Episode 15 Just Listen To Your Body (Part 1 of 4)
Welcome to episode 15 of Wellness Wednesday’s Audio Series.
I’m Nissrine, registered holistic nutritionist, mindful nutrition & wellness coach for female entrepreneurs who are looking to prioritize their health and wellbeing without fad diets and wellness trends.
I created this series to bring a fresh perspective to nutrition and wellness, one that is centered on and lead by you.
There’s a plethora of information out there and it can be really hard to know what to do and eat to feel good in your body.
It’s easy to get caught up in fad diets and wellness trends, often questioning, doubting and second guessing your decisions when it comes to the way you nourish and care for yourself.
I wholeheartedly believe that; reconnecting with your own innate wisdom to know what your body needs to thrive is the first step to a life-changing transformation and true lasting wellness; and that progress is made by taking small steps, mindfully, intentionally and consistently.
In today’s episode, I want to talk about what it means to listen to your body and how to do it.
It can feel like a loaded term to hear, “just listen to your body” and it can be a source of frustration for so many people who feel like they have no idea how to even begin doing that.
If this is you, you’re not alone and it’s not your fault.
Ok, here me out.
Listening to your body is the ability to assess how your body feels in response to the foods you eat, the stress you experience, your activity levels or lack thereof, the amount of sleep you get, and your daily habits and practices.
While listening to your body is intuitive and we are all born with the innate wisdom to know what our body needs to thrive, our conditioning determines our ability to reconnect to that innate wisdom and unfortunately or fortunately depending on how you look at it, there’s no on/off switch.
But our body does speak to us. In fact it speaks to us every minute of every day and there are many reasons why we lose touch with our innate wisdom and with it our ability to listen to what it is telling us.
The two most common ones I see often are Dieting & Busy-ness.
Let’s unpack that.
Many of you have spent the majority of your life looking for and listening to outside input about what, when and how and even how much you should and shouldn’t be eating, drinking and moving to adhere to this ideal body standard.
Diet culture taught you to numb your hunger with water, to delay your hunger until a prescribed meal time, or to eat within a time restricted window or within a restricted calorie limit or portion size, even if you still feel hungry and could eat more. Essentially, it trained you to lose trust in your innate wisdom.
So naturally, you’ve stopped listening to it because you think it's misleading you and untrustworthy. Right?
Add to that our busy hectic schedules and lifestyles, which unfortunately lead us to rarely make time to pause and reflect on how our body feels about the choices we are making and when we finally do stop and reflect at the end of the day our body is usually screaming at us by then. And we’re not really pausing and reflecting mindfully, it’s actually forcing us to pause and reflect.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard busy female entrepreneurs or moms tell me they always feel famished at the end of a long work day and ready to devour the entire contents of their fridge.
Once I dig deeper it’s always rooted in the fact they don’t nourish themselves properly throughout the day.
They skip breakfast, maybe they eat something quick or breakfast and skip lunch, they’re subsisting on snacks all day long instead of a nourishing meal, they eat very little, most of the time on the go, and unknowingly ignore their hunger cues until they are ravenous and lose control around food and blame themselves for not having enough willpower and motivation to stick to a healthy meal at dinner time.
Chances are, if you’re struggling to listen to your body, you’re experiencing a mix of these two things.
It can be one or the other, but in most cases it’s the mix of the two from my experience working with women and my own past experiences.
The key to moving past this is to strengthen your interoceptive awareness which is the practice of tuning into yourself, noticing how you feel and getting a sense of what is going on inside your body.
Interoceptive awareness involves all our body's feelings and sensations, so from things like heart rate, to muscle tension, pain, thirst, body temperature, and even emotions, like anxiety, anger or joy and how these emotions are experienced and felt in the body. All of which can impact how we behave, including how we eat, our eating habits and practices and our relationship with food.
When it comes to eating, Interoceptive awareness refers to Your ability to sense Your hunger and satiety cues, so the physical and biological need for food, your ability to distinguish between this physical biological hunger and psychological triggers of hunger like emotional eating, stress eating, eating out of habit and your ability to assess how your food & lifestyle choices, habits and practices affect you and your mood, how they affect you holistically, meaning mind body and soul.
The more in tune you are with what is happening inside your body at all levels, the more in tune you will become with your hunger and satiety cues and the more you will know what to do to stay nourished and satisfied.
We were all born intuitive eaters, knowing what our body needs and respecting it's hunger and satiety cues. You only need to observe a baby or small child for a short amount of time to see this innate wisdom in practice.
Over time, external messages affect our beliefs and feelings about food and nutrition. We start attaching good and bad labels to what we eat, following fad diets and wellness trends, and seeking other people's advice and input and ignoring our own inner knowing.
Inevitably, we lose touch with our own innate wisdom in the process.
Here are a few clues that you may need to strengthen your interoceptive awareness
You feel out of touch with your hunger and satiety cues. You can’t really tell when you’re physically and biologically hungry and when you’re just stress eating and you have a hard time feeling your fullness. You usually wait until you’re ravenous to eat or uncomfortably full to stop eating.
You find yourself overeating, undereating or losing control around some foods, regularly. The operative word here is regularly. We all overeat, undereat and lose control sometimes, but if it happens to you habitually, that’s a pretty good sign that you’re out of touch with your inner signals and could benefit from strengthening your interoceptive awareness.
You find yourself eating on auto-pilot, skipping meals or snacking mindlessly throughout the day. You often eat because it’s time to eat, not because you’re truly hungry, you find yourself skipping meals when you’re too busy and don’t take the time to mindfully tune into how your body is feeling so you can nourish and fuel yourself, or you often find yourself eating out of boredom, because you feel stressed or you’re used to eating in moments like these. An example of this could be that you’re used to eating chips every time you watch a move so you do it on autopilot even if you don’t really feel like having chips or your husband brings home donuts and you eat them because they are there and not necessarily because you really feel like having a donut. It’s totally ok if you do, but it’s also ok to say no.
In the next few weeks and episodes, I will be sharing some tried and tested tools that I use with my clients, to help you reconnect to your innate wisdom and start listening to your body. These include the hunger scale, the mind body scan and the food & mood journal.
So tools that are guaranteed to help you reconnect to that dormant energy inside of you so you can start listening to your body with ease and confidence.
On that note, thank you for tuning in and remind you that if you’re looking for support with your nutrition and self-care and making it a priority, you can book a complimentary wellness consultation with me, to chat about your goals and how to get you there. At the very least, we’ll have a nice chat and you’ll get some clarity about the wellness journey ahead of you.
Book a Complimentary no Obligation Wellness Consultation
To chat about your goals and learn more about my coaching programs and packages and how I can support you in reaching your wellness goals with ease and simplicity as you build the business and life of your dreams.
Last but not least, If you’d like to be a part of my pilot program, entitled (re) Awaken Your Innate Food Wisdom, a self-paced mindful nutrition program with 4 weeks of group support to help you prioritize your nutrition & wellness without fad diets and trends, get on my mailing list to get an exclusive invitation once I’m ready to launch it.
It will be a journey to learning more about your body and what it needs to thrive; A mindful approach to nutrition that will improve your relationship with food; and a wellness education program that will guide you for life so your nutrition and self-care will always be a priority.
To get on my mailing list, subscribe to this audio series or download my simple 5 step framework to nourishing meals in minutes and you’ll be the first to know when the pilot program is ready for testing.
A Simple 5 Step Framework To Nourishing Meals in Minutes
You’ve got your hands full and more than enough on your plate. Take the guess work out of what and how to eat and make meal preparation a breeze, even when you’re short on time.
If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe and share with a friend and be sure to tune in next week for another episode of Wellness Wednesday Audio Series, where I a share a short audio clip each week to inspire you to reconnect with yourself on a deeper level so you can start nourishing and caring for yourself, more mindfully and intentionally.
Until next week,
Stay healthy, happy and safe,