Intuitive Eating makes no sense if you think about it with your logical brain. Many a skeptic has pointed out that if left to our own devices, we would eat crappy food and never budge from the couch. They assert that if you take away the rules and the discipline, our human nature will always seek the path of least resistance.
Intuition doesn’t come from the head, it comes from the heart, and in the sphere of eating, it comes from your belly. Scientists have found that we have a second brain in our gut. It has been connected not only to physical digestive processes but also to the way we feel (butterflies in your stomach/a gut feeling). This is the place we check in when we decide what to eat, not our heads. Our belly tells us when we’re hungry and when we’ve had enough. It craves vegetables on some days and raisin toast on others. When we stop getting our brain involved in the conversation, our bodies always choose what is right for us at that moment. Our divine intelligence resides in our bodies, not in our minds.
Some of the best advise I got when I gave up dieting was to stop thinking and talking about what I was/n’t going to eat. Disengage your brain. Don’t think about it. Don’t weigh up the calories, the carbs, the fat, or the number of times you’ve had chocolate this week. And after a while you need to stop reading the IE books and going to the websites and forums. After you’ve understood the basics, dwelling on the steps/rules elevates eating into something far more complex than it needs to be.
Silence your thinking brain — you will never make intellectual sense of intuition. Follow your gut, lead with your heart and embrace your profound capacity to know without thinking.
[There is] is an often-overlooked network of neurons lining our guts that is so extensive some scientists have nicknamed it our “second brain”.
A deeper understanding of this mass of neural tissue, filled with important neurotransmitters, is revealing that it does much more than merely handle digestion or inflict the occasional nervous pang. The little brain in our innards, in connection with the big one in our skulls, partly determines our mental state and plays key roles in certain diseases throughout the body.
Technically known as the enteric nervous system, the second brain consists of sheaths of neurons embedded in the walls of the long tube of our gut, or alimentary canal, which measures about nine meters end to end from the esophagus to the anus. The second brain contains some 100 million neurons, more than in either the spinal cord or the peripheral nervous system.
This multitude of neurons in the enteric nervous system enables us to “feel” the inner world of our gut and its contents. Much of this neural firepower comes to bear in the elaborate daily grind of digestion. Breaking down food, absorbing nutrients, and expelling of waste requires chemical processing, mechanical mixing and rhythmic muscle contractions that move everything on down the line.
Thus equipped with its own reflexes and senses, the second brain can control gut behavior independently of the brain. ~ Scientific American
Unfulfilled needs.
That’s what it is.
Since I realised that my relationship with my husband is not working and has, in all likelihood died, I have lost 6kg. I do not feel the need to eat for comfort, because I know what I need.
Hi Katie, great post and a truly important insight! The fact that we have ‘brains’ in our heart and gut is profound…
Informed by the recent Neuroscience findings about the discovery of functional and complex neural networks or ‘brains’ in the heart and gut, we’ve completed 2.5 years of behavioral modeling research on the core competencies of these brains and how they communicate and integrate with the head brain. We’ve written about our findings and the models and techniques in our recently published book ‘mBraining’. See http://www.mbraining.com for more info.
For example, one of the many things we’ve uncovered in our work is that much of intuition is processed in both the heart and gut brains, and indeed the gut brain goes through a sleeping cycle each night that mimics and integrates with the equivalent of the head brain. When the head brain is dreaming during REM sleep, the gut brain is undergoing RGM (Rapid Gut Movement) sleep. The research indicates that it is during these periods, that intuitions are being communicated from the gut and heart, via the vagus channels, to the head. There are lots of distinctions and techniques that come out of these insights, and match completely what you’ve been writing and talking about in your blog.
I hope you find this backup to your own work as fascinating as we do.
smiles and thanks, Grant and Marvin