In my last video, I talked about why relearning to listen to and trust your body wisdom can be a game changer! In this video, I’m going to introduce you to Transformation Stage 2: Eat What You Love Without Guilt or Loss of Control. I’ll talk about Fearless Eating and give you three questions to ask yourself for deciding what to eat without restriction and deprivation.
For 25 years, Am I Hungry? has been guiding you to an inside-out approach to eating! You no longer need to weigh, measure, count, or log food and exercise but instead, you can learn to trust yourself to be in charge of your eating.
In the last video, I shared one of the many tools we teach that can help you reconnect with your body wisdom: the Hunger and Fullness Scale. Think of this awareness tool like the fuel gauge in your car: You don’t fill up every time you see a gas station. You check your fuel gauge first!
Now I know I made it sound easy, but there are a lot of challenges people face because this is such a revolutionary way to think about their eating. Near the end of this video, we’ll talk about one of the biggest challenges for people who are finally ready to address their eating challenges head-on.
Stage 2: Eat What You Love Without Guilt or Loss of Control
Transformation Stage 2: Eat without Guilt or Loss of Control
Many people aren’t conscious of the tremendous influence of diet culture. Diet culture is this prevailing belief that there is a right and a wrong way to eat, that certain foods are good and others are bad, and that if people just followed the rules, everyone would be thin and healthy.
This prevalent cultural message has so many flaws, I don’t have time to address them all here, but let me talk about one of the major problems.
Diet culture backfires
Making foods good and bad, and making yourself good or bad depending on what you eat or how much you weigh, has exactly the opposite of the intended effect!
Depriving yourself of foods you love causes you to think about them even more often. Many people I work with struggle with constant cravings or feel obsessed with food .
You may be able to resist these so called “bad” foods for a while, but you might find yourself seeking out replacements that aren’t very satisfying. You continue to crave the foods you don’t think you should eat. When you eventually “give in” and eat them, you find it difficult to stop eating them. You eat until you are too full and uncomfortable, then feel guilty. This confirms your “original” belief that some foods are bad, and maybe you’re even addicted to them.
You promise yourself to start over tomorrow, or Monday, or January 2nd, and you restart the restrictive eating cycle.
Now some of you aren’t on a formal diet, but you’ve picked up various rules from every diet you’ve been on in the past and good food/bad food messages from friends and family, the news, social media, and your doctor’s office. Sometimes you don’t even realize you have these thoughts, until you recognize that you think about food all the time and that you feel out of control when you eat certain foods.
Three questions to ask yourself to decide what to eat
Ironically, the solution is fearless eating! In other words, learning how to think about food in a more neutral way, by making fearless decisions from the inside-out. Fearless eating is eating what you love with fear of guilt or loss of control.
In this video, I introduced you to a technique for making decisions about what to eat that aren’t based on all restrictive rules.
Ask yourself three questions:
- What do I want?
- What do I need?
- What do I have?
I explain the purpose of each question in the video.
You CAN learn to eat fearlessly!
I know it can feel scary to give up the rules if you’ve lost control in the past. But remember, that happened because you told yourself you shouldn’t eat certain foods. Believe me, when you break up with diet rules, food begins to lose its power over you.
We’ve seen it happen for thousands of people, and it can happen for you too!
In my next video, we’ll start to tackle emotional eating. I’ll help you understand why your impulse to eat can feel so powerful and difficult to resist sometimes.
9 thoughts on “Fearless Eating: 3 questions to decide what to eat”
I have a question and don’t know where to ask it. Sometimes I’m just not hungry I may skip breakfast because I don’t want to eat right then is that ok?
It’s a great question Colleen! In fact, I wrote this article about it: https://amihungry.com/should-i-eat-breakfast-if-im-not-hungry
Those three questions are very simple but so freeing. To think and know that I can choose is amazing . I have dieted for 60 years.
Yes! When you get to make decisions, YOU are in charge!
My problems is, I really can’t eat certain things due to managing my blood sugar. It has not been as difficult as I thought to leave certain foods alone. I can no longer eat what I love. LOL, rather I am eating to live.
Chanda, I’m glad you are taking diabetes management seriously since it makes a big difference in your immediate and long-term health.
It’s important to note that it is not “restrictive” if you don’t feel restricted! So, if cutting back on certain foods doesn’t leave you feeling deprived (and later bingeing on those foods) then it sounds like this is working for you!
However, I’ve worked with many people who have diabetes (or other health conditions) and fall into the same eat-repent-repeat cycle they struggled with when dieting. Since diabetes is a long-term issue, they need a long-term approach! It is not necessary to eliminate certain foods (i.e. carbs) from your diet but it is helpful to learn how your body responds to different amounts of carbs (and other macronutrients) after your snacks and meals so you can adjust the amount you eat and keep your glucose in your target range. (For more about all this, take a look at Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat with Diabetes – https://amihungry.com/marketplace/eat-what-you-love-love-what-you-eat-with-diabetes-a-mindful-eating-program-for-thriving-with-prediabetes-or-diabetes)
The hardest questions are what do I want and what do I have. I struggle with keeping things I like readily available. Because the doctor said to stop eating wheat, I have to roast vegetables and/or make salads or other vegetables almost daily, so no more quickie meals. Also my husband is on a low sodium diet so we struggle with getting good food on the table. No wonder women didn’t used to work outside the home! It is just a change of mindset too that we are struggling with-no more easy processed food which is good but time consuming. We are still learning what we like that we can eat.
Hello.
I felt some peace after listening to the three question concept. Thank you.
Yes, it is a simple concept! Not always easy of course, but with practice, it becomes second nature.