INTUITIVE EATING: TRUST YOUR HUNGER

Summer is here and not only it did bring sun and flowers, but it also brought new diet plans and ‘superfoods’. In this interview, our guest is Serra Atalay from Turkey. She is a young nutritionist who encourages her clients to listen to their bodies instead of listening to restricted diet plans and trendings. 

RawafedZusammenfluss: Intuitive eating is becoming increasingly popular. However, false information on the subject is also increasing. Could you give us a factually sound explanation of intuitive eating?

Serra Atalay: Intuitive eating is a non-diet approach created by registered dieticians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. It increases your sensitivity to body signals such as hunger and satiety, helps break the chronic diet cycle, and improves your relationship with food.

RZ: Can individuals expect to lose or gain weight through intuitive eating? 

SA: No. Intuitive eating is a non-diet approach: non-diet approaches focus on health-promoting behavior, better body image, and a healthier relationship with food, rather than focusing on one's weight. While individuals' weight may change during an intuitive diet, it is not intended to be a weight-loss method. 

RZ: What are the rules of intuitive eating? 

SA: Intuitive eating does not have strict rules. Rather, the approach has 10 flexible principles. Honoring your hunger is one of the primary principles. When you aren't truly hungry, you venture out to eat unhealthy foods just for the sake of eating. This is called "taste hunger". When one limits their responses to "taste hunger", they end up eating smaller portions overall.

RZ: We often forget to enjoy the food we consume, fixating on our weight. What can we do to prevent this?   

SA: In this case, we can apply the principle of discovering the satisfaction factor of intuitive eating. Which flavor is interesting to me? How does food feel and taste in my mouth? Do I want to eat something sweet, salty, sour, or even a bit bitter?  
By answering these questions before choosing food, we can regain our pleasure of eating over time. 

RZ: Instead of experiencing our emotions, we often try to overtake them by relaxing ourselves. The easiest way to do this is to eat something. Do you have any suggestions for clients who come with this complaint?    

SA: Emotional eating is a coping mechanism that we learn as a baby. When the baby cries, we breastfeed the baby and calm her/him down. It is not a bad thing. 

RZ: Today, emotional eating; is defined as the use of nutrients to avoid negative emotions. Emotional eating is to use the nutrients to relieve emotions such as stress, anxiety, emptiness, loneliness, and anger and relax to suppress these emotions. 

SA: We work with the principle of intuitive eating to deal with your emotions, (learn to cope - Cope With Your Emotions Without Using Food), with my clients we are trying to change this behavior. We recognize the emotion they feel and talk about it like what they can do instead of eating food.
It is not possible to reset emotional eating because we are not robots but we are working to prevent emotional eating from being a kind of passive coping method with intuitive eating principles during the sessions.    

RZ: Could the media offer the thought of being happy while eating? Because we are familiar with advertisements selling happiness with the product.    

SA: Yes, especially easy-to-consume products such as biscuits, ice cream are associated more with happiness.  The slogans of the X biscuit brand come to mind when I think about happiness and also there are a million reasons to have a soft drink if you want to be happy. Or that's how they portray it. For example: If we are a person who usually turns to food to deal with our emotions, we can be easily influenced by advertising and buy the product.     

RZ: One of the first steps of intuitive eating is to respect your own body. What is the relationship between respecting our body and nutrition?    

SA: Accept your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect to realistically squeeze into a size six, it is equally as futile (and uncomfortable) to have the same expectation with body size. But mostly, respect your body, so you can feel better about who you are. It’s hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly critical about your body shape.     

RZ: We usually start to go to GYMs when summer gets close. Sports are marked as something we do to lose weight. But exercising has a different place in intuitive eating. Can you tell us about the relationship between these two?    

SA: Intuitive eating advises us to find an exercise we love. You can ask yourself questions after the exercise. For example: How do you feel after the exercise is over? Are you more energetic? Does it seem to help you sleep better? After finding a workout you love, it is more enjoyable to continue it. We can remember the days when we played hide and seek as a child and not thinking about how many calories we spent.    

RZ: Do you get feedback from your clients that their lifestyles have changed after their turn to intuitive eating? What are your observations as a nutritionist?    

SA: There are now over 125 research studies that have shown the benefits of intuitive eating. The studies show that intuitive eating is associated with: 

Higher self-esteem 
Better body image 
More satisfaction with life 
Optimism and well-being
Proactive coping skills 
Lower body mass indexes 
Higher HDL cholesterol levels 
Lower Triglyceride levels 
Lower rates of emotional eating 
Lower rates of disordered eating   

I receive feedbacks in parallel with the above results in most of my clients. However, intuitive eating is a process, it does not aim for perfection and there is no destination. The above results may change from person to person. It can take more time than you think. You can have different experiences from the above results.    

RZ: Thank you for answering our questions and sharing your knowledge with us. 

SA: Thank you for having me as a guest. 

Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash

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About the author
Rumeysa
Rumeysa

Rumeysa macht derzeit ihren BA in Soziologie an der Abant Izzet Baysal University. Für ihr Studium kam sie nach Berlin, um für RawafedZusammenfluss Geschichten über starke Frauen zu sammeln. Du bist oder kennst eine Frau, die sie portraitieren sollte? Erzähl ihr davon: r.yalazan@offensiv91.de

Rumeysa is currently doing her BA in Sociology at Abant Izzet Baysal University. For her studies she came to Berlin to support RawafedZusammenfluss by collecting stories of powerful women. You are or know a powerful woman that should be portrayed? Tell her via r.yalazan@offensiv91.de

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