Since Covid, my digestion hasn’t been the same. But a particularly nasty bout of acidity, which flared up last year, had been an even more inconvenient niggle than usual. I’m usually forensic about the food I eat, so I was understandably flummoxed. If my relatively clean eating got any cleaner, I would be living on two sticks of celery.
Johns Hopkins Medicine says the gut or the ‘the little brain’ has more than 100 million nerve cells and trillions of bacteria. Our digestive system affects our cognitive skills and most of the body’s serotonin, the happy chemical, lies in our GI tract.
Oscillating between gastroenterologists and home remedies, I had to learn to understand what my tummy really wanted, needed and tolerated. I had to learn to respect the limitations of my body. Unconsciously, I embraced intuitive eating, one cautious bite at a time.
Eating mindfully
Way back in 1995, dietitians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch wrote the tome Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach, a radical book for its time. The duo founded the Intuitive Eating Framework guided by 10 core principles, which starts with rejecting diet culture and ends with honouring your health with gentle nutrition.
Intuitive eating is simply following your internal cues of hunger and satiety to guide your eating. With over two million hashtags on Instagram and growing, it brings curiosity to the subject of food, rather than restriction. Naziya Rashid Shaikh, registered clinical dietitian at Wockhardt Hospitals says, “It is an approach to food that focuses on listening to your body’s natural hunger, fullness and satisfaction cues, rather than following rigid diet rules. Instead of labelling foods as ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ it encourages a healthier, more balanced relationship with eating.”
Building trust with my own body
Weighed down by guilt, fad diets and self-styled Instagram nutritionists, I turned to my own five senses to guide me through my food journey. At my Punjabi home, food is prepared traditionally and eaten strictly on schedule, seated at the dining table. Still, years of travel and work-related events, plus a city where most plans revolve around food, have made eating out routine.
As a child, I learned to avoid certain foods that didn’t sit well with me (looking at you, the tall glass of Bournvita and milk with two spoons of sugar, spicy masala chips and aerated drinks). But growing older, the decisions became harder. Gluten? Cheese? Hot sauce? Really? And for how long?
Each time I logged on, some new information would come petering through. If I had to eat 60 grams of protein and 25 grams of dietary fibre each day, would I really have time to do anything else?
Learning to listen
It’s a skill that I have had to rebuild gradually post-pandemic. In the age of edible temptations, I didn’t want to deny myself the food I wanted to eat, but I wanted to get rid of the mental drama and the guilt that accompanied it. I wanted to be more conscious of what I ate and learn how my body reacted to it in the short and long run, whether it was a cheesy lasagna or an apple.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: vogue.in
