We're in the week of making peace with food. I had a mindset-changing insight. I initially though Intuitive Eating was about learning when to stop eating when satisfied. What I start to see now is that it is about teaching our bodies that we will not deprive them any more. That is why the first three principles are all about that: reject the diet mentality, honour your hunger, make peace with food. A difficult point for me to understand was the power of deprivation. It has a tremendous power. Where does it come from? Here is my theory. Deprivation draws on the power of survival. But why? Surely we can live without sweets. Or at least without certain kinds. Surely this is not needed for our survival. 

The point here is not about body needing sweets to survive. The point is that we trick our body into thinking it does. Deprivation is a natural mechanism our body uses to signal misses an essential nutrient. What we do with rules for eating is to trigger this natural mechanism from within. 

It's like stress. Stress is a natural mechanism of the body to prepare for danger. It's also about survival. When a lion attacks a zebra, all the powers within the zebra's body are recruited to fight for survival. Adrenalin kicks in, blood withdraws from the skin to reduce the chance of bleeding out, blood pressure goes up, their hearts race. These changes in the body can be handy in an emergency, but they don't do you much good when you're just sitting on a rock swatting at flies and wishing horrible things for your enemies. And this is what we do when we worry and stress over things - we provoke the same survival mechanism as in a real emergency. 

That is my theory: by creating strict rules and then breaking them, we provoke deprivation. The deprivation we provoke seems to have similar effects on us, as the deprivation used by our body for survival. It has a tremendous power. Willpower can do little against it. That's why it's important to make peace with food.