My Experience With Intuitive Eating - Part II

My second IE experience was intentional. About 12 years ago, I bought the book Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch and began putting the principles to work. I was actually making slow but steady progress, and even losing weight, and I remember feeling really good. But for some reason that I can’t remember, I stopped. Knowing myself, I’m fairly certain that it wasn’t working fast enough and I decided to try some diet that promised I’d lose 30 pounds in a week without any effort. Also, that was a time in my life when I was not at all happy (living in a city I hated, no friends, working at a job I hated even more than the city), so I may have just fallen into emotional eating and never looked back. And so the book got packed into a box and tucked away and I went back to the dieting rollercoaster and forgot all about intuitive eating until just this year.

But I do remember how good and how natural it felt to eat this way. And I remember that it actually felt fairly easy, even though it was a slow process. I wish I could say that it felt as easy this time. While I'm definitely appreciating the freedom that not considering any food forbidden brings, I'm struggling with stopping when satisfied in a way I don't remember doing before. Don't know if my memory is just not that great or an additional decade worth of baggage has made the struggle that much more difficult. As a result, I am worried about being able to reach a weight that I’m really comfortable at. And that is probably my biggest fear with regard to IE. I want to make peace with my body, but if that means that I’ll be at this weight forever, then I'm not sure this will work for me. Because I don’t think I can be happy at this weight. I really don’t. But, for now, I'm putting that fear aside, because I have one full year to devote to this and I'm going to see where it takes me. And who knows, in a year from now, maybe my head will be in a different place, even if my body isn't. And a little peace of mind isn't a bad thing by any stretch of the imagination.