Interoceptive Awareness is your superpower: The foundation for Intuitive Eating
What is Interoceptive Awareness?
This is the ability to perceive physical sensations that arise from within your body. It’s a direct experience, a felt sense e the happens in the present moment. It includes sensations such as feeling a distended bladder, hunger and fullness cure, and the felt sense of every emotion. Each emotion has a unique physical sensation in the body, next you experience an emotion, take a second to sense where you physically feel it in the body, for example, anxiety may be physically felt in the chest, joy may be felt in the stomach, fear may be felt in the legs etc.
When you perceive bodily sensations, it gives rise to powerful information to help get your psychological and biological needs met, which in turn profoundly supports physical and mental wellbeing.
And this is why people describe intuitive eating as life-changing, people get to reconnect to themselves on a truly unique and authentic level.
Ultimately, intuitive eating is a personal process of honouring health by listening and responding to the direct messages of the body in order to get your needs met. The principles of intuitive eating work by either enhancing interoceptive awareness, or by removing the obstacles of rules, beliefs, and thoughts, to perceiving and and responding to the felt sensations in the body.
The challenge in diet culture today, is that many people do not value, let alone trust, their body sensations, which is an inside job. That’s why using external methods to eat, such as counting macros, calories, or points - does not help you connect to your body, and does cultivate authentic long term health success.
Interoceptive Responsiveness
Body awareness is itself is only one part of the process of becoming an intuitive eater. The way an individual values and responds to these body sensations is known as interoceptive responsiveness.
An example of this is to imagine your best friend pounding at the door to deliver helpful news. Although you hear the knocking, you don’t bother to let them in. Interoceptive responsiveness as an intuitive eater is the ability to respond to physical sensations in the body due to greater body appreciation, and therefore body awareness.
The 10 principles of Intuitive eating and interoceptive awareness:
IMPROVES INTEROCPETIVE AWARENESS
Honour your hunger
Respect your fullness
Discover your satisfaction factor
Movement - feel the difference
REMOVES OBSTACLES TO INTEROCEPTIVE AWARENESS
Reject the diet mentality
Make peace with food
Challenge the food police
Cope with your emotions with kindness
Respect your body
Honour your health with gentle nutrition