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Do you spend a lot of time thinking about what to eat? How much should you eat? What would happen if you gave yourself unconditional permission to eat?
You’re eating unconditionally when:
- You trust your body to know when to start eating
- You trust your body to know when to stop eating
- You eat what sounds good
- You acknowledge you deserve to eat for any reason
- You don’t put limits on how much you can eat
- You keep a fully stocked kitchen of foods you enjoy
Having food rules about what you eat comes from diet culture and does not promote physical and emotional health.
To experience true food freedom, you will need to give yourself unconditional permission to eat. This article explores some of the reasons you might set limits on what you will and won’t eat, examples of food restriction, and hot to give yourself full permission to eat.
What Does Unconditional Permission To Eat Mean
When you give yourself unconditional permission to eat, you are trusting your body to know what it wants to eat, when it wants to eat, and how much of that food it needs.
Unconditional permission to eat means:
- You don’t rely on information from diet culture to make your food choices.
- You don’t rely on faulty metrics like BMI to dictate what your body should look like
- You don’t let the fear of weight gain dictate your food choices
- You honor all types of hunger without feeling guilty after you eat
- You practice food neutrality, meaning no food is good or bad
If you have given yourself unconditional permission to eat, you accept that your body may change over time and that this is okay.
You don’t feel the need to earn food, or compensate for the food that you’ve eaten.
Unconditional permission to eat also means that you are willing to accept feedback from your body about the foods that you’ve eaten. For example, you may feel the urge to eat past fullness on something tasty in the moment but you might have a tummy ache or feel sluggish later.
Learning from the feedback signals your body gives you about will and will not make you feel good in the future is also an important part of unconditional permission to eat.
It’s also important to consider that just because we know a food might make us feel yucky, we still have unconditional permission to eat it without feeling guilt. Being able to make food decisions based on the information our body has given us in the past, even if we know you know you won’t feel your best after eating that food, is an important part of intuitive eating.
Staying Healthy While Eating All Foods
You might be afraid to give yourself permission to eat without limits. You might be afraid that if you intuitively eat, you will binge.
When you first allow yourself access to all foods, you are going to overeat. You might even feel out of control with food. This is normal. The more that you are able to recognize that this is normal and it will pass, the quicker this phase will pass.
Some tips to help you avoid overeating as you unconditionally eat include:
- Eating regular meals and snacks
- Getting in protein, fat, carbohydrate, and fruits/vegetables at each meal
- Taking time to enjoy your food
- Make eating social
- Remember to hydrate
- Use a hunger and fullness scale
7 Unconditional Foods Examples
Examples of giving yourself unconditional permission to eat include:
- Keeping a fully stocked kitchen with all types of foods you enjoy
- Saying no to the food police
- Not counting calories
- Eating outside of scheduled meal times, because you’re hungry or something sounds good
- Allowing yourself to eat past fullness simply because it tastes good
- Ditching all dieting for good
- Allowing yourself to eat for emotional wellness
How To Allow Yourself To Eat Fearlessly
In order to allow yourself unconditional permission to eat, you will need to let go of the pressure to be thin placed on you by society.
The pressure to follow certain food rules usually comes from a desire to change your body and/or eat the “healthiest” foods possible.
Allowing yourself permission to eat all foods gets easier when:
- You ditch the scale
- You find ways to respect your body daily
- You celebrate non-scale victories regularly
- Use body positive quotes or mantras
- Practice food neutrality
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