Going through challenging times can be mentally exhausting and emotionally draining. Staying sane and capable of taking care of yourself and your loved ones requires preserving your emotional resources and your strengths to what really matters – what helps you survive through crisis and thrive afterwards.
If you find yourself dealing with stress eating under these difficult circumstances or you have been struggling with eating emotionally or bingeing on certain foods long before the quarantine – you may consider turning to dieting in an attempt to keep your eating “under control”. And, as with all dieting experiences for most of us, it will inevitably backfire, adding more stress and anxiety and further complicating your eating behaviours.
Intuitive eating, on the other hand, can help approaching eating issues from a completely different perspective. As a non-diet approach, it helps normalizing complicated relationship with food and address disordered eating from a place of self-care rather than self-control. It provides the space for building self acceptance rather than self-hatred, and for cultivating self-compassion rather than self-blame for “not being strong enough” or having no “willpower”.
Learning to be gentle with ourselves is much needed during these times, and I thought it can be beneficial to have a talk on how the intuitive eating approach can help with that. I will be sharing here intuitive eating principles, one at a time and how each of them can be applied to the current situation, improving our relationship with food.
Stay tuned!
Yulia Nutrition 