I’ve never uttered the words, “Clean your plate” in my four years of motherhood. I don’t make my kids eat something they claim not to like and I don’t withhold foods they are obsessed with (ever heard of “ketchup?”). I adhere to the belief that if my kids are hungry they’ll eat, and if they are full, they’ll stop. In my opinion, toddlers are the best example of intuitive eating we could ever hope to find.
I first became familiar with the concept of intuitive eating after my first daughter was born. After yo-yo dieting before my pregnancy, embracing cheddar cheese Ruffles and root beer floats during my pregnancy, and trying to starve the weight off post pregnancy, I was determined to find my way back to eating the way our bodies were meant to. I read the book Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch and discovered a novel concept: I should eat when my stomach growls and stop eating before it starts to hurt.
Though the idea may seem simple to “normal” eaters, to many women who live their life on a diet or battling an eating disorder, they’ve spent a great portion of their adult lives trying to ignore their body’s hunger cues. However, retraining your body to send those signals, and retraining your brain to listen, as former American Idol finalist Katherine McPhee did, can be life changing. McPhee explains, “”I was actually addressing the issue, not trying to lose weight. I was letting my body do what it naturally wanted to do, by eating normally.”
While I’ve put the baby weight far behind me, I still hold true to the intuitive eating principles now that I am a parent. Though the fridge and pantry are not always WIDE open to my kids, the produce drawers and fruit bowl are. I listen to when they say they are hungry, determine when to offer a snack or instead suggest an activity, and when they say they are full, their last bite is just that. Maybe some nights their dinner isn’t perfect, like tonight when fruit salad and whole grain toast were scarfed and vegetarian enchiladas were picked through, but they’ll make up for it at breakfast, and there’ll be more leftover enchiladas for me.
