My Journey to Intuitive Eating

When I went to seminary, that all disappeared. Learning many hours a day, not having any time to exercise, and being pretty sedentary, after having done at least nine hours a week of exercise the previous year took its toll on my weight. And the following year, working part-time and learning part-time, having no time to actually exercise and eating lots of takeout food, I was, for the first time, in the category that people would call fat. 

When I got engaged, I was so busy, emotional, and distracted that I would frequently forget to eat and my weight went down. Then three months after my wedding I got pregnant and had hyperemesis gravidarum, vomiting multiple times a day and not having any appetite to eat. I lost quite a lot of weight, carried an eight-pound baby, and a week after birth weighed less than I did before I got pregnant. The same happened with my next two pregnancies. Each time I gained a little weight postpartum, but once pregnant again the constant vomiting had me ending up pretty thin once I gave birth.

My fourth child changed everything. That pregnancy I also was terribly nauseous for nine months straight, but I didn’t vomit. The only thing that helped my nausea was eating, and eat I did!

Once I gave birth and recovered, I weighed myself and was shocked. My highest weight ever. Just over 200 pounds. That shocked me and I decided I needed to do something. Being that fat was just no good, I decided, because that was the message society fed me. I already was off gluten (I realized in my third pregnancy how much it made me sick and had stayed off it since then) and decided to go on the Paleo diet. But not just Paleo, low-carb Paleo.

I ate no grains, no legumes, no processed food, and just had a diet based on veggies, chicken, meat, and fish, and some fruit and nuts in limited amounts. I exercised with High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) and other exercises I could do at home. I shared my progress via pictures and Facebook posts. I tracked what I ate every day, weighing and measuring and counting calories and carbs. My weight went down, down, down. My weight goal was 165 pounds (as the recommended weight for my height of 5’9 and broad build was 150-165) but I never could get there, no matter how ‘perfect’ I was in my diet. 

The lowest weight I reached was 173 pounds, and my body never got quite how I wanted it because I had a weak core that made my stomach stick out. I was obsessed with the scale, weighing daily, but making sure I was undressed and had just used the bathroom and before I ate or drank anything, just so I could get the lowest possible number. And even though, in retrospect, I was really skinny, I still wasn’t happy with how I looked. It was hard to eat low-carb all the time, so I cheated on my diet, and then guilted myself for it. This began a cycle of going back on the diet, cheating, feeling guilty and going back on it. Lather, rinse, repeat. Eventually, I just had to stop. I gained back some of what I lost, arriving at a resting weight between 185 to 190 lbs.

I tried to accept my body as it was. I realized that I couldn’t continue dieting. It was too hard. So I tried reminding myself that today’s view of beauty is not the only standard. I looked at paintings of goddesses from years past, from the Renaissance, etc., especially by Rubens. I have a goddess body, I reminded myself. Today’s standard of ‘thin being the only beautiful’ wasn’t the one I had to accept. 

During that period in my life, I finally admitted to myself that not only was I incredibly burnt out, but I was also dealing with significant mental health issues. I needed therapy, and once there, it all started spilling out. My mental health issues started taking over my life, and I couldn’t function. Therapy just wasn’t enough and I went to a psychiatrist who prescribed medication for me. I was warned that these medications can make you gain weight. I asked if it just made you hungrier or changed your metabolism and was

told that it was about making you hungrier, so I decided to be extra careful about how much I ate. I was frustrated by my weight and I wanted to make sure I didn’t gain more. I tried just lowering my carb intake and had such a bad psychiatric reaction that my psychiatrist forbade me from dieting or even cutting my carbs. That would be very bad for my mental health, she explained. 

So that was it. No dieting. I just needed to eat normally, while indulging in specific treats when I knew that that was the self-care I needed. I did this regularly and listened to what my mind and body were telling me. 

Over the years, my friend Oriyah had opened my eyes to the concept of intuitive eating, but at first I was skeptical. However, once I saw that dieting was no longer an option for me, I realized I needed to change something. And so I headed into the world of intuitive eating. 

The first thing I did was to throw out my scale. I knew that having the scale made me obsessed with the number, which really is a pointless thing. Even when I was strictly on a diet, but was above the weight that I and the BMI charts thought I should be, I was probably skinnier than was healthy for my body, because I was chasing after that elusive number on the scale. 

I then learned that, if we take care of our body properly, giving it the love and respect and the nutrition all bodies deserve, we will come to an equilibrium in our weight, a happy place for our body. Everyone’s equilibrium is at a different point, including at different stages in their life. My goal was to listen to my body and let it take the lead. 

First I had to do a diet detox. Eat whatever I want whenever I want. At this point in the intuitive eating journey, people often binge on what were previously forbidden foods. And that is totally normal and part of the process. Because when some food is forbidden or considered bad, we desire it more and it becomes the focus for us. As it says in the Torah, “mayim gnuvim yimtaku”, forbidden waters are sweeter. When we can’t have something, that’s all we can think about wanting. It leads to bingeing on that item when we do have it, and feeling bad about it; or eating more (and more and more) of the foods we’re ‘allowed’ to eat, but they never satisfy us because they are not what we’re craving. But once we allow ourselves to actually have what we want, whenever we want, we realize that the same foods we used to binge on no longer make us do that. I can buy chocolate in bulk and eat it occasionally because it isn’t this forbidden food that I have to stuff down my throat because I might never have more. 

Once I got that out of the way, I worked on my mistaken belief that some foods are garbage. All foods provide something, whether it is calories in the form of energy, some vitamins or minerals, or joy and satisfaction. 

I started listening to my body and paying attention to what I was eating. I began asking myself, “What does my body want right now? What is it telling me that it needs?” And when I eat those things, I try to focus on the taste and texture, and the enjoyment it gives me, because that makes me appreciate the food more. This mindful eating is also a part of intuitive eating, because when you take the time to let the food give you all it has to offer, you tend to not overeat. You might stop in the middle of a plate of delicious food and say, “I’m good, I don’t need any more than this.” Once I started doing this, I became less of a bottomless pit and started actually being satiated from my food.

Because of my medications (and more that were added to my original dosage) combined with not restricting my eating, my weight went up and up, quite rapidly, to be honest. I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t a health issue causing my weight gain and did find out that I had thyroid issues which slowed my metabolism. I went on medication for that and slowly my weight gain leveled out, at quite a few pounds more than it was when I started dieting. I think my body