Accessing Your Innate Body-Wisdom to Discover the Perfect Way to Eat for You

Our bodies know how to eat. Yes! But we’ve lost our innate ability to know. The reason, I believe, boils down to one simple thing: we’ve disconnected from our bodies. A study led by Leann Birch, Ph.D., and published by the New England Journal of Medicine confirmed that if they’re not interfered with, preschool age children have an innate body- wisdom that directs them to eat what they need to grow. The caloric content at any given meal is variable, but over time it evens out. Well-meaning parents who interfere with their children’s innate body-wisdom cause more damage than good. It has been shown that overweight children have parents who are more controlling of their food intake than normal-weight children and that such children will eat less when left alone, without parental pressure. Duke University psychologist Philip Costanzo, Ph.D., found that children whose eating was controlled ate more and had more weight problems than children whose eating was not restrained. From the moment we enter grade school we are taught to disconnect from our bodies. From that moment forward, our ability to think is considered superior to our ability to intuit, move, sense, or feel. In a culture that celebrates the logical mind, the innate intelligence of the body has been looked upon suspiciously. Today, science is catching up with nature, discovering that the body itself has a “mind.” Although Western culture is beginning to embrace what primitive peoples and spiritual masters have always known—that our bodies are the true temples of spirit—our institutions, belief systems, and patterns of behavior rely on an economic system built upon the superiority of the intellect and the drive to produce. When production is valued more than connection, we suffer a tremendous loss. Our economic system, built on the premise of production and consumption, conditions us to override the natural rhythms of the body. To be valuable and successful in a production- consumption society drives us to override the innate natural cycle that calls for rest and rejuvenation. Our bodies know. Sometimes our bodies need to eat more, sometimes less. Sometimes we need to sleep more, sometimes less. Sometimes we’re energized and productive; other times we need to slow down and relax. In my eBook, Throw Away Your Diet Book, I teach an Authentic Way of Eating™ based on honoring our innate body wisdom. Authentic Eating teaches us to listen to the innate wisdom of the body and its cycles. It teaches us to trust again. We all need to learn how to re-inhabit our bodies, thereby celebrating the quality of stillness, silence and non-doing that supports all action. Only by reconnecting to our body’s innate knowing do we reclaim our innate inherent power, our biochemical truths and our authentic natures.