WEEK 3: Intention to Intuition

It’s time to separate your emotions from your decisions around food, and create a sense of freedom related to your nutrition. That’s exactly what intuitive eating is. The feeling of freedom to enjoy life without constantly worrying about what you’re eating, or how much you’re eating. Having some knowledge and education around nutrition, and also how you frame your thoughts, allows you to stay healthy, maintain your physique and experience total freedom from diet culture.

If you have been tracking your intakes fully up to this point, you are going to choose one full day to leave completely untracked.

FOR WEEK THREE

First, prepare your snacks for the week ahead of time, applying changes to them as needed based on how week 2 went.


Next, you are going to slow down for 2 meals and 1 snack every day, even if you are still tracking them in an app. Halfway through these meals, pause and take the time to assess how you feel. We recommend using a journal (or a note in your phone) as often as possible during this process.

• Are you full?
• Do you still feel hungry?
• If you eat more, will you feel uncomfortable?
• Are you eating slowly and enjoying what you’re eating?
• Are you distracted?

In this step, we are simply evaluating how we feel without judgment. Allow your mind and body to connect and be in the moment. 

Allow yourself to continue eating if you are not satisfied. Alternatively, step away from the meal if your body is giving you signs that you are full.

• Signs of fullness:
  • Feeling focused, calm
  • Able to concentrate better
  • Feeling energized
  • Hunger is gone; stomach no longer feels empty
  • A decrease in the desire to eat
  • Feeling less irritable
  • Slight stomach/abdominal distention

When satiation is reached, food may still be on your plate. Alternatively, you may still be hungry and need to get an additional serving of food. Neither feeling is “wrong” as long as you are truly allowing yourself to slow down and make an educated decision based on what your body is telling you. Acknowledging both feelings are part of eating intuitively and honoring your hunger and satiation cues. 

Lastly, if you are currently tracking your intakes, it’s time to add ONE full untracked day to the week. For this one day, we want you to eat similar foods/meals to the rest of the week, mind your portion sizes and make sure you’re still thinking about everything we’ve worked on up to this point. You want to aim for the same general amount of food as the other days, but it doesn’t have to be perfect. What you eat to maintain your weight and overall health can change slightly day to day. However, to start, we do not recommend saving your first intuitive day for when your schedule is crazy or you’re away from the house all day. Consistency without specifics is the idea here.

Another way to add in intuitive eating days is by not planning them. Instead, you can have your intuitive day when you are hungrier, or need to fuel a workout, or feel like eating less than normal. They are intuitive days for a reason. Intuition = the ability to understand or decide something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning. If you are a long time tracker, you likely have been tracking long enough to know in an instance whether you need to eat or not without having to justify it. And if not, that’s what the other points in the module are designed to help you discover. 

When you are not tracking your intakes fully, it’s still important to know where you are going to get certain things in your diet. In general, the things you should be aware of during intuitive eating include: 

• Protein
• Fiber
• Water
• Fruits and veggies (color!)
• Supplements as needed

END OF WEEK THREE

• Reflect on how your first full intuitive day went:
  • Did you feel the urge to use your tracking app?
  • Did you eat your typical meals?
  • Did you ever feel overly hungry or overly full?
  • Did you feel happier? More calm? More stress?

Do not pass judgment on the things you’re feeing. Instead, write things down and sit with it. Letting go of past thoughts and beliefs around dieting takes time.