How Do You Eat Intuitively When Your Intuition Just Wants French Fries?

When you learn to listen to your body, it will lead you to exactly the foods, workouts, and life choices that are best for you in each moment. This isn’t something a diet will accomplish for you. You must go deeper and connect to your intuition, and specifically what I call your “intuitive food voice.”

You’ve heard about intuition, right? This magical thing that’s meant to guide us?

Well, your intuitive food voice is like that, but specifically for what you’re eating. It’s what your gut (all those bacteria in your physical gut and your intuitive gut instinct) are telling you to eat and what to avoid.

The best decisions for you are personalized and individualized, and can change over time. We’re fed so much information about diet and lifestyle trends that it’s easy to get confused and stuck under the layers of opinions out there, whether it’s what Vogue is recommending to eat, your best friend’s latest diet, or what your yoga instructor thinks about smoothies and juices.

You can learn the recipes, the tools, and the tricks, but this will never become part of you until you learn to listen to your own body, to connect to your own inner guru, your own intuitive voice.

This inner knowing is what takes the power away from the birthday cake, the third glass of wine, or whatever “hot-button food” you’re trying to not eat (you know those foods you can eat and eat and eat without stopping—hello, almond butter jar!). This is your internal compass that will steer you back to you. Check in, again and again and again.

Become friendly with (or at least interested in!) your cravings. All cravings are really just a kind of communication between your brain and your body. And if you know how to listen to them, you can learn how to answer them better. Cravings are an opportunity to tune into our bodies and hear what we really need.

There are four things I ask my clients to check themselves on when it comes to tuning in to intense cravings: water (are you thirsty?), emotions (check in with your feelings, not the fridge), self-sabotage (what happened today with your eating?) and habit (are you just on auto-pilot?).

For example, I used to get tripped up by dessert after dinner. It took a long time for me to realize that dessert was an emotional habit and a memory-based need for me, not a belly- or nutrient-based necessity. One of the ways my brother Paul and I bonded during our teenage years was going to get ice cream together (Carvel Vanilla Coke Floats, with extra vanilla syrup please!) after we had eaten dinner at home.

My biggest shift in body, weight, and mind happened when I focused on nourishing my gut and becoming truly thin from within. When my husband and I began talking about starting a family, I shifted my focus from “How skinny can I be?” to “How can I create the most ideal ‘home’ for my future baby to live in?” And then I had an a-ha moment: Our bodies are our homes—this is where we live. Shouldn’t we treat them right?

I let go of trying to look a certain way. I slowed down even more at meal times and chewed my food completely before swallowing. I began to focus on the foods that made me feel my best. And guess what? I began to crave the foods that made me feel (and eventually look) my best, not just pizza and cookies.

So no matter what your cravings have been telling you lately remember you can also take a moment to stop and breathe, chew and tell yourself that you’re doing the best you can. Because you are.