How much should I eat?

I’m super excited because even though the 7 Day Smokin’ Hot Mom Detox doesn’t officially start ’til tomorrow, things are already shifting and brewing with the 50 fabulous women, who have jumped into the detox.

As the conversations heat up on our private Facebook Detox group, one familiar question has popped up a few times….

• “How much should I eat?”
• How much trail mix can I eat?
• Can I really eat a whole avocado every day?
• What’s a normal serving of rice?
• How many healthy sweet treats can I have every day?

I completely understand those questions. I used to ask them all the time. I was a big weigh-and-measure gal, during my Weight Watchers days.

But I just don’t go there anymore, and I want to invite you to abandon the weigh-and-measure mentality.

In my work, I don’t tell the wonderful women I work with how much to eat. Whether it’s in a detox or individual coaching, I just won’t do it.

I won’t tell you how much to eat because there are real problems with weighing our food and trying to regulate how much we eat via external rules.

“External rules”  – those are the key words in that sentence.

Let’s break it down a bit.

External: If how much we should eat comes from an external source, we disempower ourselves. We de-value the wisdom of our body, and we get out of the habit of listening to our body’s full and empty signals.

Rules: You and I both know that wherever there are rules – they will be broken. If we confine ourselves to live within the diet-box, we will undoubtedly break out of the box. We’ll end up eating more than what feels good in our body, and then we’ll be disappointed with ourselves.

Instead of external rules, I want to invite you into internal listening.

Internal listening is the practice of respecting ourselves enough to tune in to our inner world of sensation, and listen to what it has to say.

Our inner world – our body – talks in the language of sensation.

It’s by tuning into sensation, that we know if we are truly full or hungry. And it’s by respecting those body-signals, that we know when to eat, and when to stop.

So many of us feel like we can’t trust our body to know when to stop. That’s understandable. In a society that is constantly telling us how to be in our body, we can become disconnected to our own body-wisdom.

Here are 5 ways to cultivate your internal listening:

• Breathe – slow down and take a few deep breaths
• Ask yourself – what do I feel?
• Get curious about the sensations in your body
• Trust that you’re sensations are the language of your body.
• Remind yourself that what your body has to say is worth listening to – it’s your inner wisdom.

When you move from external food rules to internal listening, you don’t need someone else to tell you what the right amount of food is – you’ll know innately.