Intuitive Eating: Pandemic Edition (Part 1)

Long time no chat! What have you all been up to? Living in the midst of a global pandemic and trying to balance work, life, family, friends, mental health and overall well-being and happiness...? Same.

In March of 2020 I was in the exciting stages of wedding planning. We had just gotten our engagement photos done and I was eagerly mailing out our "save the date" magnets one weekend. I had no idea (I think most of us didn't) that a year and a half later, I would still be working from home and the life I knew would be so totally different. 

There have been a lot of downsides to these horrible, uncertain times we're living in, but having the extra time to focus on myself has proven to result in more than a lot of failed craft projects. That extra time for self-reflection has given me the ability to really focus on myself, my eating habits and the roadblocks that were still there in my disordered eating journey. I learned to do something I didn't think I would ever be able to do-eat intuitively. 

The question of "What is intuitive eating?" is much better answered by one of the its' founders in an article that can be found here:  www.intuitiveeating.org/what-is-intuitive-eating-tribole/ Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch are the brilliant masterminds behind a concept that so many of us, through years of living in a world filled with dieting, disordered eating and body image issues have forgotten how to do-listen to our bodies. 

Having the extra bandwidth meant having a lot of hard conversations with myself. I asked myself things like Why do I restrict my eating? What am I gaining from not eating (blank)? What am I afraid of happening if I allowed all foods into daily life? What's the worst that could happen (or better yet-what's the best that could happen?) Truthfully, my lifelong need to be perfect was preventing me from seeing how great life could be when it's messy, chaotic and imperfectly human. I had been holding onto the need to not make 'mistakes' when in reality, what I was afraid of wasn't a mistake at all-it was human and the way it should have been all along. 

One of the most important parts of this journey was rejecting the diet mentality. This is not only the first principle of Intuitive Eating but absolutely necessary in order to move forward. As long as we hold onto the notion that our life will be amazing once we discover the next perfect diet, we're never going to move forward to enjoy the freedom we were meant to live. For me, this meant a period of mourning. Mourning the idea that I'd someday achieve the perfect body, the perfect weight, the perfect sized jeans and the perfect life because of those things-this was where it got messy (hint: It's still messy but you learn to embrace and actually love the mess). I won't get into the steps I took to work through this because we all have our own roads to travel and have to do the work for ourselves, but I can say...it's worth it. Trust me. 

In part two we'll talk about how I learned to stop hating exercise, embraced my new body (kind of) and developed a new obsession with potatoes. 

In love, health and french fries,
Kacie Leigh