I was thinking about how my take on food, health, and fitness has evolved. There are no absolutes anymore, no fear, no guilt. There's not a big story where eating one thing can be my downfall, or where not eating certain foods defines me. I considered this as it pertains to peanut butter. As a mostly-plant eater, I like foods that add flavor and boost the protein in my diet, so I have a jar of organic peanut butter powder. I also like actual peanut butter and have four jars of Skippy. I also have peanut butter ice cream and Reese's Peanut Butter Pumpkins. 🎃 If you take a diet mindset, buying powdered peanut butter means the real stuff is "bad" and you're being virtuous by avoiding it. If you take a whole-food, unprocessed stance, you'd have to just stick with peanuts. Smashing them up with sugar and salt is dangerous and wrong. If you're in the no-diet-anything camp, it would be wrong to buy powdered peanut butter because it has fewer calories. It must mean you're restricting. I'm of the mindset that I want to be able to eat any of it. There are times when I want to increase protein in a meal, times when I want to swoon over candy, and times when I need something that will melt on hot toast. None of it defines or limits me. That is refreshing compared to trying to decide which way is right, and what my peanut butter choice says about me as a person. I've been meditating most days. At first, the meditations with talking really annoyed me. Now, I'm liking some of the Deepak Chopra ones. One of my favorites lately has you meditate on this: Every choice I make is a decision between happiness and resentments. I choose happiness. I give up being right. Love that! In the moment, I rarely realize that I have a choice. Someone says something dumb or makes a demand of me and I'm stressed. They did it to me, the story goes. Or, this thing happened and now I will be upset and resentful. It wasn't the fault of the person or circumstance though, I was the one choosing resentments. If I stop it, I'm happier, and if I lose the need to "win" in these situations, I'm happier still. It's pretty cool!

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How are things with food and exercise lately? With life? With sleep and stress? I ask because there’s such a strong connection between how we treat ourselves and how we experience body image, regardless of weight or shape. If we feel angry, helpless, or resentful, it can get turned inward, with the body becoming a scapegoat. You don’t even have to post an answer if you don’t want to, just things to ponder. Another line of questioning for your own brain is to ask yourself, "What stories am I telling myself about my body and weight?" What meaning are you assigning to it? Usually, it's the story causing the suffering and the body is a neutral bystander. If you work on the thinking directly, you feel better faster than if you have to change food, weight, shape, hormones, and other people in order to be ok.

Sometimes, the motivation to continuing eating is not hunger, but escape. You want to relax and not think about your troubles. Eating something tasty and doing something fun will keep stressful thoughts away, at least while you're doing it. Afterward, you may feel even more stressed than you did before if you're unhappy with the choices you made or the way you feel physically. Spending time outside, petting a dog, or engaging in a fun hobby also cause you to relax and not focus on your troubles. They accomplishes the same thing without food, maybe to a different degree of effectiveness, and probably with less fallout afterward. Either approach is a valid way to feel better. It's so important to remember that's all it is. You're trying to take care of yourself. You're trying to feel better. It's not a crime or a character flaw. Personally, I still occasionally turn to food after dinner when I'm not the least bit hungry. I know that eating is soothing, so sometimes I choose to engage in that, knowing full well what I'm doing and why. It happens most often when I'm trying to put off thinking about something, like work the next day. I want to stay in my happy place. For me, there are a few factors that make this not a problem: 1) I'm not chronically deprived or exhausted, and therefore not hungry enough to go wildly overboard in these situations. 2) If I let it, my body easily takes the extra food into account when adjusting my appetite, fidgeting, body temperature, digestion, energy level and all that. It may make for a great workout or a slightly lower appetite in the coming days, but it's not something I have to deliberately manage. 3) I don't judge it. Without any guilt or shame, the whole thing stays pretty tame. I need to get really emotional in order punish myself with food or eat like a total lunatic. If I'm calm, my eating is calm.

"When I think about my friends who are "normal" eaters, they don't seem to have issues with eating whatever they want and not feeling like a terrible person because of it. Which in turn (I think) leads them to be able to stop eating when they've had enough." Yes! This is such an important piece of the puzzle. Imagine that guilt, shame, and fear of weight gain are completely gone from your food decisions. Without them, what other factors influence your choices? It becomes things like how hungry (or not hungry) you are when you start eating, how full you feel, whether the food is emotionally satisfying, whether it tastes good, and how you want to feel during and after the meal. You still think about gentle nutrition and eating to be healthy and perform well, but in a practical way, without any emotional drama. Like, I know if I eat candy for breakfast, I'll probably get sleepy when the sugar crash happens and then be starving. There's no judgment there. I'm not a terrible, weak-willed, hopeless person. I may even choose to eat candy for breakfast, knowing I’ll want something more substantial and balanced soon after. When there is no moral judgment, no fear or panic, eating becomes so clear and simple and non-threatening. That judgment is like a big hammer, smashing the hell out of all the more subtle hunger cues, preferences, and values. We think they're not there. We say, “If I didn't punish, control, and guilt myself, how would I know what to eat? How would I know when to stop?” And the funny thing is, the guilt and shame is what causes it to be so confusing and hard.

I loved this Tabitha video called Does Recovery Have to be Awful? https://youtu.be/l42ExdfiToI I especially liked the quote, "Unrestricted eating is for life." I had a misguided notion that really tripped up my efforts to stop dieting and overexercising. It was that I could only eat freely or not exercise under certain conditions (namely, until I gained weight) and then I'd have to start restricting again. 🙄 No. Recovery means you never restrict again. This was a revelation, and it doesn't mean you gain and gain and never stop. I weigh less now than when I was exercising 2-3 hours per day 7 days per week and tracking everything I ate. I can see now that there was just a whole lot of anxiety there. I was SO tired, SO hungry, SO fearful. Of course I ate like a lunatic and felt like a bottomless pit. Committing to the idea that I would never restrict again really helped me start thinking in terms of, "So, now what?" If I'm not going to do fasted morning HIIT, and track macros, and ignore pain and fatigue, what will I do instead? Well, now I'll pay more attention to what my body is telling me. I'll notice how the food I eat and the way I move makes me feel. Now, I'll eat more in line with my own values, the ones that come from my soul and not Instagram. Now, I'll gain confidence in my choices and learn to trust myself. That shift in my notion of the possibilities was when eating more happily/intuitively really started clicking. As long as I thought I would have to restrict again in the future, I never got very far with trusting myself or hearing what my body was telling me. So, I really love that "unrestricted eating is for life" quote. It's an important notion. Without it, you're in that quasi-recovery twilight zone where you try to ease some restrictions, or exercise a little less, but then go right back to beating yourself up and counting calories or earning food.

I was thinking about emotional eating, which, when I was restricting, I definitely viewed as a personal flaw or a big problem to be solved. Now, I think eating for emotional reasons or due to environmental cues is normal. I was pondering this, and I still do it all the time, so does my husband, so does everyone I know. For example, I still eat M&Ms because I'm bored, serve myself seconds or thirds because it tastes good, or keep eating because my show is on. I definitely eat until I'm too full sometimes. Dieter Me was like, "Oh, this is so wrong and bad. I have to figure out how to stop." Current Me doesn't really even think about it in the moment. I don't feel guilt or shame. I don't deliberately compensate by trying to eat better or less afterward. If I stay calm and curious, my appetite will handle the rest. This weekend, I brought home a box of Hostess Ho-Hos. My husband had opened the box and eaten four of them before I even had all the groceries in the house. Then, I made a run at them and the whole box was gone in a day. Is that "bad?" I don't make a judgment one way or the other. I'm neutral. I'm Switzerland. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and it didn't even ruin dinner because Ho-Hos are like eating air, well, air wrapped in saturated fat. LOL What I think has changed is the quantity of food and consistency with which I eat it. When I was hungry and deprived, really guilty and fearful, any slip of control was like a dam breaking. I could eat and eat and eat, be in physical pain I was so full, and still want to eat. I don't experience that anymore, not that kind of frenzy or blackout eating where it feels like I'm possessed or on autopilot. Going off the rails with food used to feel a bit like a pressure valve releasing. All my fear, pain, judgment, and control would blow wide open and there were just cookies. For the time I was eating them, everything was ok. I experienced that so many times in the past, but I don't think I'm hungry enough or hard enough on myself to experience it now. The combination of hunger and shame were like throwing gasoline on the emotional eating fire. Without those two elements, emotional eating isn't problematic at all. I still eat emotionally and like it. It's not something I struggle with or that I'm trying to stop doing. Without primal hunger and without guilt, the magnitude of it is pretty marginal. I would describe it as fun overall. I'm just putting that out there as my own experience. Maybe someone can relate, or maybe your experience is totally different. I would love to hear anyone's thoughts.

In my own experience, eating always has to do with hunger. If I'm not deprived, exhausted from exercise, thinking restrictively, and fearing weight gain, numbing out with food doesn't occur to me. It would be boring and gross, like numbing out with cleaning the toilet. Eating is no longer even on my radar as a soothing or time killing activity, this after it being my go-to for several decades. Why? I can eat whenever and whatever I want. Truly. So, I guess the thrill is gone? It no longer feels rewarding or comforting to be UNcomfortably full, or to eat something I could eat all day every day if I were so inclined. The novelty really does wear off when full, unconditional permission to eat is given, not just mentally, but in practice. Now, where that whole concept veered into a ditch with me, and why I railed against intuitive eating for years, is that I gave myself full permission to eat, but while paying zero attention to how the food was making me feel mentally and physically (eating without attunement, they call it in the book), AND while judging myself very harshly the whole time, AND while convinced it would never work for me, sure I'd have to restrict again soon. That is not a setup for success. It's also not what Intuitive Eating is. I was bashing it online for years as something stupid that had failed me, never having understood the principles or even tried it for myself. My twisted take on it wasn't what anybody was recommending. Once I embraced the actual principles of kindness, respect, and gentle nutrition, it was a completely different experience. I found the Intuitive Eating Workbook to be much more helpful than the original book for actually putting the principles into practice and experiencing the benefits.

If you don't want to hear anything about weight or eating less, maybe skip this one. That last conversation had me thinking about how I approach weight myself. I'm definitely no longer having those moments of panic where I want to start calorie counting, or eliminate some food, or start some crazy exercise plan. Usually, what happens is my jeans will start getting tight or the scale will start creeping up. I'll think, hmmm, what changed? Perhaps I've been stress eating at work, or eating a third of my food intake as candy, or getting too hungry in the afternoon and then really eating a lot at night. Usually, if I think about it for a second, I know what the issue is. Once I bring a little awareness to it, I can gently adjust by managing stress in other ways, buying more foods I'm excited about eating (so I don't fill the "I don't know what to eat" gap with Hershey's and Lindor), or making time for a better lunch so I don't hit the evening hours overly hungry. If I can't identify an obvious pattern that isn't working for me, I can still make some easy adjustments like eating one candy bar instead of two, or half the avocado instead of a whole one. There's still no diet, no rules, no deprivation. I'm still eating for maximum satisfaction, I'm just not eating well past satisfied, or eating in a mindless blur, or eating out of line with my own values because I'm rushed, or stressed, or not paying attention. I thought I would get specific about that, because it's not magic or luck. It really is just awareness, KIND awareness. It's not a hunger and fullness diet, or serving myself sad little portions. Even if my weight is up or my pants feel snug, I still eat what I like. I still eat until completely satisfied. I just maybe don't need all four of those. Or maybe I need more of something else. If I adjust a couple of things and carry on enjoying my food, weight will eventually trend back down. It can't be about what I "should" eat, and then rebelling against that. I eat for how I want to feel. Tiny or skipped lunches tend to lead to very big dinners plus dessert plus snacks, for me anyway. I get very hungry and it's like a snowball effect where the snowball is rolling downhill picking up speed and food as it goes. I do feel like I have slightly less margin for error in menopause. If I pay zero attention to what or how much I eat, whether I'm full, if I'm actually hungry, that all shows up on my lower abs in no time. Where maybe it used to go to my biceps, or my fidgeting, or my hips and thighs, now it's belly, and really quickly. But like I said, I'll notice, make a couple small adjustments, and gradually lean back out with no rules or nutrition software.

I’m not big on rules, but I had a no-exceptions RULE that I was not allowed to make any judgment about my body or changes to my way of eating while hormonal. So, period week and the week before, it was just a given that any kind of weeping panic and need to change everything now had more to do with hormones than reality. My perspective would skew negative. Any nutrition or fitness plans I would come up with to “fix” the way I was feeling about myself tended toward delusional punishment. Now, that’s me, but maybe someone can relate. It took me years to recognize the hormonal element of that pattern. Once I did, I’d notice the panic rising, feel the urge to shame myself, blame my body and eating for everything, and take drastic action, but then I’d realize what week it was and go, “Oh, duh. Never mind.” This policy alleviated so much struggle and pain. The crazy week would pass, the cravings and water weight would diminish, and the majority of the time I would realize there was nothing actually wrong. If I still wanted to make an adjustment or try something different, I’d do it then, when I could make decisions that were calmer and more objective. And it was never, starting tomorrow, I’m going to run ten miles a day and eat nothing but kale. It was more like I didn’t feel so great eating that whole pan of brownies myself, so next month I’ll plan to get myself a deluxe frosted fudge brownie from a coffee shop during PMS week. Or, I realize that I’ve been stress-eating and not noticing hunger and fullness cues, so I’m going to take one minute to relax and breathe before I start eating. Those kind of thoughtful adjustments have big payoffs in terms of aligning your eating with your values and feeling better right away, plus, they tend to be sustainable. Panicked restriction will always cause more problems than it solves. So, for me, never making any big changes to my food or workouts while hormonal is what kept me from going there. The most important thing is to veer toward kindness and humor, not the scale and a plan. The scale in that scenario can be a bit like stepping on a land mine.

I shouldn't want to be smaller, but I really do! I shouldn't be so focused on how my body looks, but I really am! Here's a way of looking at it that alleviated that struggle for me. Why do I want my body to look a certain way? I want to be happy. I've convinced myself that getting smaller is the ticket to happiness. In fact, it just might solve ALL my problems. So "giving up" on it feels like giving up on being happy. It was a lightbulb moment to recognize the faulty logic. What do I really want? I want to be happy, healthy, confident, and at peace with food. I want to feel good and have energy. I want my behaviors and values to line up instead of being at odds. The more I focused on genuine health and happiness, the better everything got. The more I felt like my authentic self. Health isn't dieting. It's the big picture of mental, physical, and spiritual wellbeing. How you treat yourself matters. When you focus on treating yourself well, on being genuinely healthy and happy, it's a night and day difference from that weird hell of entering numbers in software and letting that determine how your day goes. Eat to feel nourished and satisfied. Move to feel good, be healthy, and have fun. Logic doesn't have to go out the window there. Consider nutrition. Consider how you want to feel after you eat. Consider what food will taste good and be emotionally satisfying. Think about what kind of exercise you actually enjoy. Approaching it all from a place of kindness and self-care changes everything. It feels completely different from trying to fix yourself or impress others.

Intuitive Eating is one hundred percent in line with taking great care of your health. There is no conflict there. The whole notion of doing intuitive eating "right" is diet thinking. There is no wrong way to trust your intuition and take great care of yourself. That looks different for everyone. If your body is communicating that it isn't healthy, listen to it! Things go wrong when we don't listen, not when we do. There is a whole chapter in Intuitive Eating on gentle nutrition that should give you some ideas on how to balance fun and satisfaction with good health. There is no requirement that you eat a whole lot of something that hurts you. The way to avoid any kind of pendulum swinging is to leave WEIGHT out of it, along with guilt and fear. Don't underfeed yourself or place anything completely off limits. Don't tell yourself scary stories about failing and doing it wrong. Eat whatever makes you feel healthy and well that also tastes good and satisfies. If you notice a food you love is causing problems for you, have it less often, in smaller portions, at a different time of day, with a different combination of foods, or seek out a tastier replacement. There is always a way to totally enjoy a meal and feel great afterward. Look at it like you're conducting research or detective work on maximum satisfaction, health, and enjoyment. This is a fun puzzle to be solved, with lots to be learned and plenty of delicious food to be eaten. That's how I approached it when my husband and I changed our eating for health reasons. I've written quite a bit about the mashup of happy and healthy eating in my own journal. Another really powerful element is fully owning whatever choices you make. As long as you are always free to choose, there is nothing to rebel against. It's never an all-or-nothing proposition where you either go back to a restrictive diet mindset or you ignore your blood sugar until a limb falls off. There is a vast middle ground between the two just waiting to be explored.

I saw a great Tabitha Farrar recently on "normal" eating and how dumb it is to think we can go from prolonged restriction right to normal eating. There are things we need in order to be alive - air, water, food. If your air is being restricted, you don't breathe normally when it's available again, you gasp. If your water has been restricted, you are not casual about water when you have access to it again, you gulp. It's normal and necessary. Yet we think we can drastically restrict food, and then be super casual around it or only eat a little bit. That misconception carries over even to some eating disorder treatment providers. They are so concerned about overeating that they promote meal plans that would be inadequate for most people, let alone someone who has been in extreme energy deficit. I really liked the air, water, food analogy. Why is food any different from the other two? They're all essential for life. The body responds accordingly when we are deprived. It's biology, not that we are weak-willed, greedy, or emotional.

I was looking back over my Fitbit stats to see when I worked out last. There were 8 days around the covid vaccine when I didn't do anything but walk the dog. Those are not power walks or anything. It's mostly Cooper sniffing along reading his "pee mail" and me gawking at nature and visiting with various neighbors. I did a strength workout yesterday. I assumed my pull-up mojo would be compromised from the extended rest but found myself freakishly strong instead. I got curious about my workout frequency. By workout, I'm talking strength or metabolic conditioning. I don't have any set schedule. I do what I want when I feel like it. Going back through the weeks, the days I don't do a formal workout far outnumber the days I do. Other than walking, I never do steady state cardio. I don't own a cardio machine and don't run. I do some body weight intervals, jump some rope, swing some kettlebells, but that's as part of a short metabolic workout. When I look at the days between those strength or metabolic workouts, it's like 2 days, 6, 3, 4, 2, 5. There is no rhyme or reason other than most days I'm not doing it. LOL Most days I rest, then I blast, but I only blast for 15-20 minutes usually, sometimes far less than that. 5 minutes of kettlebell swings, or 7 minutes of body weight intervals. Then it's back to living life. Not convenient to workout today? Don't feel like it? That's fine. There's always tomorrow. Every time I workout it's because I want to and I'm excited about it. It's the exact opposite of the hardcore gym schedule or training programs I used to keep. I would miss someone's funeral if it was going to interfere with my workout. I would drive through blizzards to get to the gym. I'm so not that person anymore. It occurred to me that this freedom is what happens when you uncouple food from exercise. Part of the reason I was so hellbent on sticking to my workouts is that I felt like I was earning my food. There was never enough food. No way I wanted to eat less, therefore I couldn't workout less, or so went my screwy logic. Food doesn't even enter into it now. When I didn't workout for 8 days, I ate the same way I always eat - what I want, when I'm hungry. I always have an eye toward feeling my best and overall good nutrition, but that still includes Cadbury Creme Eggs. It's that time of year, but there is no, "Oh, you didn't workout today. No chocolate for you.” Diet culture does that to us, fitness magazines, social media, all the little charts showing how long you have to run on a treadmill to burn off a Marshmallow Peep. The whole notion is ridiculous. Your body is so much smarter than that. My weight is completely stable now and has been for years. When I was so carefully trying to manage my intake and expenditure, failing, cheating, starting over, cracking down, OMG, my weight was not stable. It would swing 6-7 pounds in a weekend. Sometimes 15, 20, 40 pounds in the course of a year depending on if I was restricting or rebounding. Now, nothing. I eat to appetite, and my appetite is calm and reasonable since I'm not overdoing exercise.

Overthinking is a symptom of fear. Tabitha Farrar had a recent video about that. It's so true but I'd never really thought about it that way. When we're comfortable with something, we do it and don't even think. When someone is afraid of flying or afraid of going outside, oh, the thinking! Pros and cons, worst case scenarios, preparation, bargaining, endless debate. It's the same thing that happens when a dieter's brain melts over whether to have a snack or what to eat in a restaurant. For someone who’s not afraid, the choice is easy and inconsequential. For someone terrified of weight gain, it feels like you're about to jump out of a plane. Her advice when your brain starts grinding its gears like that is to recognize the thinking as fear-driven, and then if it's a food choice, to go ahead and do whatever is scaring you. That's how it becomes not scary. I've noticed that I'm still in all those same situations that used to flip me out: plans changed at the last minute, wanting more of something, eating out, etc.. I still make a choice, but the choice isn't based on fear (of weight gain), so it's quick and painless. I eat it or I don't. I can see how I thought the fear of weight gain helped me not gain weight. In fact, it helped me eat like an idiot. 😄 I'm far more likely to relax and eat in line with my values when I'm not panicked and beating myself up.

Speaking from my own experience, mental hunger IS hunger. It's the first sign that I need to eat, and then a clear indicator that I need more. That thing where you're constantly thinking about food, wanting to eat, feeling like you need to eat, daydreaming of things you shouldn't eat, questioning whether you can eat, that's hunger. All of it. Who knew? 🤷‍♀️ Diet culture had me bamboozled into thinking it was some kind of a trick. I never trusted it, but it turns out to be completely legit. If I am not at all hungry, I don't daydream about eating food. It doesn't even occur to me. I have little interest even if food is offered. Having been chronically hungry for like, decades, this was a revelation! There is a miraculous difference in my overall consumption if I act on that first inkling that I could eat something rather than questioning or ignoring it for several more hours. I used to let myself get really stomach-growling hungry (aka, waaaay too hungry) and then wait another hour after that before I would eat. No! That's nuts. It caused me to eat like a starving animal and never want to stop. Now, I'll be going about my business, think, "Oh, a sandwich sounds good" and I'll just go and make one right then. If it's an hour before dinner, maybe I'll make a half sandwich, or maybe I'll decide to order a big deli sandwich for dinner and have a few bites of something else while I wait for delivery. What I don't do is tell myself that I can't possibly be hungry or that I'm not allowed to eat. I also don't wait until I'm really, really hungry and then try to eat some boring food that I'd previously planned and no longer want. All of that creates a big disconnect. People who ignore hunger also tend to ignore fullness. What about emotional or habitual eating, numbing out with food? That too is ignoring hunger and fullness. Maybe it's filling an emotional void rather than being a response to restriction, but the answer is the same. You get curious about what you actually need on a mind/body/soul level and then you meet the real need. Maybe it's more food, a hug, a nap, a day off, something to look forward to, or a friend to talk with. If your motivation is to take the best care of your body and mind, then no worries about doing it wrong.

When you don’t feel great for a few days in a row, respect that by resting or doing something less intense. I’ve learned never to combine intense exercise with poor sleep or lack of sleep. That really does a number on both your immune system and appetite. If you’re healthy and well-rested but just a little mopey or down, a workout can be a great mood boost. If you’re exhausted, very stressed, sleep-deprived, or the thought of intense exercise fills you with dread, the couch and a blanket is a better course of action. Other options would be going for a walk instead of a run, stretching instead of lifting, or doing five minutes of basic body weight exercises instead of a longer, more challenging workout. That way you’ve taken some time for yourself, done some enjoyable movement, but you’re not piling up stressors like when stacking a poor night of sleep with a brutal workday with a challenging run. A little stress helps us to adapt and grow stronger, too much just breaks things. It’s also so important not to confuse a cortisol stress buzz (fight or flight) with “energy.” Things like going too long without eating or pushing too hard in the gym can give us a wired, invincible feeling that is not at all the same as being legitimately well-rested.

I have only read the kindle sample, but it looks good. There's a book called Train Happy: An Intuitive Exercise Plan for Every Body by Tally Rye. If anybody has read it, I'd love to know what you think. My exercise is already so intuitive I'm not feeling any particular need to read a whole book on the subject. It looks like the purpose of it is to untangle health and joyful movement from diet/fitness culture and weight loss.

Rather than metabolism slowing down at some arbitrary age, people may tend to become less active as they get older and busier with life, yet continue to eat (or not eat) for reasons having nothing to do with hunger. It's so important to eat to satisfaction and respect appetite. If we get those things in sync, it tends to work in any decade or circumstance. In general lately, I find I have to push my levels of comfortable fullness in order to adequately meet my energy needs. A lot of what I eat is higher volume and if I don’t get FULL my energy, hormones, and weight start dropping. The trick I’ve learned is to go for “quite stuffed” when eating things like beans, rice, sweet potatoes, smoothies, and vegetables, and to pay a lot more attention to mind/mouth satisfaction with, say, Doritos and Cadbury. If I were using my beginner understanding of intuitive eating on high-volume, plant food meals (always stop at level whatever, don’t get too hungry or full), I would be legitimately starving. And if I were applying the “gotta get FULL” mindset to candy and pie, I’d be wildly overdoing it. That’s why it’s so important to find your own way using kindness, common sense, and listening to your own body. No rigid meal plan or set of diet rules is going to work perfectly in all situations, but your body will tell you. Once you're practiced at eating to satisfaction and respecting your appetite, you can trust that through sedentary work days, training for an event, rehabbing an injury, whatever comes up. When I was dieting, I would absolutely panic if anything about my routine changed. If the gym closed, or I couldn't go walking, or I had to rest for a week or a month, OMG! What will I do about my food?!?! It was like walking a tightrope. Now, with what I eat driven mainly by satisfaction and appetite, that keeps working regardless of if I'm bedridden, swinging kettlebells, or going through menopause. So, there's a major benefit of intuitive eating that I would never have acknowledged when I was railing against it.

How do you think about or use the scale? Personally, I forget about it, or ignore it for months, or use it occasionally, or daily. I basically don't worry about it at all. Whatever feels right that day is fine, which I find easier than all the declarations I used to make about smashing it, not being allowed to go near it, or only using it on a predetermined schedule. I kind of did the same thing with food. Normalize, habituate, get bored, don't assign meaning. For me, that's the middle ground between obsess and forbid. Vowing not to do something only makes me want to do it right now. LOL I do understand that some people find it really helpful or necessary not to weigh at all. I'm curious what you see as the pros and cons.