Can You Intuitively Eat Without Tracking Macros First?

Nikkiey: What's going on, you guys? Hey, everyone. Welcome back to The WarriorBabe Show. Before we even dive into today's episode, I just want to take a moment to say something that has been sitting heavy on my heart in literally the best freaking way, because we just hit 1 million downloads on this podcast. What? 1 million. And honestly, you guys, I'm so speechless. This happened, we saw it yesterday.

My team saw it, let me know and filled me in. I immediately logged in, saw the numbers, and I was just staring at the number like, oh my gosh. Holy cow. This milestone, we did it. We hit it. Y'all, I started The WarriorBabe Show two and a half years ago, January 9th of 2023. I remember it like it was yesterday. First of all, it had taken me two years to start the podcast for multiple reasons. Mostly because I was pulled in all different directions within WarriorBabe with team, personnel, product, all the things. And then a little bit of imposter syndrome too. Of all the content that I make on a daily basis, this one is just free flow. It's just talking. It's just spitballing. And I was like, can I even do that? I didn't know exactly what the podcast would become.

I just knew in my heart that I have real shit to say, and I just want to be able to speak it directly to the women that need to hear it the most. And now we have over a million downloads. You chose to press play on all of these episodes. You chose to listen. You chose to learn. You chose to grow with me and with the podcast. And there's an aspect of where you click that episode and you're like, all right, I'm going to show up for myself. I know Nikkiey's got some heat, or she's going to drop some knowledge bombs, or some light bulbs are going to go off, and some things can be uncomfortable in some episodes, or you're learning some things in episodes.

But you click play and you're showing up for yourself. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you. Thank you for trusting me in your ears. Thank you for trusting me in your daily routines, your journeys, your fitness knowledge. Thank you for sharing these episodes, for screenshotting the episode and whatever hit most for you and sending it to my DMs. And more importantly, thank you for being a part of this moment and a part of this milestone.

We get to celebrate this together, and it's just really cool to see where we are today. And here we go. We're going to keep going, baby. So keep firing, keep going, keep raising the bar. One million, you guys, is just the beginning. I can't thank you guys enough. Seriously, I have so much sincere gratitude for you and for how you show up for me in this podcast and for sharing it. And more to come, guys. There are a lot more episodes lined up, and a lot more awesome guests that we're going to be bringing on.

So with that being said, thank you. I love you guys. Let's get into today's episode. Today's episode is episode number 271, and it's something I want to get real with you guys on, because I know the Fourth of July holiday is coming up. Summer's here. And I've heard so many times, over and over again, from people that they intuitively eat.

And when I ask what intuitive eating means to them, they're like, oh, well, I just eat healthy. There are a lot of people on social media talking about intuitive eating. But first of all, you can't intuitively eat what you've never learned. Let me just say that before we even dive into this episode, because there are people on social media telling you, oh, just tune in, or just trust your hunger cues, as an aspect of intuitive eating, or that eating healthy is intuitive eating.

But that's not how it actually works. The narrative I want you to trust me on and accept, and I'm going to go into the backstory of how and why I feel this way, is that intuitive eating needs to be earned. It is a muscle that you build over time. I'm going to share why, I'm going to dive into the how, and I'm going to give you tactics and steps on how you can build that muscle too. But first I want you to understand what it is and what it isn't, because I want to clear the air.

Intuitive eating is not just eating when you're hungry, and it's not eating clean or healthy 100% of the time. And it's most definitely not ignoring structure or chasing food on a whim. That's what I feel like social media makes intuitive eating seem like. It's like, oh, it's not structured. I just eat intuitively throughout the day.

I have three meals, and it's probably a salad, and it's just people eating when they're hungry. Intuitive eating, for me personally, means that you have a deep, informed and respectful relationship with food, that you can read your body's signals, and that you can trust them because you've put in the work. And what I mean by the work is this: if you have never tracked a macro, you don't understand why protein matters.

If you've never learned how carbs and fats work together, dude, you are just guessing. If you haven't put in years of work looking at what a food item looks like on a scale, seeing how much it weighs, and getting to mentally picture, oh, this is 40 grams of oatmeal, or this is 150 grams of egg whites, or this is 100 grams of rice, or this is 200 grams of sweet potatoes.

If you've never done that work and you're saying that you're intuitively eating now, you are just guessing. If you don't understand the importance of protein, what it does in the body, how it builds and maintains your muscle, how it helps in other aspects, and how it works simultaneously with carbs and with fats, dude, you are just guessing.

You can't fear food. You can't be afraid of carbs. There are people you're following on social media who you see intuitively eating for a day, but there's a limited amount of carbs in those food posts. They don't have a respectful relationship with food. First and foremost, what I want to dive into with you guys is what the actual work looked like for me, because this is a 10-year foundation. Ten years of full-on tracking, knowing exactly what was going into my body, understanding macros, understanding protein, learning the ins and outs, learning what didn't work for me and what does work for me.

So this is how I personally built this foundation. I'm going to break it up into a couple of phases. Phase one, for years. Years. I would put this under tracking, bringing awareness, and meal planning or meal pairing. I logged every meal. And yes, a portion of that was from me being in the bodybuilding space and having a meal plan to follow.

Even though that was three years, that world gave me a whole different perspective on nutrition that I never had before. Like I shared with you guys in episode one, I relied on not eating the entire day and having one meal, dinner, at the end of the night. Then I relied on Pinterest for meals to cook when I did start getting a little more serious about being healthy and working out, but I still wasn't eating enough. I tried all of the diets under the sun, even prior to the bodybuilding era.

When I started to track and log every single meal, I recognized, holy cow, I was probably only eating 800 or 900 calories a day. And actually tracking and logging 1,600 or 1,800 calories isn't really that much food. It's just the portion of protein, fats and carbs broken down in a way that makes it doable across five meals a day. And more than anything, what I learned in this phase was to observe.

I learned how I felt after I ate carbs. I learned that if protein was lacking, my hunger spiked. Yes, I was on a diet for bodybuilding, but I was also observing how my body was reacting. I would be hungry every two to two and a half hours, and I would know, okay, this is a time to eat. I need to go get my next meal. I also realized that skipping certain nutrients left me feeling moody, bloated and tired. Following the meal plan and tracking gave me these types of insights, almost like a nutrition roadmap, which made me more curious about how my body was operating with this new nutritional knowledge.

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Nikkiey: Then after those years, because bodybuilding was three years, I moved into taking on macros and learning that there's another world outside of bodybuilding.

And it's like, I can have food freedom. I can have whatever brand I want. I can have whatever food I want. There are no limitations. There are no restrictions. But it made me realize there are certain things that are non-negotiable, like protein. Protein is an absolute non-negotiable. There were days when I was learning how to balance eating what I wanted with eating it in the quantity I needed to stay within my calorie range. Because again, you guys, macros are just calories broken down into specific percentages that meet your overall calorie intake.

A lot of people can just track calories, and many people do that. But when you're trying to focus on body composition and building muscle, you need to make sure the percentages of those calories, broken down into macros, make sense for you and what you're trying to achieve. Yes, I had tons and tons of protein when I was bodybuilding, but in those moments I learned that protein here was absolutely non-negotiable. I continued to learn as I was implementing these things. I continued to be curious. I continued to absorb this knowledge.

I learned how important protein is for stabilizing your appetite and supporting your muscle growth, and that it's so essential for long-term fat loss. And then you pair it with fats and with carbs strategically. Carbs are for energy, and fats are for your hormones and keeping things in check there. I started playing around with timing. I started playing around with post-workout carbs. I started playing around with different things throughout the day. This is where I was learning what felt good in my body, because everyone is so individually different, and what didn't.

And I learned that for a period of time, dude, ice cream and dairy made things rock and roll in my stomach in an uncomfortable way. So for a little period of time I did an elimination diet. That's where you eliminate the thing that's upsetting your stomach for a period of time, then slowly reintroduce it. Are you guys slowly starting to hear the type of work I had to put in? That's why people can't just say, oh, I intuitively eat, without having done any of the work Nikkiey is mentioning right now.

Intuitive eating requires you to have a deep, informed, respectful relationship with food. I'm just going to keep going back to that, and this is me elaborating on how it was for me. Most importantly, it was every single day. Me putting a food item on a scale to learn. Not to be restrictive, to learn. People think they'll have to weigh everything for the rest of their lives, and that's not true.

And they feel like the scale can be restrictive. The scale is an opportunity for you to gain so much insight, so much knowledge and so much of a respectful relationship with food, understanding how many carbs are in a given amount of sweet potatoes, how many carbs are in a given amount of oatmeal, and vice versa. So every single day I was putting a food item on a scale, seeing how much it weighed, and seeing how many carbs that equated to.

And over time, I can now spitball certain things off the top of my head and know that this is X amount of carbs, X amount of fats, X amount of protein. That would be phase one and phase two mixed in there somewhere. Then phase three really came down to understanding emotional versus physical hunger, and starting to identify patterns like stress snacking or sugar cravings after a long day at work.

Because there are intuitive eating aspects for me personally where I'm not 100% every day. I know there are some days where I lack on getting my protein. And when I have a craving at the end of the night, I recognize, oh shit, I didn't get enough protein in my day, and this is why I'm having this type of craving right now. I can recognize that because I put years and years of work into it. So it's pausing in that moment before eating and asking myself, dude, is this hunger?

Is this stress? Is this boredom? Is this thirst? Am I thirsty? Is this me recognizing that I didn't give my body the nutritional needs it needed today? I'll pause and engage with intention rather than impulse. Again, these are skills you have to learn over a period of time. These are prerequisites. Prerequisites. This is literally everything.

I'm saying there's a prerequisite to getting to intuitive eating and saying that you can intuitively eat. Okay. I'm going to give you guys steps on how you can do this. But these are the majority of the phases I would want to put you in. And these phases, phase one and phase two, that's years. That's years. Okay. And this last phase, which is what I've been in for the last year, is releasing control.

When I've planned and tracked meals for the last 10 years, there's a control aspect to it. So the way I navigated into intuitive eating and allowed myself to release control was by testing myself. I would track core meals. I would track breakfast, lunch and maybe a snack, but then I would leave one meal flexible. That would usually be dinner. And oh my gosh, there were times, you guys, where I fumbled, where I went overboard, where I totally overate at dinner.

And then I had a big dessert. That happened many, many times. That's where you learn, in those moments. You don't look at yourself like, oh, I'm a failure, I suck, I messed up, I can never intuitively eat, I need to go back to the structure and the control. You learn in each of those situations and you gain more knowledge, and you know that the next time, you're not going to do what you did last time.

And that's where you can loosen your structure and loosen your control. That took time. That took experimentation. That took failure. But that's how intuitive eating became rooted in my experience, and not in guesswork. So I really want to paint that picture of the foundation I built for myself: tracking, logging every meal, understanding my body and my cues, knowing deeply what protein does in the body, how it works simultaneously with carbs and fats, what carbs and fats each do.

How my body feels. All of the things I just said. Emotional versus physical hunger, and then allowing the release of control. That's four different phases there, you guys. Four different phases. Okay.

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I appreciate you so much for taking the time to support this show. I know many of you are like, how do I start doing this? I want to start building the blocks of true intentional, intuitive eating for myself. And one of the main foundations of WarriorBabe is that you're going to learn how to track macros, whether you like it or not. Whether you have limiting beliefs about macros being way too hard, or you think it's restrictive, or whatever the stories are that people carry about tracking macros.

Oh, I don't want to have to weigh my food on a scale, that seems like too much. Look, point blank, you've got to do those things in order to develop a deep relationship with food and a healthy relationship with food. Do you have to do those things for the rest of your life? Absolutely not. And I don't want you to. I also don't expect you to bring your scale to a party and measure your food out in the middle of it. If you don't care what people think, then go for it.

It's a good conversation starter. It's also a good inspiration tactic. But if you don't like it, and many people don't, I'm not telling you that you need to do that. And I'm also not telling you that you need to track macros for the rest of your life. But do you need to learn them? Yes. 1000%. 1000%. You can take the steps from the foundation I built for myself and apply them to building your own foundation. But if you want a tactical roadmap, what I would say is you need to track for about a year, point blank.

You need to really gain that knowledge. And then when you start to transition into the intuitive eating aspect, you still track for, say, two weeks. So you're like, all right, I'm going to start easing out of the control of this. But you're going to log your macros, log your hunger levels, log your energy levels, and log how these meals made you feel, and you're going to begin to understand. You may already have the baseline of being able to track your macros, since you tracked for a year. But if you log it and pay attention to what you're feeling, you're going to have a strong baseline to trust yourself enough to leave that baseline.

Another thing: within that year of tracking macros, you need to learn the macro roles. You need to know protein, carbs and fats. You need to understand why they matter, how things change in your body as you eat them, and what happens when you don't eat them. And even in these two weeks, as you're paying attention and easing out of control into a looser structure, you need to pinpoint your hunger cues.

You need to understand that physical hunger comes from an empty sensation in your stomach, and it increases gradually over time. You ever hear your stomach rumbling? Your stomach is empty at that point. That's an empty sensation, and you know how it gets stronger and stronger and stronger. That is physical hunger. Emotional hunger hits really fast and is so specific. It's like, oh man, I want chocolate right now. You need to pinpoint those hunger types and then respond appropriately.

Do you just need to hydrate if it's emotional? Do you need to eat consciously if it's physical? Because if it's physical and you're starving, man, that can go sideways real quick. Okay. So you need to eat consciously and give your body the protein, fats and carbs it needs. Not a big carb-load meal, like a huge dinner out because you're starving. Something else that's really important to notice throughout the year, and even in these two weeks as you're transitioning, and I'm going to keep going back to that, is that it's not all about what you eat, but how it makes you feel, physically and mentally too.

That's the awareness that teaches your body to respect itself. That's intuition. It's not guesswork. And make sure you set some non-negotiables in each meal. Protein should literally be a non-negotiable in each meal. You should have veggies daily. You should have a reasonable amount of carbs around your workouts. And keep the same structure. From my years of tracking and logging my meals, there are a lot of those same meals that I eat on a daily basis today.

But maybe two of my meals are very loose. I know it works. I always go back to this: one, I don't like to cook. Two, I don't like to think about things. If my day is busy, the last thing I want to think about is what I'm going to eat today, what I'm going to have for a snack. So I use a lot of the same meals I've had over the years: yogurt, fruit and honey, oatmeal, egg whites, and a bagel and cream cheese in the morning.

And then usually lunch and dinner are like, okay, let me maybe have some sushi from Whole Foods, or chicken scallopini and mashed potatoes from Whole Foods. It's just very loose. There's not much control. There is control, but it's structured control, I should say. And what I can say for you guys is to review and reflect weekly on what worked for you and what felt off. Did you eat on point? Did you eat true to your hunger?

Did you eat to emotion? That type of feedback point is going to be really important for you to sit with, because you'll be able to reflect and give yourself the necessary feedback to move into the next week. Like I said, you are going to mess up, and it's okay. You just have to be honest with yourself at the point where you mess up and say, all right, I know next time I'm not going to do this. And you reflect on it. Those reflections train your intuition, 1000%. Now, once you've built this type of foundation, okay.

Once you've done a year of everything I just mentioned, swap out one structured meal weekly. For that meal, let your body follow hunger cues, not your macros, and see how your body reacts. And then stay flexible. I'm still following my controlled structure 80% of the time, and 20% of the time I practice food freedom. Practice trusting yourself with eating a meal and either going overboard or not going overboard.

Because you're going to learn from that. But know that total chaos in a meal, eating with gluttony and eating until you're overly stuffed and full, is what intuitive eating is not. You need to build that food friendship and that food relationship. Notice how foods make you feel. I used to joke around on holidays, don't eat like an a-hole. Eating like an a-hole is where you wish you didn't eat as much as you just ate. That's where you work on building a healthy relationship.

If you notice how a meal makes you feel afterward, physically and emotionally, that you're tired, you're run down, you're overly stuffed, you're overly bloated, then archive that in your mind, in your personal intuition reference, for moving forward. And sometimes what I do personally is regularly re-center myself. Maybe for you that's going two weeks of testing this and then doing one week of tracking.

I'll typically go a month to two months and then regularly re-center, dropping back into structure and back into tracking for a little bit, and just letting myself remember what my body feels like in this state of mind and this type of controlled structure. Again, all of it is to help you trust yourself a little bit more. I think these are really important things to take away, you guys.

You're building the foundation and putting those things to work: learning your macros, pinpointing hunger types, knowing how food makes you feel, setting non-negotiables, and reflecting on a weekly basis to give yourself feedback. Then when you start actually going into true intuitive eating, swap out a structured meal weekly and check in with yourself. Am I hungry? Is this the kind of food my body wants? That awareness-centered question prompt will lead you to choices that feel nourishing.

Stay flexible, not completely loose. 80% of the time, follow your structure. 20% of the time, practice food freedom. Have a food relationship. Notice how foods make you feel emotionally and physically. And then re-center. Allow yourself to go two weeks and then track for one week. Go one month and track for one week. Go two months and track for two weeks. These are all tactics for you to deploy as you navigate into intuitive eating.

But like I said, you have to put in the work. My foundational structure that I've shared with you, and how I built it over 10 years, does it need to be 10 years for you? No, because there was a lot of learning in there where I used myself as a learning mechanism to understand things. Can you do this faster? Yes, absolutely. But I would say give yourself the allotted amount of time. Think about it: you've maybe been dieting for 10 years and you've been all over the place.

You've been on a hamster wheel, left, right and center. Can you give yourself the grace to maybe take five years to learn this the right way? Yeah. And I've seen thousands of WarriorBabes do that, and they now have a deep, intentional, healthy, informed relationship with food. And now they can live the rest of their lives with that type of knowledge and understanding. Why you want to intuitively eat, and why you need to do it right, is because you get food freedom.

You learn that food isn't overwhelming or stressful anymore. You build confidence. You trust your body to guide you and to help you understand what it needs and what it doesn't need. Most importantly, you end diet cycles, because you know how to respond, not react. And you stick with it for life because it's built on structure and flexibility. This is how I live my life. There's no guilt. There's really no counting anymore, other than me re-centering.

Like I said, maybe for a week, but I'm mostly just listening to my body. But I got here because I learned. I got here because I did the work. And that's the gift I'm giving you guys in this episode: what work you actually need to be putting in. Please don't be confused into thinking that all the people on social media who say they intuitively eat haven't done it. Maybe they did do the work, and those are the people you definitely want to listen to. But you can't intuitively eat what you've never learned. You can't intuitively eat without doing this type of work.

You can't just trust your hunger without building the foundation of tracking your macros and understanding nutrition, because in that case it just becomes absolute chaos. You can't just eat healthy and say you intuitively eat if you've never done the work. I hope this episode helps you guys on so many levels. Even just saying it out loud really makes me appreciate the work I put in, because now I truly do have the foundation to loosely eat whatever I want in a controlled, structured and flexible way. Okay?

If this resonates with you, screenshot whatever insight you took away and tag me on Instagram, at Nikkiey Stott and at The WarriorBabe Show. I want to celebrate the light bulbs that went off in your brain and how you're going to implement this episode into your own life moving forward. Share it with a friend who's tired of tracking forever because they feel like they have to, or a friend who's a fly-by-the-feeling type of person.

Or even a friend who says, I'm eating healthy, but are they eating enough? I want you all to build intuitive eating that lasts forever, and I want to do it together with you guys. All right. So until next time, I love you guys. Most importantly, learn the language of your body, and it will speak freedom to you in so many ways. All right, guys. I love y'all. I'll see you in the next episode. Peace out.

Real quick: if this episode resonated with you or gave you the push you needed, I'd love for you to pay it forward. Drop a quick rating and review, share the podcast with someone who might need it, and help me keep spreading the word. Your feedback not only helps the show grow, but it might just be the nudge someone else needs to kickstart their transformation. Thank you so, so, so much for your support. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.