Intuitive Eating – The New Way to Build Muscle/Diet For Time-Strapped Professionals
You’ve heard how it goes before: Joe (Bloggs, not Binley!) is your regular guy who wants to shred some lbs/build some muscle. He manages to get to the gym 3 X per week if he’s lucky, and also has to balance a full-time, 10-hour per day professional job, two kids, his wife, and have time to play a round of golf on the weekend with his friends and spend time with his family.
Joe faces a conundrum: either count calories meticulously and spend his free time painstakingly watching his diet or give up this whole “gym thing” and take up darts instead.
What’s a man to do, in a situation like this (that you too, may find yourself in at some stage in life)?
Give up? Hell no – there’s too much at stake for this. He can’t flush his health down the toilet and look like crap – there’s too much pride and education resting on it.
What Joe needs, is an alternative solution.
Joe needs to follow the concept of Intuitive Eating.
Intuitive eating is a revolutionary approach to getting in shape without the stress of counting every single calorie that goes onto your plate.
It sounds ludicrous – obscene, in fact… until you’ve tried it.
What, you think 10,000 years ago, when we didn’t have access to modern agriculture, Grok was a flat slob who sat in front of the T.V every day devouring potato chips?
No, what our ancestors did – our muscular, ripped, hunter-gathering ancestors – was follow the concept of intuitive eating.
The Principles of Intuitive Eating
To begin with, we’re going to have to break down a few reinforced ‘beliefs’ that have stunk the fitness industry out like a bad smell the last couple of decades.
To embrace intuitive eating, you’re going to have to put your preconceived ideas of what bodybuilding nutrition is meant to be like to one side for a second, and get ready to embrace a fresh logic.
1) You Eat When You Want
The whole “eat 6-8 meals per day to stoke the metabolic fire” is flawed logic.
Back when our primitive ancestors were around, they had access to food when they killed it or picked it during season. The ability to store foods was limited as many of them had to constantly be on the move in the hunt of new food.
Intuitive eating follows a similar pattern: you eat when you have to; or, more specifically, when you need to.
This may take some getting used to if you’ve been following a rigid, soul-destroying meal plan for a few years, but over time you’ll grow to embrace this refreshing approach to meals.
2) You Eat What Your Body Demands (Within Reason)
The second rule of intuitive eating is that you eat what your body tells you to eat.
No, this doesn’t mean donuts, candies and French fries – it’s about fuelling your body with healthy nutrition at peak times.
This aspect of intuitive eating may need a bit of trial-and-error to come to turn’s with healthier food choices. But once again, over time, it becomes a logical way of approaching nutrition rather than an arduous one.
You’ll also be pleasantly surprised by how intuitive your body is at demanding certain macronutrients at various times as well. Post-workout, for example, you will crave carbohydrates/energy sources more than in the mornings, where your body will either prefer to fast or eat a healthy protein + fat source.
3) Bigger Meals are Preferred
The third principle of intuitive eating is a natural bi-product of following the first two steps.
Once your metabolism settles down and adjusts to eating when you want and what you want, it’s likely that your overall calorie consumption during those meal times will increase.
There is no reason to panic here. The likelihood is that since you won’t be “grazing” constantly on food, you’ll have an appetite for larger, more substantial portions packed with higher quantities of macro and micronutrients.
And, contrary to popular belief, there isn’t any evidence to suggest this is an inferior way of eating. Quite the opposite, in fact – a reduced meal frequency with more satiating food choices may promote long-term adherence to diets, making it better for fat loss since the diet is more realistic for most individuals.
For busy professionals like Joe mentioned above, bigger meals will be a godsend for him as well – he now gets to spend more quality time with his family, and less time messing about with packing tupperwears for his 8 meals the next day.
Get Ready for a Revolution
Today served for a brief introduction to intuitive eating and the benefits that can come of it. In the following 2 articles on the #ADBlog, we’re going to break down how you can tailor intuitive eating towards both a muscle-building and fat-loss diet for superior results than the traditional calorie-counting method, if the diet is a good fit for your personality and lifestyle.
Stay tuned.
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