You’ve Heard of Intuitive Eating, Now Try Intuitive Working
Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program that Works is a 1995 book written for “chronic dieters,” establishes a new diet program that isn’t about obsessively counting calories or starving oneself to achieve a body they can’t sustain. Intuitive eating is about naturally losing weight by eating when you’re hungry, indulging reasonably in cravings, and listening to your body’s needs in order to restore your figure to a natural equilibrium. And interestingly, the science backs up these claims – a June 2021 study shows that intuitive eating can do wonders for one’s body image and that those who eat intuitively have more energy, a lower BMI, and generally feel healthier.
This kind of intuitive behavior isn’t just a healthy way to eat, it’s also a healthy way to live. By taking some of the thoughts behind intuitive eating and applying them to the way one manages work throughout the day, you might be able to feel a little bit more productive, at ease, and confident in your abilities.
Ultimately, intuitive eating provides a sense of stability, allowing you to “make peace” with food – which is exactly what you should be aiming for when you feel that work is becoming overwhelming, taxing, and detrimental to your mental wellbeing. If food is fuel for your body, work is fuel for your mind, and you should be enjoying both as much as you can.
The principles of intuitive working
In all, there are ten principles of intuitive eating – and six principles of intuitive working.
1. Reject the work mentality
Put those Weight Watcher’s cookies in the trash, and cancel your juice cleanse – diet culture is over if you’ll have it. In intuitive eating, this step is called “rejecting the diet mentality” because ideally, you’re going to want to eschew the entire ethos and mythos around dieting to reclaim your own identity with food. It’s easier said than done, as often we’re surrounded by crash diets, flat tummy teas, waist-slimming pants and bloating commiseration. But the constant berating, restricting, and degrading language around gaining and losing weight has to stop in order to move forward.
The same thing is true for the popular conceptualization of one’s work mentality, what we could also call “grind culture.” Toss out those productivity tips, memes about working late, inspirational LinkedIn posts and self-help books on how to get ahead. At the end of the day, forcing yourself into someone else’s idea of success will only make you miserable in your career, as you’ll be trapped in a cycle of overwork and peer pressure.
2. Honor your hunger
While it might seem like intuitive eating is something you’d hear from an Instagram self-help coach, intuitive eating isn’t all radical acceptance and ice cream for breakfast – and intuitive working shouldn’t be either. This tip, called “honoring your hunger,” is a great indicator of what intuitive eating is actually about – being able to tell when you’re hungry, and not letting yourself become excessively ravenous, leading you to overindulge.
In the world of work, your hunger represents the breaks you need to be taking. It’s more than likely that you work until you feel burnt out, but you tell yourself that you just need to do one more task, one more email, or one more spreadsheet before you take your half-hour Peloton break. Then, before you know it, that half-hour turned into an hour, and for the rest of the day, you feel too listless, distracted and irritable to work.
By putting off the restorative time you needed, you unintentionally burned yourself out, whereas if you pace yourself, you wouldn’t feel so aggressively exhausted.
3. Make peace with work
In the realm of intuitive eating, this step involves “making peace with food.” Chronic dieters know that being on a restrictive diet perpetuates a pattern of fighting with food by isolating forbidden foods and restricting yourself, craving, binging, feeling guilty, and then starting the masochistic cycle all over again.
In the same way, you’ve got to make peace with your work. You probably find that the “forbidden foods” of your workplace are mundane tasks you often put off until they all pile up. If you have some painstakingly boring paperwork that needs to get pushed, don’t put it off. That nagging feeling is only going to grow, hanging over your head until it becomes psychologically insurmountable, and when you finally get around to doing all the administrative work you’ve been neglecting, you may have to spend hours playing catch-up, leading to feelings of guilt, shame, and isolation.
Nip the issue in the bud by doing something as it occurs to you – just as if you realized you were hungry and needed a snack.
4. Challenge the “work police”
Rather than challenging the work police, intuitive eaters take the time here to “challenge the food police.” These are the voices in your head instructing you that some foods are “good” and some are “bad,” and that if you eat “bad” food, you’re a bad person. This casts a certain moral value judgment on food that causes gratuitous self-loathing.
It’s more than likely that you have an idea about what constitutes good work and bad work. Good work is thoughtful, carefully crafted, innovative and inspiring, and bad work is done quickly, somewhat thoughtlessly, automatically and robotically. But who says you can’t do some bad work sometimes without considering it bad?
Imposing a moral value judgment on the kind of work you do all the time can only lead to low self-esteem, as doing some “bad” work can often make you feel like a bad person. But don’t be afraid to phone it in if you need to, submit something that isn’t your best, or ask for a little help as long as you’re open with the rest of your team about what’s on your mind.
5. Discover the satisfaction factor
This tip is identical in language for both intuitive eating and working, and nearly identical in execution. The satisfaction factor of eating is really just the pleasure gained in the experience of eating. The more you do it, the more you’ll realize that eating isn’t something to be hated, feared, or obsessed over and that there’s an inherent satisfaction in food.
The same can be said for work, even if you find yourself hating, fearing, and obsessing over various parts of your job as well. While it’s certainly trending to think that work is all dolorous, mind-numbing screen-staring and Slack-chatting, don’t get swept up in the unnecessary negatively.
Arrange your home office in a way that makes you happy, whether it’s with pictures of your dog or a clean, empty standing desk. Sit in the morning and take in the ambiance with a hot cup of coffee (or a cold cup of iced coffee), and revel in the fact that you have the opportunity to make decisions, do tasks, and think creatively in ways that may very well benefit others. There is satisfaction in working as long as you allow yourself to feel it.
6. Feel your fullness
When you’re intuitively eating, you’re instructed to “feel your fullness,” meaning that you can identify the signs of being comfortably full. Be mindful, and pause in the middle of eating to ask how the food tastes, what your current level of hunger is, and how satisfied you are with the meal. By doing this, you won’t eat too much or too little, and you’ll work your way back to the satisfaction factor.
Finally, this last tip requires a level of mindfulness that may not be intuitive. Sometimes, work requires not a break, but a momentary check-in. Ask yourself, how am I working? Am I comfortable, and content with the amount of work I’m doing at the moment? Am I tired of working, and do I feel wiped out? Or do I feel energized, inspired, and perhaps I want to tackle a larger project?
By asking yourself these questions, you won’t overdo the amount of work you tackle, nor starve yourself, do too little, and leave your workday feeling unfulfilled.
