Intuitive Eating Principles from a Somatic Therapy Approach in Atlanta
We learn how okay or not okay it feels to be nourished in our earliest experiences of life, over and over again. Whether people have Good Enough Parenting or not, no one gets what is ideal. But our body shows us, our habits and patterns let us know, when we crave a somatic knowing of ideal support that moves beyond words.
As chronic anxiety, depression, or challenges with food, eating and exercise begin to surface more and more, many people need to experience more support, more help with re-patterning safety, trust and the capacity to move into the world with curiosity. This takes time. No quick fixes. No promises or threats. Reconnecting with safety, trust and fulfilling eating and movement is an initially a relational process, a lifelong personal practice, a path of exploration to eventually feed yourself deeply.
On one hand, various forms of talk therapy, support groups, affirmations, mantras and reading can offer verbal morsels of support, words and ideas that support change, healing and growth.
On the other hand, for sustainable growth from the inside-out, re-patterning safety, trust and movement requires preverbal redos, somatic explorations of early relational experiences:
for co-regulation (the relational experience of “Is all of me welcome with you now?”), and
for eventual self-regulation (“All of me is welcome here now, and I can love, accept and advocate for all of me now.”).
Intuitive Eating is a non-diet approach that helps you to reconnect with your unique cues for nourishment, helping to heal your relationship to food, movement, and living fully. And this experience of growth and connection is unique for every body.
While there are plenty of books and podcasts about Intuitive Eating that can be helpful, the Intuitive Eating Principles, the daily practices of reconnecting with with your intuition, your Belly-brain awareness, is a somatic experience that can be made more conscious and accessible when it’s supported with a relational and developmentally-informed approach.
Intuitive Eating as a Practice to Honor Life Force, not just Disordered Eating Healing
Nearly 30 years ago, I began personally exploring reconnecting with my own body wisdom, my core hungers, as I was feeling pressure to conform, to shape myself into fitting in while in college. I knew that tight, oppressive trajectory I was experiencing was not my preference or sustainable for me, but I needed help and guidance for a new way to live, eat, move and focus.
I immersed myself into an Intuitive Eating informed lifestyle with various forms of support — therapy, groups, movement practices and professional studies. Working in various levels of care for addictions and eating disorders treatment deepened my understanding of the need for more trauma-informed and relational approaches for sustainable bodily functioning and relational nourishment.
Over these years of personal and professional development, I co-developed a trauma healing and embodiment method called Chi for Two®, as well as developed my private practice therapy and coaching approach called M-Bodied: Mindful Movement as Mothering Medicine®, an offering of movement and shapes based on developmental and relational patterns for deep nourishment from the inside-out.
Here are the 10 Principles with examples of relational and developmental M-Bodied support:
Intuitive Eating Principle 1: Reject Diet Culture
Can you turn your head away from swallowing messages and pressure to conform to shapes, styles & shoulds that do not fit your taste? This will help you turn toward what fills you up. If no is not an option, yes is not a choice. The celebration of preference invites safety and autonomy, which creates environmental support for biological functioning, gut motility, a desire to live more fully.
Intuitive Eating Principle 2: Honor your Hunger
Your hunger and body cues are unique to you, and you get to practice attuning to them as they inevitably evolve throughout life. Your bodily sensations, your hunger cues, are unique to you getting to know them rather than a prescriptive or restrictive plan that is designed to disconnect you from your body messages. As you become curious in getting to know your hungers, your body wisdom, you gain more capacity to get to know more of you.
Intuitive Eating Principle 3: Make Peace with Food
If you deprive yourself, you’re more likely to binge or feel out of control with food. How about unconditional permission to eat? No bad foods. When constructs about food or prescriptive plans are removed, our palate can feel free to choose what actually tastes good and satisfies with rebuilding trust that there is plenty more to experience in life. Your brain can better dance with both kinds of processing: “Logically, I can eat more later today,” along with expanding into “My body can be my vehicle, my guide, to tasting and steering my life.”
Intuitive Eating Principle 4: Discover the Satisfaction Cycle
Consider how exploring your eating experience with mindfulness can bring pleasure, nourishment & satisfaction to fueling your body, relationships & appetite for life. As aligned with early relational and developmental patterning, when we are supported well, when our environments offers safety and ease, our anatomical functioning reinforces neural pathways that promote sucking, swallowing, breathing, digestion and elimination. We can receive, metabolize and mobilize food as well as satisfy other appetites and desires throughout life.
Intuitive Eating Principle 5: Feel your Fullness
Listening for signals of fullness can help you mindfully transition from a tasty meal or snack to receiving nourishment in new and fulfilling ways. While this fullness factor is a unique practice for every body, and it’s even okay to overeat at times (sometimes food is so delicious, we need a second helping!), discerning between satisfied/energized and stuffed/shutdown is key. That in-between space usually takes some relational redo — the experience of “is it okay for me to feel me, rather than silence me?” Receiving space to feel you, without starving our stuffing yourself down takes practice, love and support.
Intuitive Eating Principle 6: Challenge the Food Police
For generations, the Food Police has shown up in different uniforms with hopes of keeping certain people small, unseen, less capable in an effort to benefit others. Intuitive Eating is embodied resistance to the Food Police. Intuitive Eating is resistance to domination, oppression and marginalization. Food Police might look like safety for certain families, cultures, systems: “Don’t be too big, don’t call attention to yourself, don’t risk being seen, don’t be too needy.” But staying curious about how culture and systems show up in our body, in our lineage, can provide the insight, the aha, the contraction of birthing that says, “no more arresting my life force.”
Intuitive Eating Principle 7: Cope with your Emotions with Kindness
Reaching for relational support that is invitational can help develop your own inner parent so you can ride the inevitable waves of distress and delights of life rather than reaching for diet culture as a quick fix. However, if you missed adequate attunement, curious exploration of your unique self, then it might sound impossible to be kind to yourself. That’s understandable. Asking for help from someone trained in invitational and developmentally-informed somatic therapy can help you embody what has been silenced. This way your can begin to celebrate all of you — the bold, the shy, the sensitive, the snarky, the creative, the passionate, the scared, the eager.
Intuitive Eating Principle 8: Respect your Body
Let’s celebrate diverse body shapes and sizes like honoring a rainbow of preferences, backgrounds, interests, beliefs and hobbies. Each person’s unique genetic makeup deserves dignity and serves both our individual and collective life force. Like the Poodle Science video that I love to show to emphasize body diversity, our mammalian instincts and conditioning shape our life experience. While we have neurodevelopmental alignment in our biological functioning and all require safety and trust to thrive, we indeed have differences in our shapes, likes, needs and ways we can wag our tails in life. 🌟
Intuitive Eating Principle 9: Movement—Feel the Difference
Moving into your body, toward your body’s preferences and tastes for being present and moving (or not) feeds your embodiment process, your ability to move consciously in the world. Curiosity about your body’s appetites, your body wisdom, can help you to explore different ways of moving and experiencing the world. Movement doesn’t always mean exercise or cartwheels though. Stillness can be a movement practice of sensing the cells in your bones, just as much as feeling the mat support you as you flow through a yoga sequence, or move like a sea creature in water. Let’s shift from movement as prescriptive, to movement as a relationship to honoring your life force.
Intuitive Eating Principle 10: Honor your Health—Gentle Nutrition
When we take away labels of “good or bad” regarding food & movement, we open the possibility to become more curious about how different foods & ways we spend our day affect how we feel, how we shape our lives. When we can pause and become curious about constructs about food and feelings, we can approach food and feelings as energy, things to consume and express as an honoring of our life force rather than something to restrict, control, measure, or tame.
Intuitive Eating is about progress, not perfection.
Intuitive Eating is about reclaiming your Life Force.
Baby steps, no quick fixes.
Curiosity, Compassion & Care.
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