Done With Dieting? This Lifestyle Allows You to Eat the Foods You Crave and Love Your Body

When you're hungry, eat! Keep your biological needs in mind, offering your body enough calories, including carbohydrates. If you don't honour your hunger and you wait until you're excessively hungry, you'll likely overeat. Honouring your hunger will allow you to rebuild trust in your relationship with food.

Allow yourself unconditional permission to eat, including when and what foods. Telling yourself a food is off limits will lead to feelings of deprivation and will just make you crave it more, which can lead to binging and, ultimately, guilt. You don't need that kind of negativity, so stop the fights you have with specific foods.

No more telling yourself you're "good" for eating minimal calories or "bad" for eating a piece of chocolate cake. This refers to the "food police" inside your mind, which monitors the unreasonable and unsustainable "rules" that dieting creates.

The food police shouts out negative comments, hopeless phrases, and guilt-provoking statements that just make you feel bad about yourself and about food. "Chasing the Food Police away is a critical step in returning to Intuitive Eating," Evelyn and Elyse state in their book.

It's important to be aware of the "I'm full" signals your body gives you. Know when you feel satisfied and comfortably full but not painfully stuffed. It may help to stop in the middle of your meal to recognise how your food tastes and whether or not you're hungry for more.

If you find you're an emotional eater, find other nonfood ways to comfort, distract, and resolve your issues. We all experience anxiety, loneliness, boredom, stress, and anger, but food will only offer a short-term fix.

Eating in response to your emotions can actually make you feel worse, because you'll still have to deal with the source of your emotion, as well as the discomfort of overeating. Write in a journal, call a friend, go for a walk, lift some heavy weights: these are all great ways to get your emotions out.

Lose the idea that you need to punish yourself with intense exercise in order to burn calories or to change how your body looks. Shift your focus to loving how exercise and moving your body make you feel.

Do you feel more energized, stronger, more confident, or happier? Do you sleep better, and have you made amazing relationships at the gym? If you exercise only with the intention to lose weight, you won't enjoy it as much or feel inspired to stick with it.