You Can’t Intuitively Eat What You’ve Never Learned

00:00What's going on, you guys? Hey, everyone. Welcome back to The WarriorBabe Show. And 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 dude, honestly, you guys, like I am, I'm so speechless. Like this happened, we saw it yesterday.

00:30My team saw it then like let me know and filled me in. I immediately logged in, saw the numbers and I was just staring at the number and I'm like, oh my gosh. Holy cow. This milestone, we did it. We hit it. Y'all, when I started The WarriorBabe Show two and a half years ago, January 9th of 2023. Remember, it was like yesterday. First of all, it had taken me two years to start the podcast because of multiple reasons. More so because I was pulled left, right, and all the different directions within Warrior Babe with team, personnel, product, all the things. And then a little bit of imposter syndrome too. Like, oh, like of all the content that I make on a daily basis. This one, because it's just free flow. It's just talking. It's just like spitballing. It's like, you know, and I was like, can I even do that? And I didn't know exactly like what the podcast will become.

01:25I just knew, like in my heart, I have real shit to say. And I just want to be able to speak it like directly to the women that need to hear it the most. And now, the fact that we have over a million downloads where y'all wanted to hit, like you chose to press play on all of these episodes. Like you chose to listen. You chose to learn. You chose to grow with me and with the podcast. And you also, like there's an aspect of where you click that episode. You're like, all right, I'm going to show it for myself. I know Nikki's got some heat or she's going to drop some knowledge bombs or some light bulbs are going off and some things that can be uncomfortable in some episodes or you're learning some of the things in episodes.

02:07But like you click play and you're like showing up for yourself. So just from the bottom of my heart, thank you. Thank you for trusting me in your ears. Thank you for trusting me in your routines on a daily basis, your journeys, your fitness knowledge. Thank you for sharing these episodes for screenshotting, you know, the episode and then whatever hit most for you during that and sending them in your DMs. And just more importantly, for just being a part of this moment and being a part of this milestone.

02:43Like we get to celebrate this together and it's just really cool to see where we are today now. And, you know, here we go. We're going to keep going, baby. So keep firing, keep going, keep raising the bar. One million, one million, you guys is just the beginning. And I just I can't thank you guys enough. Seriously, I have so much sincere gratitude for for you guys and for how you show up for me in this podcast and for sharing it. And more to come, guys. There's a lot more episodes that I have on our bell, a lot more awesome guests that we're going to be bringing on.

03:16So, yeah, with that being said, thank you. I love you guys. And let's get into today's episode. Today's episode is episode number 271. And it's something that I just want to get real with you guys on because I know the holiday of Fourth of July is coming up. Summer's here. Right. And I've heard so many times over and over and over and over again from people that they intuitively eat.

03:47And when I ask like what intuitively eating means to them, they're like, oh, well, I just eat healthy. And there's a lot of people out there that they're just like a lot of people like on social media are talking about intuitively eating. But the 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's people like on social media that are like telling you, oh, just tune in or just, you know, trust your hunger cues as an aspect of intuitively eating or eating healthy is intuitively eating.

04:21But that's not how it actually works. The narrative that I want you guys to trust me on and accepting, because I'm going to go into the backstory of like how and why this is what how I feel about it. But intuitively eating needs to be earned. It is a muscle that you build over time. And I'm going to share why and I'm going to dive into the how and I'm going to give you guys like, you know, tactics and steps on how you can build that muscle, too. But once you guys understand like what it is and what it isn't, because I want to clear the air.

04:56Like intuitively eating is not just eating when you're hungry or it's not eating clean or healthy 100% of the time. And it's most definitely not ignoring structural or chasing food on a whim. And that's how I what I feel like the bucket of on social media makes intuitively eating seem like it's like, oh, it's not structured. Like I just eat intuitively throughout the day.

05:26I have three meals and it's probably, you know, a salad and it's just people eating when they're hungry. And intuitively eating means what for me personally, that you have like a deep, informed and respectful relationship with food and that you can read your body signals and that you can trust them because you've put in the work. And what I mean by the work is if you have never tracked a macro, you you don't understand why protein matters.

06:05You've never learned how carbs and fats, how they work together. Dude, you are just guessing. If you are someone that hasn't put in the work of years of looking at what a food item looks like on a scale and 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.

06:38If you've never done that work, you and you're saying that you're intuitively eating now, you are just guessing. If you don't understand the importance of protein and what it does in the body and how it builds and maintains your muscle and how it helps in other aspects and how it works simultaneously with carbs and with fats. Dude, you are just guessing.

07:31You can't fear food. You can't be afraid of carbs. So there's a people that you're following on social media that you see them intuitively eating in a day, but there's a limited amount of carbs that they're sharing in those food posts. They don't have a respectful relationship with food. First and foremost, what I want to dive in with you guys is to understanding what the actual work looked like for me because this is like a 10 year foundation, 10 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, what does work for me.

08:10And so this is how I personally built this foundation for me. First and foremost, I'm going to break it up in a couple of phases. I would say phase one for years. Years. I would put this baby under like tracking and 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.

08:43But even in that world, even though that was three years, that gave me a whole different perspective on nutrition that I never had before. From sharing with you guys in like episode one, like relied on not eating the entire day and having breakfast or having dinner, having one meal at the end of the night. Then looking at Pinterest and relying on meals to cook when I did start getting a little bit more serious with being healthy and going to work out, but still wasn't eating enough. Tried all of the diets under the sun prior to even, you know, the bodybuilding error.

09:18When I started to track and start to log every single meal, I recognized, holy cow, I was only eating probably 800, 900 calories in a day. And actually tracking and logging 1600 calories, 1800 calories isn't really that much food. It's just the portion of protein, fats and carbs that's broken down into making it look like it's actually doable across like five meals in a day. And more so what I learned in this phase is like I learned to observe.

09:51I learned when I ate carbs, how I felt afterwards. I learned if protein was lacking due to my hunger spiked. Like I wasn't, yes, I was on a diet for bodybuilding, but I also was observing how my body was reacting. And when I would feel hungry, like I would be hungry every two hours, two and a half hours. And I would know that, okay, this is like, this is a time to eat. I need to go get my next meal. And I also realized like skipping certain nutrients left me feeling moody, left me feeling bloated, left me feeling tired. Like the following the meal plan and tracking gave me these types of insights, almost like a nutrition roadmap that led me to being more curious as to understanding how my body was operating with this type of new nutritional knowledge.

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11:11Imagine knowing exactly what your body needs to see real results and results that last. Look, don't wait anymore. Take charge of your health and join our community of strong, empowered women. Visit warriorbabe.com forward slash apply today to start your transformation. That's warriorbabe.com forward slash apply. All right, let's get back to the show. Then from these years and then moving into, because bodybuilding was three years and then moving into like, okay, this is where I started taking on macros and learning that there's another world outside of the bodybuilding world.

11:51And it's like, I can have food freedom. I can have whatever brand I want. I can have whatever food I want. There's no limitations. There's no restrictions. But it made me realize there are certain things that are non-negotiable in it, like protein. Like protein is an absolute non-negotiable. There'll be days where maybe when I was learning how to balance eating what I wanted, but also eating it in the quantity that I needed it to be within my calorie range. Because again, you guys, calories are just, or macros are calories just broken down in specific percentages that meet your overall calorie intake.

12:29Like 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 that your percentages of that calorie broken down into macros make sense for you and what you're trying to achieve. And in those moments, that's when I learned, yes, I had tons and tons of protein when I was bodybuilding, but protein here was absolutely non-negotiable. Like I continued to learn as I was implementing these things. I continued to learn. I continued to be curious. I continued to absorb this knowledge.

13:00How important protein is with stabilizing your appetite, with supporting your muscle growth. And it's so essential for long-term fat loss. And then when you pair it with fats and you pair it with carbs strategically, right, carbs are for energy, fats are for your hormone and keeping things in check there. Like I started playing around with timing. I started playing around with post-workout carbs. I started playing around with, you know, different things throughout the day. And like this is where I was learning what felt good with my body because everyone is so individually different and what didn't.

13:35And I learned for a period of time, dude, ice cream and dairy made things rock and roll in my stomach in an uncomfortable way. So it's like then there was in that a little period of time, an elimination diet. And that's where you eliminate a certain amount of said thing that's upsetting your stomach for a period of time, then slowly reintroducing it. Are you guys slowly starting to hear like this type of work that I had to put in? Like that's why people can't just say, oh, I intuitively eat, but I didn't do any of this work that Nikki is mentioning right now.

14:08Intuitively eating requires you to have this deep, informed, respectful relationship with food. I'm just going to keep going back to that. And this is me elaborating on that 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. Because a scale and people think that the way everything for a long period of time for the rest of their life is not true.

14:38And they feel like the scale can be restrictive. The scale is an opportunity for you to gain so much insight and so much knowledge and so much respectful relationship with food and understanding how much carbs are in said amount of sweet potatoes, how much carbs are in said amount of oatmeal and vice versa. Right. So every single day I was putting a food item on a scale and I was seeing how much this weighed and how much also that equated to the amount of carbs that was in that.

15:09And so over time, I mean, I can spitball certain things off of my mind and know that this is X amount of carbs, X amount of fats, X amount of protein. Then I would say like phase, that would be probably phase one and phase two mixed in there somewhere. And then phase three really came down to understanding like the emotional versus a physical hunger. And starting to like identify patterns like stress snacking or sugar cravings after you had a long day at work.

15:46And maybe you, you know, because there's intuitively eating aspects like for me personally that every day I'm not 100%. And I know that there's 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. Because I put years and years and years of working into it. So it's like pausing in that moment before eating and asking myself, dude, is this hunger?

16:17Is this stress? Is this boredom? Is this thirst? Am I thirsty? Is this recognizing that I didn't give my body the nutritional needs that it needed in the day? And then like I'll pause and just I'll engage with intention rather than impulse. And these again, these are skills that you have to learn over a period of time to be able. It's like these are prerequisites. Prerequisites. Like this is literally everything.

16:47And I'm saying there's a prerequisite to you getting to intuitively eating and saying that you can intuitively eat. Okay. And then I'm going to give you guys steps on how you can do this. But these are like majority of the phases I would want to put you in. And these phases, like the year one, like the phase one and then phase two, that's years. That's years. Okay. Okay. And then this last phase is like what I've been in for for like the last year is releasing control.

17:19Because when you do, when I've planned and tracked meals for the last 10 years, there is a type of control aspect to it. So the way that I navigated into intuitively eating and allowing myself to release the control was testing myself. And what I would do is I would track core meals. So I would track breakfast. I would track lunch and maybe a snack. But then I would leave one flexible. That would usually always be dinner. And as and there's, oh my gosh, there was times you guys where I fumbled, where I went overboard, where I totally overate in a dinner.

17:56And then I had and then I had a big dessert. Right. And that happened multiple many times. That's where you learn. In those moments. You don't look at yourself as like, oh, I'm a failure. Oh, I suck. This is like me messing up. I can never intuitively eat. I need to go back to the structure. And I need to go back to the control. As you learn in each of those situations, you start to gain more knowledge. And you start to know that the next time that you do it, you're not going to do what you did last time.

18:27And then that's where you can loosen on your structure and you can loosen on your control. And that took time. That took time. That took experimentation. That took failure. But that's how intuitively eating became rooted into my experience. And not in guesswork. So I just want to really paint that picture of the foundation that was built for me with tracking, with logging every meal, with understanding my body, my cues, with knowing deeply what protein was doing, what it does to the body, how it simultaneously works with carbs and fats, what carbs and fats do, what one does versus the other one does.

19:12How my body feels. How my body feels. All of those things that I just said. Emotional, physical hunger and then allowing the release of control. That's like four different phases there, you guys. Four different phases. Okay. Hey, while you're listening, if you're getting value from this episode, take a moment to tap that review button or share this podcast with a friend. It's a small gesture that goes a long way in helping more women find their way to feeling stronger and more confident in their skin.

19:44I appreciate you so much for taking the time to support this show. I know many of you guys are like, how I want to start to be able to do this. Like I want to be able to start building the blocks for yourself of true intention and intention, intuitively eating. And I look all a lot of the time people see because that's one of our main foundations of Warrior Babe is you're going to learn how to track macros, whether you like it or not. Whether you have these limiting beliefs on macros and then being being in a being way too hard or you think it is still restrictive or whatever the stories are that people carry on tracking macros.

20:22Oh, I don't want to have to weigh my food on a scale that seems like it's too much or look, point blank, you 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 ever be bringing your scale to a party and measuring your food out in the middle of a, if you, I mean, if you don't care what people think, then go for it.

20:56It's just a, it's a good conversation starter. It's also good inspiration tactic. But if you don't like it and many people don't, don't, I'm not telling you 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%. Steps you can take away from what I just said from the foundation I built for myself. Really, you can apply those to your own, you know, you building your own foundation. But if you want to, you know, a tactical roadmap here, what I would say is you need to track for a year or for like a year, point blank.

21:31Like you need to really gain that knowledge. And then maybe when you start to transition into the intuitive eating aspect, you still track, right? For two to like, say two weeks. So you're like, all right, I'm going to start like easing out of the control of this. But you're going to log your macros and you're going to log your hunger levels and you're going to log your energy levels and you're going to log how these meals made you feel and you're going to begin to understand. You may already have the baseline of obviously being able to track your macros or you track your macros for a year. But you're still if you log it and you pay attention to what you're feeling, then you're going to really have a strong baseline to be able to trust yourself to leave that baseline from.

22:13Another thing is within the year of retracking macros, you need to learn the macro roles. You need to know protein, carbs and fats. Do you need to understand why they matter and how things change as you as you eat them in your body? If you and what happens when you don't eat them in that year? Right. And even in these, you know, as you're paying attention in these two weeks, as you're easing out of control and into a loosened structure, you need to like pinpoint your hunger cues.

22:44You need to understand what physical, physical hunger comes from like an empty sensation in your stomach. Right. And that increases gradually over time. Like you ever get guys like hear your stomach rumbling. Your stomach is like empty at that point. And that's an empty sensation. And you know how it gets stronger and stronger and stronger. That is physical hunger. Emotional hunger is like something that hits really fast and so specific. It's like, oh man, I want chocolate right now. And then with those, you need to pinpoint those hunger types and then you need to be able to respond appropriately.

23:21Do 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 that it needs. Not a big carb load meal, you know, like a huge dinner and going out to eat because you're starving. Then something that's really important for you to notice throughout the year too as well. And even in these two weeks, let's say you're transitioning. I'm going to keep going back to that. It's not all about what you eat, but how it makes you feel and how it makes you feel mentally too as well.

23:55That's the awareness that teaches your body to respect itself. So it's intuition. It's not guesswork here. And then like make sure you set some non-negotiables in each meal. Like 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, you know, just keeping the same structure, like keeping like the years of me tracking and logging my meals. There's a lot of those same meals that I eat on a daily basis today.

24:27But maybe two of my meals are very loose. I know it works. So it's like it also like I always go back to one, I don't like to cook. Um, two, I don't like to think about things. And if I'm my day is busy, the last thing I want to think about is like, what am I going to eat today? What am I going to have for snack? Um, so I, I use a lot of the same meals I've had over the course of, you know, the yogurt, fruit, honey, oatmeal, egg whites, egg whites, uh, and a bagel and cream cheese in the morning.

24:57And then usually lunch and dinner are kind of like, okay, let me just maybe have some sushi from Whole Foods. Or let me have a chicken scallopini mashed potatoes from Whole Foods. Like it's very, it's just very loose. Like I'm not, and there's not much control. There is control, but it's structure control. I should say that. And then what I can say for you guys is like review and reflect weekly on what worked for you. What felt, felt off. Did you eat on point or did you eat like, did you eat true to your hunger?

25:28Did you eat to emotion? And really these, that type of like feedback point is going to be really important for you guys to, to, 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, like you are going to mess up and it's okay. You just got to be honest with yourself in that mood, in that point where you do mess up and be like, 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 built this type of foundation, okay.

26:00Like you've done a year of doing everything that I just mentioned, swap out one structured meal weekly. Like let that meal, let your body follow hunger cues, not your macros and see how your body reacts. And then it just is needed. Stay flexible. Like 80, like I'm still 80% of the time I follow my, I'm of the controlled structure, but 20% of the time it's like practice your food freedom. Practice like trusting yourself with eating a meal and either going overboard or not going overboard.

26:35Cause you're going to learn from that, but know that total like chaos in a meal, like eating gluttony and eating until you're like overly stuffed and full is, is what intuitive eating is not. You need to build that food friendship and that food relationship. Notice how foods make you feel. Like if you know that you ate, I used to joke around the time, like on holidays, I'm like, 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, where you work on building a healthy relationship.

27:06If you notice how a meal makes you feel afterwards, physically and emotionally, you're tired, you're run down, you're overly stuffed, you're overly bloated, then put that like in your, in your mind, like archive that in your personal, like intuition reference, like in your brain for reference moving forward. And then sometimes what I do personally is like regularly I'll recenter myself. So maybe every month or maybe for you, it's like you go two weeks of testing this and then you do one week of tracking.

27:38I'll typically do like a month to month to two months and then go back to regularly like recentering it, like dropping back into structure, dropping back into tracking for a little bit. And just letting myself remember like what my body feels like with being in this type of state of mind and in this type of controlled structure, right? And it's, again, all of it is to help you trust yourself a little bit more. I think these are like really important things to take away, you guys.

28:08Like you're building the foundation, putting those things into work, knowing like everything I said in terms of learning your macros, pinpointing hunger types, knowing how food makes you feel, setting down negotiables, and then reflecting on a weekly basis to provide you feedback. And then when you start actually going into like true intuitively eating, swap out a structured meal weekly, check in with yourself. Like how am I hungry? Is this a kind of food my body wants? That awareness centered like type of question prompt will lead you to choices that feel nourishing.

28:44Stay flexible, not like completely loose. Like 80% of the time, follow your structure. 20% of the time, follow practice like food freedom. Have a food relationship. Notice how foods make you feel emotionally and physically. And then re-center, right? Re-center. Allow yourself like 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. All of these are just tactics for you to deploy on as you navigate into intuitive leading.

29:14But like I said, you got to put in the work. My foundational structure of what I share with you and how I built that over the 10 years does it need to be 10 years for you? No, because there's a lot of learning in there that I physically used me as a learning mechanism to understand the things. Can you do this faster? Yes, absolutely. You don't. But I would say that you give yourself the allotted amount of time to like, think about it. You've maybe been dieting for 10 years and you've been all over the place.

29:46You've been on a hamster wheel, left, right and center. You think that you can give yourself the grace to maybe take five years to learn this the right way? Yeah. And I've seen thousands of warrior babes 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 that type of understanding. Why you want to intuitively eat and why you need to do it right is because you get food

30:16freedom. You then 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. You most importantly end diet cycles because you know how to respond, not react. And then you stick with it for life because it's built on structure and flexibility. This is how I live my life. Like there's no guilt. There's no counting really anymore other than me re re re centering.

30:51Like I said, like maybe for a week, but I'm just like 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 right now in this episode is what work you actually need to be putting in. But please not be confused as to thinking that the people that are on social media saying they intuitively eat, maybe they did do the work. And those people that 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.

31:24You can't just trust your hunger. You can't just like, if you never, without building the foundation of tracking your macros with understanding nutrition, because in that case, it does just become absolutely chaos. You can't just like 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 as it, as I was even just saying it out loud, like it really makes me appreciate the work that I put in because now I truly do have the foundation of loosely being able to eat whatever I want in a controlled, structured

31:59and flexible way. Okay? If this resonates with you guys, screenshot it, whatever insight it was that you took away, tag me on Instagram at Nagistat at The WarriorBabe Show. I want to celebrate what you guys, the light bulbs that went off in your brain and how you're going to be able to implement this episode into your own life moving forward. Share it with a friend who's tired of like, you know, either tracking forever because they feel like they have to, or if any of your friends are like fly by the feeling type of person,

32:30or even if they're persons like I'm eating healthy, but are they eating enough? Like I want you all to build the intuitively eating that lasts forever. And I want to do it together with you guys. All right. So until next time, you guys, I love you guys. Learn the language of your body, most importantly, 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 that you needed, I'd love for you to pay it forward.

33:01Drop 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 to 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. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

33:32Thank you. Thank you.

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.