It’s natural after years of dieting and diet culture influence to find it difficult to trust yourself around food and your body. As an intuitive eating coach and when learning intuitive eating myself, I found self-trust to be the most important piece to healing your relationship with food.
How to start trusting your body more as an intuitive eater
First I want to add this list in the context of learning to trust your body more for intuitive eating. I know there are many reasons you might have trouble trusting your body, and this focused list may not answer trusting your body for those other contexts.
But if you’re reading this from the place of not thinking you can’t trust your body because you’ve spent years dieting and being told you’ll overeat if you don’t watch yourself. Then these tips will be for you.
Compassion for when you don’t trust your body
The first tip for trusting your body is to not disregard the reasons you’re struggling to trust your body.
When I started learning intuitive eating I noticed how so many tips I followed (and gave as a registered dietitian) actually sent the message that you can’t trust yourself
Things like “don’t keep it in the house so you can’t eat it”, teach you that if it’s in the house you will overeat the food.
And diets put such an emphasis on using self control, discipline, and willpower that you end up spending so much energy controlling yourself. And trying to control someone (even yourself) isn’t trusting.
I remember feeling like I needed the meal plan because I couldn’t trust myself to make the right decisions without a plan.
Embracing the reasons I couldn’t trust myself and building an understanding of why I felt that way was the important first step for me to be able to start trusting myself around food again.
Instead of judging myself for all the times I was “out of control”, I started to have compassion for those moments and was able to forgive myself for the relationship with food I created while dieting that created those out of control moments.
Build safety to trust your body
The second tip I have for learning to trust your body is to practice creating safety to trust yourself.
New experiences can often be unnerving and can feel unsafe to do. Which can lead some people to avoid going back to the new beliefs they want.
Really how creating safety will look depends on each individual.
I often hear from clients it’s helpful to first start with the idea of trusting yourself and then slowly introducing new situations. And as they create more positive experiences when practicing trusting themselves, it feels more and more OK to just trust themselves.
So instead of suddenly breaking every food rule you’ve been following. Pick one thing at a time to do so it’s less overwhelming.
Here’s an example of one of my favorite exercises for this. The goal of the exercise is to learn that it’s safe to have the “bad” food in the house and you can trust yourself.
This exercise is great for foods that you think you can’t keep around you or you’ll just eat it all right away. We’ll use the example of chips for the steps below:
- Commit to practicing allowing yourself for 1 week
- Each day give yourself permission to eat as many chips as you want mindfully
- Notice how you feel physically and emotionally while eating
- Continue steps 2 and 3 every day for 7 days
What most people find is that after a few days of this, they lose interest in the food. While they still enjoy the food, they usually don’t want it as much every day because they allow themselves to have it.
Practice affirmations and new beliefs
The final tip we’ll go through in the post is to start practicing new beliefs. The best ones for you to practice will vary based on what you currently believe. But here are a few affirmations that could help:
- I’m learning to trust myself around food
- I can trust my body’s hunger and fullness cues
- Self-trust is a natural state of being
- It’s safe to trust my body
- My body knows what it needs
Find more positive and neutral body affirmations in these posts.