My return to a low carb diet may be seen as an abandonment of intuitive eating but I think it is actually part of the journey of making peace with food.
One of the main principles of Intuitive Eating is to eat what you want and I am still doing that. I now want to eat protein and fat with limited carbs because it means that I am not always hungry, I don’t have to measure and log my food, and I can release some of my healing weight easily and effortlessly.
Duckfish keeps saying “are you allowed to eat x?” and I keep saying “I am allowed to eat x but I choose not to”. This morning, Baby Seahorse said at the breakfast table “Katie chooses not to eat bread”.
And that is the difference. When I was in the grip of hard-core dieting, I ate what I was prescribed but it wasn’t what I wanted. I didn’t want to eat giant salads, lean meat and greens, I wanted to eat cake, dates, croissants and magnums. I wanted to eat them because they temporarily made me feel good and took my mind off the river of pain that flowed beneath my daily existence which had nothing to do with how much I weighed.
In the midst of the trauma of last year, and as a rebellion against years of deprivation, I did want to eat everything that I had missed out on for so long. I ate all the forbidden foods just because I could. I did enjoy them for a while but eventually (it took about a year … much longer that I anticipated) they lost their appeal.
Now I want to eat food that I like (bacon, eggs, chicken sausages and mushrooms for breakfast this morning), that keeps me full and satisfied and allows my healing weight to melt away. I am still eating intuitively but what has changed is what I want to eat.