Nowadays, most of the food we consume is purchased in grocery stores or farmer’s markets, organized in convenient rows, and advertised with appropriate signage. Other than having enough money to pay for groceries, there aren’t any real barriers to getting sufficient food in our bellies. No hunting or gathering is necessary, unless you count gathering your groceries in a shopping bag. Obviously, obtaining food was much more of a challenge for our ancestors. They had to track, kill, identify, and use their intellect to feed themselves.
Included in the list of skills our ancestors used to sustain their life-force are those of Intuitive Eating. They had to decide whether or not a particular substance that they were going to eat was going to be beneficial or harmful for them. There were not books for them to consult, and surely there was no PaleoHacks.com. As a result, they had to inspect the substance carefully with their senses and use their prior eating experience to guide their eating choices.
Unfortunately, many of us modern day humans have lost touch with our Intuitive Eating skills. We base what we eat off of advertising, something we read in a book, cost, convenience, or pleasure. There is nothing inherently or explicitly wrong with eating a food because it is convenient, cheap, tasty, or purported to be healthy. However, I think those reasons should be supplemented with reasons that are more natural and “intuitive” to us.
Two registered dieticians named Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch started the modern Intuitive Eating movement to help us regain the eating skills that we were born with, but just forgot to continue using. Their philosophy can be broken down into three core tenets:
1. Eat for Physical Rather than Emotional Reasons
2. Rely on Internal Hunger and Satiety Cues
3. Unconditional Permission to Eat
At first these rules may seem like no-brainers. Of course we shouldn’t be emotionally eating! But when the rules are broken down a bit further, they start to conflict with some paleo diet practices. Some folks who eat paleo fast when they are feeling hungry, only allow themselves to eat certain foods, or restrict their food intake based on macronutrient ratios. These behaviors directly conflict with the core characteristics of the Intuitive Eating movement.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that fasting, cutting highly processed foods out of your diet, or tweaking your macros is bad. If you subscribe to the Intuitive Eating philosophy though, adding some Intuitive Eating practices into your current behavioral routine is a good idea. That may mean being okay with ending a fast sooner than you were expecting. It could mean allowing yourself to eat sprouted grains and seeing if your body truly does not tolerate them. Or it could be as simple as being more relaxed with your eating regimen and allowing yourself to eat the types of whole food you are in the mood for.
At the moment, science rules the developed world. Everything is validated or invalidated by double blind studies and people in white coats. As a result, common sense and knowledge of traditional societies have been taken less seriously. I feel that this is a bit of a shame. People living in the Paleolithic age didn’t have access to journals and books, but they often did quite well for themselves. I think we can learn from them and adopt some more primitive, Intuitive Eating skills into our daily lives. After all, like paleo, research backs the movement up.
Unfortunately, many of us modern day humans have lost touch with our Intuitive Eating skills. We base what we eat off of advertising, something we read in a book, cost, convenience, or pleasure. There is nothing inherently or explicitly wrong with eating a food because it is convenient, cheap, tasty, or purported to be healthy. However, I think those reasons should be supplemented with reasons that are more natural and “intuitive” to us.
Two registered dieticians named Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch started the modern Intuitive Eating movement to help us regain the eating skills that we were born with, but just forgot to continue using. Their philosophy can be broken down into three core tenets:
1. Eat for Physical Rather than Emotional Reasons
2. Rely on Internal Hunger and Satiety Cues
3. Unconditional Permission to Eat
At first these rules may seem like no-brainers. Of course we shouldn’t be emotionally eating! But when the rules are broken down a bit further, they start to conflict with some paleo diet practices. Some folks who eat paleo fast when they are feeling hungry, only allow themselves to eat certain foods, or restrict their food intake based on macronutrient ratios. These behaviors directly conflict with the core characteristics of the Intuitive Eating movement.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that fasting, cutting highly processed foods out of your diet, or tweaking your macros is bad. If you subscribe to the Intuitive Eating philosophy though, adding some Intuitive Eating practices into your current behavioral routine is a good idea. That may mean being okay with ending a fast sooner than you were expecting. It could mean allowing yourself to eat sprouted grains and seeing if your body truly does not tolerate them. Or it could be as simple as being more relaxed with your eating regimen and allowing yourself to eat the types of whole food you are in the mood for.
At the moment, science rules the developed world. Everything is validated or invalidated by double blind studies and people in white coats. As a result, common sense and knowledge of traditional societies have been taken less seriously. I feel that this is a bit of a shame. People living in the Paleolithic age didn’t have access to journals and books, but they often did quite well for themselves. I think we can learn from them and adopt some more primitive, Intuitive Eating skills into our daily lives. After all, like paleo, research backs the movement up.