Intuitive Eating From a Nervous System Perspective
We need to feel safe enough to eat intuitively.
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In order to eat intuitively (aka following our impulses, listening to hunger and fullness cues, honouring desires around food), we need a regulated nervous system and a felt sense of safety. And Feeling a felt sense of safety is key to eating disorder recovery.
Safety requires not only the absence of threat but also the resonate presence of a nurturing and attuned other. When there is a grounding and a holding, this then opens up the capacity to tune into our desires, wants, and needs around food that stem from a clear and safe place rather than a place of fear.
Being able to feel that safety is complex in a world of diet culture where:
People who do not fit into the “ideal” shape are discriminated against, punished or bullied.
We have to dodge fat jokes, and weight loss and diet TV shows.
Certain people do not receive the adequate healthcare due to their size.
Before and after pictures are glamourized.
Certain foods are moralized whilst others are demonized.
Thinness is equated as a moral virtue.
To feel some kind of acceptance and belonging, we need to fit into to a certain body type.
Remember this feeling?
This is “normal” in our culture and it results in a chronic state of stress, leaving our entire physiology in a constant hum of danger and in a survival response.
When the body holds onto patterns of protection and defense, it does not have the spaciousness, flow and warmth to relax into intuitive or normative eating. It is geared for survival and will make whatever sacrifices needed.
For many people with eating disorders, it has not been safe to truly feel into their hunger cues or food desires. On a deeper level, it hasn’t been safe for them to feel or ask for what they want. Going a layer deeper, some people had to turn away from themselves and play a role that wasn’t them for another person. Boundaries may have been crossed. Needs may have not been met.
If we weren’t taught how to establish boundaries (or boundaries weren’t able to be instated), expand into safe relationships with others, or learn how to sense into the physical sensations or emotional waves within ourselves, we may have trouble identifying hunger and fullness cues, or choosing what food we want which could lead to restriction or binging.
This lack of a sense of self may result in difficulties in making decisions, identifying emotions, needs or wants, and as such may find it challenging to ask for help (because how do you know what to ask for).
When we haven’t learnt to come fully into our bodies, feeling the edges of where we begin and where we end, it can be hard to notice subtle hunger cues which include cues like general irritability, thoughts about food, distracted by a food image on social media, or a general lack of motivation. It may take a loud, grumbling stomach or feelings of dizziness or nausea before something registers hunger.
As we come into our own embodiment by feeling proprioceptively where we make contact with the outside world, or feeling how our bodies organise itself around a core or central line, there is a sense of pushing into things which give us the sense of our existence from a somatic, bottom-up perspective.
This shifts the inner beliefs from “I don’t belong”, or “Something is wrong with me” to “It is okay for me to exist” and “I am welcomed and wanted in the world”. When things in the body shift, so do our beliefs.
We are able to trust our bodies again and start to make food choices that come from our inner voice rather than something outside of us.
As such, eating intuitively is a revolutionary act in the face of “normal” society.
Eating from a place of felt safety changes the way we digest our food, our emotions and thoughts.
Choosing to eat intuitively has the power to change the collective narrative.
Eating intuitively is the ability to move from external rules to internal cues, and is a state that embodies belonging and self-acceptance despite what the outside world says.
Photo by Ross Sokolovski on Unsplash