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How DOES a normal person eat?

This totally depends on your definition of ‘normal.’

Here’s the truth: most people are a little disordered with their eating these days. Obsessive or disordered eating is common, so you could call it normal.

But it’s not normal – it shouldn’t be normal. And it’s definitely not healthy.

So instead of calling it normal eating, I call it ease with food.

This is how a person who has ease with food eats:

-They can go through their day and pretty much only think about food when they are actually hungry.

-They have a strong, healthy appetite for lots of food, and yet their weight stays stable in their weight set range, because their metabolism isn’t compromised and stressed from dieting.

-They eat what they crave, and crave what they need. Sometimes salads, sometimes cookies, sometimes fruit, sometimes steak, etc.

-They can eat a meal and stop in the ballpark of satiation and fullness without overthinking it.

-They can eat distracted, or tired, or stressed, or sad and still stop once they get full, because when food is neutral, and the body is fed, food intuition is easy.

-They will have a strong sense of what food they want, when, and how much, but it won’t be that important that they follow it perfectly, because life is too short to obsess about food, hunger, and satiation levels.

How do we get there? How do we find ease with food? How to feel neutral and even joyful with all foods, not just your “safe” diet foods?

Eating.

BELIEVE ME, back before the F*** It Diet, I was so far from normal and so fixated on food and weight, that I wasn’t even sure what the other alternative was. I had no idea what it was supposed to look like.

I would look at people who didn’t overthink food and think, “Well — I guess they are just lucky to not have a food addiction.” I didn’t realize that my “food addiction” was biologically driven, and constantly being made worse by every diet I went on.

I didn’t realize that, in a way, we are meant to be fixated on food. Because food is a fundamentally important part of staying alive, so when the body senses that food access is scarce, our food fixation increases. Thankfully the reverse is also true. Hallelujah. Once the body knows it will be fed, it can calm down.

 

 

(**Bleeped words are just for iTunes rules. Blerg. I know.)