Tolerating Discomfort with Intuitive Eating (the bloat kind and the feelings kind)

Okay, so we’re post-Thanksgiving and middle-holiday season. A normal response (that we’ve been conditioned to believe is a bad way our body responds to evil food) is to sometimes get bloated. It can trigger a reaction in us that induces guilt, pushes us to start planning how we’re going to adjust our eating to ‘fix’ it, and makes us feel like we did something wrong. Our heads can be scary places after (what are normal) experiences of eating past fullness. 

Eating past physical fullness can be a fun, normal and healthy (in the true, overall health way-physical, emotional, mental, social, spiritual) experience. It’s the messages we’re sent about eating more than we may typically consume that make us feel we’re out of control or bad. Often when I’m working with someone we spend a good amount of time assessing to make sure they’re not turning Intuitive Eating into another diet (where you can only eat when you’re hungry and must stop when you’re full). 

It can be sneaky at first: they can’t take being on a diet (or feel they’ve failed at it) and in a desperate attempt to find relief research alternatives and stumble into Intuitive Eating. Except in the back of their mind they believe that if they were doing Intuitive Eating right they would lose weight and only want vegetables. But this isn’t Intuitive Eating. Intuitive Eating is building resilience to the physical and emotional discomfort that comes with re-learning how to listen to and trust our bodies’ needs. And this comes with a good amount of discomfort, particularly when first beginning to learn how to eat in an attuned way. 

Discomfort can look and feel many ways: 

-intense anxiety when you are trying to pause a moment before eating (not in an effort to stop yourself from eating, but in an effort to become familiar with what emotions and sensations are present)

-a distended belly from eating foods you previously classified as off-limits in a quantity that feels large to you (which can sometimes be confused as your body being intolerant of the food)

-fear that you’ve made a mistake and Intuitive Eating isn’t meant for you, but anguish at the thought of going back to obsessing about everything you eat

So what do we do with the very normal discomfort that accompanies the process of re-learning how to tune in to our bodies? The answer isn’t simple, but a really solid place to start (and keep coming back to) is self-compassion. Self compassion keeps us grounded in the idea that we’re human, worthy of love and belonging (just as we are), and worth the tremendous time/work/energy required in re-learning to be in our body. 

We are practicing self-compassion when we: forgive ourselves for running late again (i.e. no beating ourselves up and talking down to ourselves), buy a pair of pants that fits our current body and is physically comfortable, say no to the person/thing that is causing a huge amount of stress, and kindly telling the yelling voice in our brain that ‘it’s okay-I know you’re trying to help, but I’m trying something different right now’. 

This shit is hard…but as a dear friend reminds me in those moments I forget…you can do hard things.