Today’s blog post is short & sweet but an important reminder! A sentiment we harp on here at Find Food Freedom® is “give yourself grace.” If you’ve been able to attend any of our trainings, or maybe you are a client here at FFF, chances are this is something we’ve shared at least once in our time together.
This message is so important to your intuitive eating journey; we cannot say it enough! It is important to be patient with yourself and give yourself time as you progress through your intuitive eating journey.
Giving yourself grace is a message we love to share with followers, clients, and members alike because your intuitive eating journey is new. You’ve never been in this situation before and it’s vital to remember there is no “pass” or “fail” with intuitive eating. Tune into the words “give yourself grace” and leave all guilt and shame at the door. Being hard on yourself and beating yourself up for feeling like a failure is not the intention of your intuitive eating journey—remember, failure is truly impossible along your journey.
We want to shift this idea of “failure” to using everything along your journey as a learning experience, instead of a pass or fail.
If you find yourself having a “bad” week or feeling like you “messed up,” tell yourself that these thoughts and feelings stem from diet culture. This is also true of feeling like you have to be perfect, to check all the boxes, to plan your meals, to weigh in, to get your measurements, and so on.
When starting your intuitive eating journey, and really through every part of the process, it is essential to hold compassion and grace for yourself. Understanding that you cannot mess intuitive eating up is a powerful tool in being able to hold these emotions for yourself. There is no “getting back on the wagon” if you feel as though you’ve “failed” when each experience should be viewed as a learning opportunity to learn more about yourself and your relationship with food and your body.
A lens to view intuitive eating through is as if you had to learn how to walk and talk all over again. And truly, we are all born intuitive eaters. This changes when diet culture plants negative seeds of “being a failure” when you can’t “stick to a diet”. With intuitive eating, you have to learn, all over again, how to focus on the internal thoughts and feelings you experience rather than the external.
When you find yourself in moments along your journey where you overeat, or you let yourself get too hungry, or you had a binge, or whatever scenario you experience. This is not a failure, these are all normal human experiences. But diet culture would deem all of these as “bad” or a “failure”. Intuitive eating is all about holding curiosity and looking at this as a learning experience.
Think to yourself:
- What situation are you experiencing right now?
- What can I take away from this experience?
- What is the underlying lesson behind the experience?
Each experience you have is an opportunity to add to the tools in your intuitive eating tool box. And, it is so important to tell yourself that every little thing that you encounter on your intuitive eating journey will not necessarily be “perfection.” Intuitive eating is not about and will never be about perfection. If a learning experience allows you to understand that it has made you uncomfortable, observe the situation and your emotions neutrally, as an outsider. Take moments to chat and reflect with yourself about what you are learning. Get curious!
Your intuitive eating journey is not simply a straight line. You are going to experience ups and downs, like waves. Giving yourself grace and compassion helps you ride the ebbs and flows of the waves, and is especially important in the ebbs of your journey.
The tools you add to your intuitive eating tool box—built through curiosity, compassion, and grace—are essential for this journey. For example, pull your tools out when you find yourself experiencing a bad body image day or you had a binge. Whatever situation you can imagine, these tools will come in handy.
You can never “mess up” your intuitive eating journey. You are simply learning more about yourself, your body, and how to approach yourself with grace. If you were teaching a child something and they made a mistake, you wouldn’t punish them. You would explain that “X” happened and “X” will assist them the next time they experience something similar. Learning, curiosity, exploration, discovery, observations, compassion, and grace are all a part of your intuitive eating journey. Hold this idea close to you as you continue on your journey.
If this blog post resonated with you, listen to our podcast episode “Giving Yourself Grace” to dive deeper! You can listen to this installment of our Find Food Freedom® podcast here on Apple Podcasts. We also stream our podcast on Spotify and Amazon Music!
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