Intuitive Alkaline Eating

You know that the single most important health measurement of an alkaline diet is the pH of your body, but did you know that the single most important success measurement of any diet is to be in-tune with your own body?

The goal of intuitive alkaline eating is to learn the why behind your food choices and then listen to what your body is saying. What does your body truly need? How does your body respond to your food choices? What food choices lead you to feel healthy, light and energized? With practice, you can learn to be more intuitive and listen to your body's true instincts.

Dr. Robert O. Young says that “healthy alkaline living should be instinctive, but clearly somewhere along the way humans have lost the ability to sense it.”

The pH Miracle diet is a time-tested program that is much more about a lifestyle change than it is about stereotypical diet gimmicks. There is no calorie counting, avoiding fat, or anything like that. 

Before you can achieve a complete alkaline diet lifestyle change, you have to learn how to really reconnect with your body—using your internal, natural wisdom to eat the right foods when you’re hungry and stop when you’re full.

It’s easy to learn what is healthy to eat, but learning how to choose nourishing foods and stop emotional eating is much more difficult.

In the mid-90’s a book was written titled, “Intuitive Eating”. The authors provided a groundwork for how to rewire the brain to make healthy food choices, stop mindless eating, manage/lose weight, and be happier with your body.

Here are a few principles taught in the book which provide an excellent starting point for anyone who is just starting out on their own pH Miracle journey, and a great reminder for those who are working on the lifelong lifestyle change encouraged by Dr. Young:

1. Honor Your Hunger. Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates. Otherwise you can trigger a primal drive to overeat. Once you reach the moment of excessive hunger, all intentions of moderate, conscious eating are fleeting and irrelevant. Learning to honor this first biological signal sets the stage for re-building trust with yourself and food.

2. Make Peace with Food. Call a truce, stop the food fight! Give yourself unconditional permission to eat. If you tell yourself that you can’t or shouldn’t have a particular food, it can lead to intense feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings and, often, bingeing.

3. Challenge the Food Police. Scream a loud “NO” to thoughts in your head that declare you’re “good” for eating minimal calories or “bad” because you ate a piece of chocolate cake. The Food Police monitor the unreasonable rules that dieting has created . The police station is housed deep in your psyche, and its loud speaker shouts negative barbs, hopeless phrases, and guilt-provoking indictments. Chasing the Food Police away is a critical step in returning to Intuitive Eating.

4. Respect Your Fullness. Listen for the body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry. Observe the signs that show that you’re comfortably full. Pause in the middle of a meal or food and ask yourself how the food tastes, and what is your current fullness level?

5. Honor Your Feelings Without Using Food. Find ways to comfort , nurture, distract, and resolve your issues without using food. Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, anger are emotions we all experience throughout life. Each has its own trigger, and each has its own appeasement. Food won’t fix any of these feelings.

6. Respect Your Body. Accept your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect to realistically squeeze into a size six, it is equally as futile (and uncomfortable) to have the same expectation with body size. But mostly, respect your body, so you can feel better about who you are. It’s hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly critical about your body shape.

7. Exercise–Feel the Difference. Forget militant exercise. Just get active and feel the difference. Shift your focus to how it feels to move your body, rather than the calorie burning effect of exercise. If you focus on how you feel from working out, such as energized, it can make the difference between rolling out of bed for a brisk morning walk or hitting the snooze alarm. If when you wake up, your only goal is to lose weight, it’s usually not a motivating factor in that moment of time.

8. Honor Your Health­–Gentle Nutrition. Make food choices that honor your health and taste buds while making you feel well. Remember that you don’t have to eat a perfect diet to be healthy.

We hope this helps you sense your instinct to live healthy and alkaline. Let go of lies diet culture is built on, have some self-compassion, and eat for physical health and energy.

Sources:

1) The pH Miracle Balance Your Diet, Reclaim Your Health, Robert O. Young, PhD, and Shelley Redford Young. P. 180. First Revised Edition July 2010

2) https://www.intuitiveeating.org