If you have already heard about intuitive eating, in all likelihood it was about the way individuals can benefit from this nutritional style. Yet, intuitive eating goes a way far beyond the life of an individual person. Actually, changing the style of food consumption can extremely reduce the amount of spoilt food in the world which is extremely important for the natural environment.
What is intuitive eating for an individual?
As the name of this approach to nutrition suggests, intuitive eating is using your intuition for making nutritional choices. This concerns choices of all possible aspects of eating including the time of the day you want to have a particular meal, the type of meal you want to have as well as the amount of food you want to eat. Intuitive stands for mindful in this case, so it heavily relies on your own feelings and needs.
For example, a person who has chosen the intuitive style of eating might discover that having breakfast in the morning does not serve him or her. Even though the majority of specialists recommend having breakfast, there are people who indeed have trouble with having food in the morning. In this case intuitive eating will help a person to make the best choice according to personal feelings rather than the general recommendations.
Another example of intuitive eating is stopping having a meal at the exact moment a person feels full. The majority of people were brought up in the families in which not finishing a meal was one of the things strictly discouraged. For that reason, many people, even when they became adults, still feel rather uncomfortable leaving food on the plate. This can lead to confusion when a person does not care about the internal feelings of the body and will still push oneself into finishing the portion of food. Needless to say, the psychological pressure can just make a person ignorant to one’s own perception of food which can easily lead overeating.
What is intuitive eating for the planet?
It is crucial to note that intuitive eating has a crucial meaning not only for individuals but also for the entire planet. One of the major problems of the society is poor managing of food. While citizens of many countries are literally starving to death, tones of food are thrown away in every day in the developed world. This is a direct result of the way people misunderstand their nutritional needs.
One of the examples is purchasing more food than one actually needs because of a current discount in the supermarket. Instead of listening to one’s own needs, a person feels psychological pressure to save money on the food buying more products without being able to assess one’s own abilities to finish all of the products before they get spoilt.
Another popular illustration of the negative impact of the confusion of people about food is not being able to estimate the right amount of food in the hotels with all-inclusive service. Unfortunately, many people are getting literally lost in the restaurants of such hotels almost always getting more food than they really can eat. Needless to say, this makes the workers of such hotels to throw away an excessive amount of really good food.
Financial advantages of intuitive eating
Certainly, choosing intuitive eating can be highly profitable for one’s budget. Resigning from purchasing a bulk of food which will not be consumed anyway will help one to save a lot of money. Still, changing one’s approach to food especially under the modern conditions of consumerism can be rather difficult even if a person is pretty determined to do it. Still, it is absolutely worth trying since the benefits of switching to intuitive eating are impressive.