Your Body Tells You What You Should Eat To Be Healthy And Lose Weight (learn to listen)

Your body is constantly communicating and letting you know what it needs.

It’s just that we’ve forgotten how to listen to it.

But, you can learn and begin to get back into harmony with your body.

Losing weight and keeping it off isn’t about following a serious bunch of rules. It’s also not about giving up all the food you love or half-starving yourself. And you don’t want to be listening to everything the mind tells you to do.

Most diets fail because you’re letting your brain dictate your eating habits.

What’s better is learning to listen to what your body’s telling you. If you can learn to do that well, controlling your weight and health will be a breeze. It takes time to practice that, but it’s well worth it when you see the results such a simple action can bring you.

We all have this inbuilt, natural intuition. It tells us when we’re hungry for real and the nutrients our bodies need most of all.

The trouble starts when we neglect or ignore these little messages. Or, we stop listening to them. We start eating unhealthy foods and succumb to a craving, and before we know it, disease creeps in.

The Body Knows What’s Good For It Or Not!

You might not believe it right now, but your body knows what it needs to stay healthy. This truth is hard to grasp because of the dieting ads and “experts” popping up everywhere.

We start to listen to all these varying opinions and become confused about the best way to take care of our bodies.

I’m not saying we don’t listen to experts on food and what’s best for the body. But, you must also follow your body’s cues and signals. For example, maybe you hear something about a particular type of food being the best food for your body. But, for you, it just makes your body feel uncomfortable in some way. Accept that signal and follow it. Once you keep doing this, your intuition about food will get stronger.

We need to stop listening to our minds and our emotions about diet. After all, look where that has gotten us, right? We get conned by our minds and emotions daily. Listen to your body, and you’ll reach a healthy weight with much less effort and heartbreak.

Here are some simple truths when you’re trying to learn to eat healthily. One, eat when you’re physically hungry. Two, only eat what your body tells you it needs. Don’t follow your mind. And three, stop eating when you are full. Never overeat, and you won’t have weight issues. It’s that simple!

Maybe this goes against what you’ve learned as a dieter. The diet industry tells you to listen to your mind, not your body.

Your Body Is Talking, So Listen Carefully

When you’re learning to only listen to your body, you have to recognize the signals and cravings coming from the brain and ignore them.

Push aside any emotional eating signals that tell you to eat to make yourself feel better. You can learn to recognize the difference between physical hunger and emotional hunger. Over time, you’ll notice the differences between cravings from the body and those from the emotions.

For example, if you feel hungry, but you’re not sure if it’s physical or emotional, decide to eat some healthy food. If it’s your body that’s hungry, eating healthy food will sound good.

Then again, if your cravings are because of emotions and you’re eating to satisfy them, particular food will come to mind when you’re thinking about what’s good to eat. These will most likely be fattening comfort foods with high starch content. Or maybe fats or salty foods. Junk food like McDonald’s.

Learn to identify real hunger. Actual physical need starts slowly and gets stronger over time. You get stomach noises or feelings in your middle that begin to give you more intense signals. It wants you to pay attention.

But an emotional type of hunger will start suddenly. Most of the time, it’s in your head. You’ll get these clear messages about the kinds of foods to eat. You could even start thinking about particular tastes or textures of food that will satisfy you.

Finally, it would help if you were attentive to your body and its natural needs. Learn to stop eating when you’re full. It’s better to stop before you’re full. Go for about 80% full, and this will make you feel more comfortable.

What you need is to be mindful of eating and not just mindlessly stuffing your mouth. Notice when your body sends a message when it’s had enough. So this also means don’t eat too fast. Take 20 minutes or longer to eat your meal.

Final Thoughts

Let’s face it. We’ve become emotional eaters. We’ve started ignoring our intuition about our physical needs for food. But, we can learn to listen to a different set of cues. We can pay attention to the parts of our bodies that know what we need to be healthy.

Restoring intuition will happen when you learn to listen to the right signals about why you’re hungry.