessert after dinner.
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