How to Pause and Listen to Your Body: Integrating Mindful and Intuitive Eating

Learning to pause and listen to your body is one of the most profound ways to heal your relationship with food. Connecting with the present moment by being mindful and intuitively aware of your body is healing. We often spend a good bit of time lost in thought, mindlessly rushing from one aspect of the day to the next which often results in mindlessly eating.

When was the last time you found yourself looking in the cabinet and yet you weren’t really hungry or finishing a bag of chips and wondering how you got there in the first place? These things happen, and when you struggle with emotional and stress eating, it can become a mindless action used to avoid or suppress emotions and stress. When you engage in mindless eating to ease stress or numb out emotions it may lead to forming habit pattern of mindless eating.

This is where learning to Pause and check in with your body and mind can be such a powerful action to take along your path to making peace with food. When you Pause, you begin to engage with the present moment as it is right now. When you Pause, you are respecting your body, your needs and tuning into your intuition.

Within the space of the Pause, you create an opportunity to make a choice. This is where the power lies when you become mindfully engaged with the present moment. In the present moment you can check in with how stress or your emotions are impacting your mind, your body, your energy, your mood and your choices. When truly present, you can ask yourself how you want to feel and make choices based on this—rather than on avoidance and fear of feeling your feelings.

If you have been reading here for some time, you most likely already know the definition of mindfulness. However, I am going to repeat it, because it is so useful to have the reminder. Mindfulness is paying attention from moment to moment with nonjudgmental awareness. The non-judgment part is often one of the biggest challenges. Our minds judge by nature and create conditions that can feel pressured or uncomfortable.

When you engage with the Pause in the moment of a craving or when you catch yourself mindlessly eating or avoiding emotions and stress, you are essentially practicing mindfulness. When you use the moment of Pause and make a different choice based on how you want to feel, you are growing your mindfulness muscles (so to speak) to create more strength, awareness and comfort internally.

Now that you have allowed yourself to Pause, you can create and build self-awareness. Taking time to ask yourself, “What is happening right now?” “Why am I stressed?” “Why is this emotion I seem to want to avoid through food here in the first place?” “Is there another choice I can make in this moment?” These questions lead to self-awareness, growth and the opportunity to heal your relationship with food and with yourself.

When you allow yourself to be curious about your emotions and behaviors you create the perspective of non-judgment. You can be kind and compassionate to yourself, which will be far more tolerated internally than being mean and judgmental towards yourself! When you become overly judgmental towards yourself, you are more likely to emotionally eat, regress and feel shameful or like a failure. When you are kind to yourself you are more likely to grow, to push through the challenges and create the change you want.

Once you have examined the pause in a mindful manner, you have an opportunity to make a choice. What else can you do in this moment? Here you might opt to set a timer for 5 minutes and have a glass of water. You might choose to practice deep breathing or remove yourself from the kitchen, food item, cabinets, whatever is causing the mindless eating and cravings.

If you struggle with emotional eating, you may struggle to connect to your intuition. You may feel a sense of being disconnected from your body and your gut feelings. When you take the time to Pause, and examine the space within the pause, you will get back in touch and connect with your intuition and inner knowing.

When you Pause you can observe what is happening internally. Is there something your intuition is trying to communicate to you? Be curious and open to listening to your inner wisdom. Learn to become accepting of your emotions, internal experiences and inner guidance. Learn to listen and you might be surprise by what you “hear.”

Try this practice the next time you are experiencing a craving or you find that you are mindlessly eating/grazing/staring at the fridge: take time to Pause. As you Pause, look within and tune into your intuition. Ask yourself what you are truly needing and see if you can offer that to yourself within that very moment. Your body and mind are intimately interconnected and practicing this Pause will encourage and strengthen this internal connection.

How to Identify the Emotions Driving Your Food Cravings

When emotions are the driving force that cause your food cravings, it is vital to develop emotional awareness. If you have been avoiding emotions through emotional eating—or any other mindless form of numbing them out—this can feel like an overwhelming (and emotional) mountain to climb.

As humans, we tend to seek pleasure and avoid pain. While pleasure is an important part of life, generally, life cannot exist without both, and at times, this includes experiencing discomfort and pain. If you spend your life avoiding pain, you limit your ability to truly experience the pleasures in your life to their fullest.

While emotional eating can be triggered by any emotion, it is generally driven by a desire to avoid or numb out uncomfortable emotions. Discomfort is not experienced as pleasure and we tend to want it to just stop. Food can temporarily trigger the pleasure center in the brain causing a temporary suppression of the uncomfortable emotion. However, it does not just go away! It comes back, along with all of the other emotions you have been avoiding with food.

Learning to identify emotions and understand why you are experiencing them in the first place is essential. While it can feel daunting, knowing you have been avoiding the feelings for a reason, being able to create a more peaceful relationship with food, as well as with yourself is worth the effort. Know that this is a process, it takes time and indeed a good bit of effort. 

To get started, it is helpful to have a feelings/emotions journal. If you have no idea where to start with identifying, much less feeling your feelings, you can download a feelings wheel like this one here. Giving yourself dedicated time to building your emotional awareness muscle is important.

If you wanted to strengthen your biceps, you wouldn’t do just one bicep curl and expect to create the strength you desire and be done for life! You have to do many repetitions—and in order to maintain the strength you create, you must be consistent. You will most likely have to feel a little sore in order for growth to happen.

When you check in, you are identifying and exploring your emotions, this helps you build your emotional awareness muscles. You can continue to develop your emotional awareness by preparing yourself, having a plan, and committing to check in emotionally with yourself consistently.

Choose a time to give yourself space with your journal and emotions wheel and check in with how you are feeling right now. Ask yourself if there have been any emotions you experienced throughout the day today or even the day before that want to be recognized.

Once you acknowledge that a feeling is there, check in with how that particular emotion impacts your physical body. What’s occurring internally as you bring up or allow yourself to feel this emotion? Again, try not to judge your experience but witness it, be present with it, and if it’s uncomfortable try not to run from it—if it is comfortable, try not to cling to it.

Spend time observing this feeling and engage with it from the perspective of witnessing it. Become a silent observer of your emotions.

Now allow yourself to discover the why. Ask yourself, “why did I experience that emotion?” “What happened to create that specific emotion?” Try not to judge, just be curious. Name the feeling, observe it, and now understand the why. This is powerful information about your internal response to—and experience of your life. Emotions are valuable information about your experience of your life and allow you to make choices based on your internal experience.

Do you need to take action on the feeling? When you understand the why behind the feeling, you can decide if there is anything you need to do. If you are anxious, is there something you need to do? If you are angry, is there something you need to say? If you are bored, is there something constructive you could do? How can you take action in a way that is healthy and allows you to feel empowered and in control.

Now you have the opportunity to let it go! If you have allowed yourself to authentically feel your emotion, be non-judgmentally aware of it and derive the important information from it, you can make a choice about whether or not you need to take action. Now it is time to let it go. Releasing emotions comes with time and practice, practice and time.

Allow yourself to consistently show up for your emotions—all of your emotions—and you will find them to be less scary. Additionally, you will begin to feel more and more emotionally empowered. There are no “bad” feelings, just some that may be more comfortable than others, however, they are all vitally important to be aware of in order to make a choice about how to respond. Every emotion has a purpose and is a valuable element of being a human and of being alive.

As you begin to feel more comfortable experiencing your emotions, you can specifically apply these concepts and practices to eating. When you are experiencing a craving, you can ask yourself what you are actually hungry for in the moment. You may find more often than not, it is not actually food! Then you have an opportunity to make a choice.

You create the opportunity to make empowered decisions regarding how to respond to your emotions and how to choose the foods you truly want to eat—not because of an attempt to temporarily numb an emotion, but to enjoy the taste and experience of eating that particular food.

When you consistently practice emotional awareness, you will end the cycle of escaping your emotions with food. If you find you could benefit from support in this area, reach out, find support and begin to grow your emotional awareness. This creates an opportunity to make peace with food by making peace with yourself.

Becoming a Food Cravings Whisperer: How to Tune In and Listen to Your Body

Becoming a Food Cravings Whisperer:

How to Tune In and Listen to Your Body

Food cravings can be difficult to manage, understand and cope with effectively. Learning to listen to your body and integrating mindful and intuitive eating practices will help you become a food cravings whisperer. Mindless eating distracts your attention away from the present moment, while mindful eating is being fully present with your food and its impact on your mind and body. When you eat mindfully, you are able to fully savor your food as well as the present moment.

Intuitive eating is learning to listen to your body and requires the ability to tune in to the messages from your body, respect it and care for it. Many of us live in a space of being disconnected from our body. Judging our bodies and perceiving judgements from others creates and perpetuates the disconnection and negative feelings. We can harp on wanting to change this or that physical feature which creates a sense of internal and external discontent and is not a useful way to be with yourself.

Learning to be both intuitive and mindful with food, your body and the present moment in an integrative manner allows you to understand the messages that your body sends you through food cravings. If your current perspective on food cravings is that they are a problem, try to reframe it in this way: the specific food craving is powerful message from your body about what your body needs.

When you think about it, your body is truly amazing, it is always there for you. Your heart never skips a beat, your organs of digestion do their best to digest whatever food you eat, your lungs continue to breathe. Your body is working hard at all times to maintain homeostasis, to keep you in a state of health, balance, wellness and ease.

When we give our bodies half a chance it will heal itself and remain in balance. So, is there something wrong with your body if you experience a craving for chocolate, pizza or ice cream? Try viewing these cravings not as problems, but as information, messages from your body-mind about what it needs.

A craving for something sweet could mean that you are dehydrated, you need more protein, that you need more exercise, that you ate sugar recently and it is a blood sugar balance concern. Sugar cravings may also indicate that you really need more sweetness—not from food but from pleasure and connection—in your life. The key to managing the craving for something sweet is to allow yourself to truly tune into your body-mind and understand what you really need. This requires both listening to your intuition while being mindfully engaged with the present moment.

When you are eating a significant amount of refined foods, sugar, caffeine, alcohol or foods with little to no nutritional value, you are essentially confusing your body. Our bodies are designed to thrive on whole foods and it knows how to assimilate the nutrients from whole foods quite efficiently.

These other addictive or non-food foods (like soft drinks, candy and highly processed foods) throw your body out of balance and create cravings. If you just ate, your body anticipates that it will digest that food and receive nutrients to build cells that make up all aspects of your physical body including your muscles, bones, tissues and organs. If you feed your body foods lacking in nutrients it is confusing to your body.

The more that your food is whole and healthy, the more your body will remain in balance. This essentially offers you a healthier, happier life. Your choices are a reflection of what is occurring internally. Use this information to reflect on how you feel about yourself and how you can truly nourish yourself, your mind and body in a healthy manner.

Cultivating a healthy relationship with your body is key. If you have been making negative comments about your body, judging your body and disconnecting from your body, this may be a challenge. However, it is a challenge worth accepting! Of all the relationships in your life, your relationship with yourself and your body is most important, it is your foundational relationship. Just like any healthy relationship, it takes communication, dedication, compassion, respect and time to create and maintain.

The next time you have a food craving, treat it like a message from your body. Tune into your body, listen, evaluate the what and the why of this valuable message from your body. Ask yourself these questions to help hone your intuition:

-What happened in your life just before this craving?

-Is there a nutrient you’ve been lacking in your daily meals (fiber, vitamins, minerals, protein, carbohydrates, fat)?

-How many vegetables and fruits have you eaten today?

-How much water have you had today?

-Have you been restricting certain foods?

-Have you been having negative thoughts or feelings about yourself or your body?

-Why do you want this particular food?

-Are you hungry?

-Are you bored?

-Are you lonely?

-Are you tired?

-How is your energy?

-Have you been isolating yourself?

Asking yourself these questions allows you to have greater self-awareness and will help you create self-compassion and gain a deeper understanding of each of your specific and individual cravings. The more in-tune you are with your body, the more aware you are of your emotions, the more you will trust your intuition.

When you engage in intuitive eating, you create a deep sense of awareness of your body. When you engage in mindful eating, you have a deep sense of pleasure derived from food as well as your hunger and full cues. When you practice both intuitive and mindful eating together you create freedom and peace within your own personal mind-body experience.

When you learn to tune into your body, your life and ask—and then listen, you will feel your relationship with yourself improve. When you feel more in-tune with yourself and your body, you will develop this deeper understanding of your cravings and what you truly need. Try listening, be patient for the answers and notice the impact on your choices around food as well as within your life.