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vp_bulletins for local announcements; contact_vp for questions and feedback on the way VP is run; the Vulvapedia for basic questions; and don't forget about our sibling community over on Dreamwidth!Several months ago, I attended a workshop on Intuitive Eating in New York City through
Project Connect's Healthier Me! program, which is aimed at Asian & Pacific Islanders (API) who identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, or Intersex (LGBTQI), as well as allies. If you're in the NYC area, you can go to their website or Facebook page to see if you're interested in any of these free workshops.
Even just reading the description of the workshop, I knew it was something I wanted to share with VP members. When the facilitator, Andrew Zarate, ended up being fabulous, I asked him if he'd be interested in co-authoring a guest post to share with VP about intuitive eating. Andrew is going to give us some background info, and I'll talk about my experience at the workshop. We'll also give you some resources if you're interested in learning more about intuitive eating. Since a lot of people make New Year's resolutions that pertain to their eating habits or weight loss, we thought this would be a great time to discuss this in VP.
First, let me introduce Andrew a bit.
Andrew Zarate recently completed his credentials to become a registered dietitian at Hunter College. He believes that health can come in all shapes and sizes, that food can truly be medicine, and that the key to eating is listening. Andrew has spoken on the benefits of mindful eating and meditation at numerous community organizations, and has designed and implemented a wellness series for homeless and recently incarcerated women.
And here's the workshop description that drew me in:
Am I really hungry, or am I just bored? Intuitive eating is an approach to nutrition that teaches you how to create a healthy relationship with your food, mind, and body. Come to this interactive workshop gain tools to better understand our hunger, and learn how to make peace with your food! This workshop will include a “tasting session,” where participants can sample and learn how to use a variety of ingredients, including heirloom tomatoes, vinegars, and salts.
Sounds cool, right?
We began the workshop with a little quiz to see what we knew already about intuitive eating. Here's the quiz for you to try out (the answers will be provided later!).
1. What are the three signals for hunger? a. Hunger, fullness, and appetite
b. Overeating, under eating, and normal eating
c. Emotional hunger, deprivation, and satisfaction
2. Intuitive eating is the process of listening to our body, our needs, and our wants. True/False
3. Which of these are an easy way to be present with food and the body? a. Eating on the run
b. Slowing down to savor the various sensational responses that occur while eating
c. Eating while multitasking
d. Eating when not hungry
4. What is one tool that you can use to check in with your level of hunger? a. Mindfulness
b. check in with hunger/fullness levels
c. pausing before, during, and after a meal
d. All of the above
Here's how Andrew describes intuitive eating:
Simply put, intuitive eating is the art of listening to our bodies, our needs, and our desires (you can substitute desires for wants since that’s stated above in the multiple choice) throughout the day as well as during meal times. Ultimately it’s about building a relationship with ourselves and our bodies so that we can better understand how to nourish ourselves throughout our lives.
For communities with strong ties to food and culture, intuitive eating empowers the eater to make their own decisions based on both internal and external stimuli. Traditional stable foods, such as refined grains (white rice, refined wheat flour, etc.) are reclaimed without any sort of moralization (being “good” or “bad” for eating or abstaining from a particular food) or anxiety from getting fat. Rather, eating intuitivly can go on to foster a deep sense of curiosity, creativity, and a much stronger relationship with one’s body than ever before.
After we took our quiz, we jumped right in. Andrew explained that we tend to get the message that if you don't eat the right foods, you're "bad." That's not the message that intuitive eating teaches. Almost everyone has a lot of emotional attachments to food, especially if food is connected to your cultural background. (In this workshop, we talked about it relating to queer APIs, but it can apply to other cultures, too!). Generally, we think of "emotional eating" as a bad thing, but sometimes that emotional attachment to food can be nourishing, like when you feel happy or comforted by eating food that your parents used to make you when you were sick.
Another thing that I appreciated about this workshop was that it operated from a body positive/intuitive model. It's a
non-diet approach to nutrition, and it's about developing a healthy relationship with your food, no matter what size you are. Andrew shared with us that he thinks that things like calories and portion sizes have their place, but that he thinks it's important to focus on what your body needs. In this way, by figuring out what your body needs, when it needs it, and how much it needs, by listening to your body...
intuitive eating is empowering.
The workshop was broken into three parts. The first part was
Intuitive Eating Tools, where we learned about things like the signals of hunger. Some signals of hunger come from "above our necks," which can relate to appetite or cravings. "Above the neck" hunger signals include smell, boredom, sense of time or awareness ("I haven't eaten in 5 hours"), and salivating. The kind of hunger that is "below the neck" is generally about biological need for food, like your stomach growling. These signals are very nuanced, though, so it's not always easy to tell, especially if you are just starting with intuitive eating.
Our bodies speak to us loudly and softly. If you're not getting a loud message, you can slow down and see if the message becomes clearer. You might get other messages, too, if you haven't eaten in a while, like getting moody, having fatigue, or getting a headache.
We can also lose our sense of biological hunger with age, medications or medical conditions, or from not eating for a long period of time. Sometimes you have to get to know your own body and plan for that. For example, if you know that a medication makes you lose your appetite, you still need to eat, so you need to adjust accordingly.
We did some exercises during this part, like guided relaxation and a mindfulness exercise. We used two kinds of tasting chocolate to do this exercise, one that was 80% cacao, and the other that was salted chocolate. This concept was even mentioned in a
New York Times article this year.
You can try this at home! Grab a small piece of chocolate, or any small piece of food like a section of a clementine, a small piece of tomato, or a raisin. Really take your time with this exercise. If you'd like to have someone talk you through the exercise, check out
this youtube video.
• First, examine the food in your palm.
• Then, smell it.
• Then, put it on your tongue without chewing. Take note of tastes and experiences.
• Chew it.
• Finally, swallow it, tasting it as long as possible.
I found the chocolate to be extremely satisfying this way, even though they were very small pieces. Someone else in the room commented that they ate those two pieces of chocolate in the amount of time that they've eaten whole meals. Lots of people found it difficult to take it so slow, so it's definitely something that can take some getting used to. You can discuss your experience in the comments below.
Here's Andrew's explanation of the hunger scale:
Whenever I meet a client, the first two tools I usually like to begin with are differentiating between hunger and appetite and using the hunger scale. The reason being is that they help to provide the basics of checking in with ourselves and asking the question “am I really hungry?”
While not exactly a science, checking in with whether our hunger located above or below the neck helps to provide us with some sense of where our hunger is coming from. As you can imagine when checking in with hunger above the neck, your focus is most likely centralized around your mouth or possibly around something that sounds or looks good. This type of hunger is typically associated with emotional hunger and appetite, (i.e. food that looks/sounds/smells good or is enhanced by a particular setting). Allow yourself to remain curious about your hunger and fullness. Ask yourself “Am I hungry or am I just bored, angry, tired…?” Do you want to try something just because it sounds good? If so, that’s okay too! Be playful with the process and get to know what brings you pleasure as well as what emotions or situations cause you to want to eat.
Hunger identified below the neck is more associated with biological hunger. Here a hunger scale is used to correlate varying levels of hunger to a number between 1 and 10. 10 for example is associated with the hunger of being completely stuffed while 5 correlates to being neutral; neither hunger nor starved.
The key with both of these tools is to continue to check in with yourself, remain curious, and be playful. There are no right answers, only a process to be explored between you and your body.
The second part of the workshop was
Intuitive Cooking, which is learning how to use the concepts of intuitive eating to make a meal. Andrew noted that some people might be ready to jump right in with this, and other folks might just want to sit with those concepts for a while before trying it out, and that's ok too.
Take a minute to try this exercise! We experimented with brainstorming our emotional needs and how we might fulfill that with a meal. I noted that I was feeling sleepy and excited about the workshop, and that I wanted to feel refreshed, so I envisioned a meal of baked tempeh in a bright lemon vinaigrette, a salad with cucumbers, and sides of wild rice and kale.
Feel free to talk about your emotional needs and a meal that might fulfill them in the comments.Finally, we had a
tasting demonstration. We talked about how we experience different foods, and we actually got to taste rice wine vinegar, balsamic vinegar, patis (fish sauce), soy sauce, fleur de sel, Himalayan pink mineral salt, Mesquite smoked salt, and Hawaiian black salt. It was so interesting to try these foods very intentionally and to observe the nuances of the flavors.
I really thought this workshop was awesome, and it helped me further understand a concept that I had heard of, but didn't know a lot of details about. I hope that this write up gives VP members some more insight on the topic. The experience was empowering for me, and although I have not implemented intuitive eating 100% of the time, I do try to pay attention more to these concepts as I eat.
A final note from Andrew:
Intuitive eating is a process and I can’t stress this enough. It’s a unique relationship between you and your body that you will develop over time through listening to the subtle and loud cues of your hunger, fullness, and appetite. Don’t stress out if you don’t get it right away or if you feel like you’re not doing it “right.” Just be present with the moment, go at your own pace, and if all else fails keep experimenting.
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