By: Bonnie R. Giller, MS, RD, CDN, CDE

Have you planned out what you will accomplish this year? Many people look at a new year as a new beginning or an opportunity to start over. They tend to create goals at the beginning of the year known as New Year’s resolutions. More often than not these resolutions are built around improving health through diet and weight loss. While you may have the best of intentions, somehow life happens and you often find yourself going back to your old ways. Making too many changes at once can cause you to burn out and break your commitment within the first few months of the year.

Instead of making temporary resolutions, let’s try a different approach; adopt the belief that it’s always the right time to make healthy, life changing goals. As an alternative to changing your entire way of living all at once, try making small changes every day. Slowly work your way to a healthier you. One of the ways you can do this is by learning about and applying the Intuitive Eating approach to your life.

Intuitive Eating is an approach that has emerged in recent years. It is not a diet or a meal plan. Instead it encourages you to tune into what is going on in your body and mind. It encourages you to become aware of your emotional, psychological and physiological motivations to eat. By engaging in intuitive eating, you are better able to balance what you eat, the way you eat and why you eat.

Intuitive Eating encompasses ten principles. These principles will put you on the path to regaining control of your health, rebuilding trust in yourself and your body, and eventually achieving weight loss.

The first principle of Intuitive Eating is rejecting the diet mentality. The diet mentality fosters unhealthy restrictive behavior that can result in adverse health effects. Chronic dieters often cannot recognize hunger or fullness signals, which can result in overeating and weight gain. Chronic dieting can also lead to negative body composition changes, hormonal defects, reduced bone density, and menstrual disturbances. Additionally, chronic dieting can potentially trigger eating disorders, such as anorexia or bulimia. In order to avoid or reverse the destruction of chronic dieting, it is important to work towards letting go of the diet mentality and move toward a more fulfilling and health promoting approach to eating.

Stay tuned for part 2 of this article shortly…..

– Bonnie R. Giller helps chronic dieters break free of the pain of dieting and get the healthy body they love. She does this by creating a tailored solution that combines three essential ingredients: a healthy non-diet mindset, nutrition education and caring support. She utilizes the principles of intuitive eating, which is eating based on your internal signals of hunger and satiety versus situations or emotions. The result is they lose weight, keep it off without dieting and live a healthy life of guilt-free eating. Bonnie is a Registered Dietitian (R.D.), Certified Dietitian-Nutritionist (CDN) and Certified Diabetes Educator (C.D.E.). She is also a Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor. Bonnie is the author of an e-book titled 5 Steps to a Body You Love without Dieting. Get your copy Free and learn more about Intuitive Eating at brghealth.com.