What Does it Mean to be Consistently and Adequately Nourished?
In nutrition and intuitive eating spaces, we often talk about eating consistently and adequately as the golden ticket to being satisfied and nourished by our meals while maintaining healthy energy and nutrient levels. But what does that really mean?
There are many nuances to healthy eating. This is why we don’t have one diet or eating style that works best for every single human on the planet. Our individual genes, needs, preferences, and access all play huge roles in what and how we eat. So when I say our goal is to eat consistently and adequately, know that that will absolutely look different for everyone. And that’s really the point! Intuitive eating is about reconnecting with your body’s internal wisdom and learning how to nourish yourself in a way that makes sense for your lifestyle, budget, preferences, and body’s nutritional needs. Because our bodies’ needs are different, we all have different histories with dieting or body image, we all have different job and family responsibilities, and we all face different barriers in our day to day life, our end result isn’t going to look the same.
One of the most wonderful things about practicing intuitive eating is discovering what works the best for your individual body while resisting the pressure or compulsion to follow external rules. When we first begin developing our intuitive eating skills, we may notice that we’ve actually been practicing unhealthy eating habits without even knowing it, thinking they are the right way to eat. When we base our eating and food choices off of external rules or unpersonalized guidance, we may find that we’re doing the exact opposite of what our body wants and needs. We also often base our eating off of other people’s perceived successes or the promises made by the diet industry backing them. This is not your fault! When we’re taught that we can’t trust our bodies and that we need restriction and discipline in order to be healthy, it’s easy to forget how to listen to your body and even easier to get sucked into an endless cycle of dieting. Also remember that diets don’t only promote weight loss. They can be for optimizing our body’s function, cognition, digestion, or performance, detoxing or clean eating. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck… it’s a duck!!! If you’re told to restrict calories, eliminate food groups, or eat only at certain times… it’s a diet, babe!
Newly reconnected intuitive eaters will often find that they were underfeeding themselves significantly for years by following calorie restrictions or food rules established by diets. They also may find that they were eliminating many foods that they enjoy and thrive on without true reason based on external advice in the name of health. Consistent and adequate nourishment is our goal when feeding ourselves because we provide our bodies with enough of the right foods to sustain our energy and meet our nutrient needs on a regular basis while also feeling full and content with what we’re eating.
Eating consistently can mean:
Providing your body with food at regular intervals to ensure your calorie and nutrient needs are being met so you’ll have the capacity to show up in your life as your best self. Regular intervals can look different for you depending on how your individual metabolism works, your stress levels, and how active you are, to name a few. Most people feel and operate at their best by eating something - including both meals and snacks - every 2-4 hours*.
Eating in the absence of traditional hunger cues because you haven’t eaten in a while. In the beginning of your intuitive eating journey and especially if you have a history of dieting or disordered eating, traditional hunger cues like growling stomach, nausea, headache, and irritability may not be present or obviously detectable. Because dieters have spent a lot of time, years even, suppressing their hunger cues, they often become desensitized to them and their bodies may give up sending signals altogether. These cues can return when consistent and adequate nourishment returns. You may need to set an alarm for lunch and schedule in snacks and meals until eating becomes a normal part of your daily routine. Your body will learn to trust you to feed it regularly, and you may notice gentle nudges of hunger popping up. Although these may initially seem scary because we’ve been taught to fear hunger, try to think of these as gentle notifications from your body - similar to how your phone alerts you of messages from your loved ones!
Eating “in advance” to prevent predictable hunger when you’re unable to stick to your usual routine. Eating when you’re not actually hungry feels like it’s the opposite of intuitive eating, doesn’t it? But actually predicting hunger in the future and then eating in advance to provide the nourishment you know you’ll need later, is an act of self-care. For example, say you’re attending your child’s weekend dance recital at 12pm. It’s two hours and you know they’ll be snacks afterwards but you usually eat lunch around 1. You aren’t hungry for lunch before leaving but know you’ll feel famished after the show, leading you to binge on the free (likely stale) snacks you probably won’t even enjoy. You decide to eat a light lunch beforehand. This allows you to nourish your body in advance so you can focus on your child’s amazing performance without being distracted by hunger and enjoy a handful of the snacks you truly love after the show without feeling frenzied and insatiable from hunger.
Preparing snacks or meals ahead of time so that you’ll have food available to you for when hunger strikes in the future. Similar to eating ahead of time in preparation for hunger when normal mealtimes are inaccessible, we can anticipate our needs and plan out ways to honor our hunger throughout the day. For example, packing fruit and granola bars for a mid-hike snack, making a sandwich ahead of time so you can eat a quick lunch in between meetings, or scheduling take-out to be delivered when you get home from a long day of work.
Honoring your hunger despite what the clock days. Diet culture loves to tell us that there are certain perfect times to eat during the day and an ideal time to stop eating at night. To clarify, your body doesn’t shut down at 8pm. If you are hungry at 8pm, you can eat at 8pm. Or 9pm. Or 10pm. Going to sleep hungry leads to poor quality of sleep, which has way worse negative implications for your health than eating late at night (like increased risk for diabetes and cardiovascular disease). This may also cause us to wake up in the middle of the night and binge out of extreme hunger, or wakeup feeling crappy because your body spent the night trying to repair itself without the proper materials (nutrients! calories!). Eating when you’re hungry - even when you feel like you “shouldn’t” be - is an act of self-care. Hunger is a useful tool to help us understand if different foods and meals meet our holistic needs. If you’re hungry even after eating a meal, it could mean that it didn’t have enough of certain nutrients, it wasn’t a large enough portion size in general, or that the food didn’t satisfy us in flavor and texture.
Which leads us to consider what eating adequately means:
Our meals and snacks include a mix of protein, carbohydrates (including fiber), and fats. Including a balance of macronutrients can help a meal or snack helps to keep you full and focused. Carbohydrates provide glucose, or sugar, that our body - especially our brain - uses for energy. Simple carbohydrates like white rice, most crackers, and fruit will provide almost instant energy whereas complex carbohydrates contain fiber which takes longer to digest, provides texture, and helps keep us full longer. Protein also helps slow the digestive process as well as provide flavor. Fat slows digestion the most, provides the most energy, and offers both flavor and mouthfeel to foods. Food without fat is not likely to keep you full or satisfied for very long.
Our meals satisfy all of our types of hunger. Food must satisfy our physical, taste, and emotional hunger in order to feel fulfilling. Meaning, it must not only provide the nourishment our body needs, but it also must satisfy our tastebuds, and evoke enjoyment. As stated above, the average body requires food every 2-4 hours depending on many factors. If you find that you are immediately hungry after eating a meal, it’s likely that the meal didn’t provide enough calories, or enough of certain macronutrients, or didn’t satisfy you in taste. If you’re having food in place of a craving, it’s also likely that those alternatives won’t satisfy you. Whether or not we enjoy or food is important - if we don’t like our meal, our body is going to signal us to keep looking for more satisfying foods. We also must take into consideration the type of hunger we are. Meal hunger is also insatiable by snacking because we are in need of a higher amount of calories and nutrients. Snack hunger, however, can be satisfied by a smaller amount of food. Getting to know your body allows you to better identify which “hungry” you are and ultimately, help keep yourself adequately nourished throughout the day.
We’re consuming a variety of foods. Having a variety of different types of foods in our diet helps keep us engaged and interested in our meals, as well as provide a variety of nutrients. If we’re eating the same things everyday, it’s likely that those foods - even if they meet our physical nutrient and energy needs - will stop satisfying us. Additionally, if we’re avoiding certain foods or food groups because we’ve assigned moral value to them (ex: veggies are good, gluten is bad), we miss out on the nutrients and flavor they have to offer us.
Our eating style fully supports our body’s needs or we are making an effort to fill in the gaps. Sometimes when we read something about a certain diet or eating style, we really try to make it work for us, even when our body is giving us signs that it isn’t. For example, although veganism can absolutely be a healthy choice for some individuals, it can be very unhealthy for others. If chosen for an ethical or religious purpose, there are ways to make it work using supplementation. But if choosing to eliminate food groups is entirely a health-based choice, it may be best to listen to your body and reevaluate what healthy means for you.
We feel satisfied, energized, and nourished by our meals. How do you really feel when you eat? Not every meal is going to make you feel like a rejuvenated goddess emerging from the break room after lunch. That being said, you should feel full and content after meal times. If you feel bogged down or are experiencing physical discomfort or pain like excessive gas, headaches, or brain fog after meals, you may need to investigate whether a certain food or habit is triggering these symptoms (don’t just focus on individual ingredients, also consider if these are brought on by days you get take-out for lunch vs when you pack, or days you eat later than usual).
Food isn’t on your mind 24/7. Obsessive food thoughts are a sign of being hungry. So if you find yourself thinking about food constantly, even after just eating a snack or meal, you may need to reevaluate the types and amounts of foods you’re eating.
It’s important to note that eating consistently and adequately is a privilege that many do not have. We talk about hunger in intuitive eating a lot because a return of those signals and understanding how to respond to them is an exciting step in the intuitive eating journey. However, we must remember that many do not have the ability to honor their hunger and aren’t able to access adequate and consistent nourishment to support their body’s needs. Diet culture often vilifies hunger in such a way that beginner dieters tend to view hunger as a signal that their body is going to lose weight. Gentle hunger cues are your body’s nudge telling you it’s time to eat. Signs of extreme hunger like light-headedness, shakiness, and dizziness (hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar) are your body’s panic signal. Being hungry is not a trend, it is a systemic problem. We cannot forget that when having this conversation.
I also want to remind you that intuitive eating is a self-care tool, not a diet. It isn’t something that works or doesn’t work, because there isn’t an end goal other than a happy, healthy you. You’re not going to eat adequately and consistently all the time, that’s the truth. There will be days that you skip a meal accidentally or on purpose. There will be weeks when you can’t seem to settle on an eating schedule that works, and you may find your body is telling you it needs more or less food. Your body may change things up depending on the seasons or your stress level which may require you to adapt and take it meal by meal. Because it’s not a diet, and there aren’t any rules, you cannot fail. IE allows you flexibility in how you eat so you can exist without the guilt of eating the wrong way or the toxic anxiety caused by pursuing perfection. It can be frustrating because you may be used to the immediate effects (or promise of immediate effects) of dieting and food rules. It can feel discouraging as you begin trying to redefine a healthy way of eating for yourself. You may have a hard time building meals that satisfy and provide enough energy and nutrients to sustain you. But remember that every meal and snack is an opportunity to learn more about yourself and your body and expand your toolkit to better support it later on. Lead with curiosity over judgement and remember you cannot fail at nourishing yourself, you can only learn.
*Source: Tribole, Evelyn, and Elyse Resch. Intuitive Eating: a Revolutionary Program That Works. St. Martin's Griffin, 2012.
