Just What is an Intuitive Lifestyle
Just before Christmas last year I came across the concept of intuitive lifestyle. Just what is it and how to live one? Well, living an intuitive lifestyle pretty much means you take away the arbitrary rules, control, and restrictions from your life, and instead listen to your intuition. that can mean throwing all those diet rules out the window. Not being so strapped down by all of the things that can control you.
After all, your body knows what to do and is able to guide you to what it needs at different times. You only need to do is learn how to listen to it.
5 Ways to Listen to Your Body
One of the biggest challenges when it comes to being more intuitive is understanding how to listen to our body. This just takes a little practice and patience, but the following tips can also be incredibly helpful.
1. Mindfulness
The first way you can start listening to your body is with mindfulness. What this does is allows you to acknowledge and appreciate how you feel in any given moment, without pressure or stress about what you think you should be experiencing.
Mindfulness takes practice just like meditation, but is much easier to get a handle on. When you are mindful, you are in the moment. This means sitting quietly and enjoying the present moment, understanding what you feel, and really listening to what your body or mind is trying to tell you.
Before a meal when are deciding what you want to eat, just sit for a few minutes in silence without distractions, go through what sounds good to you right now, and take it from there.
2. Cravings and Aversions
Both what you crave and what you no longer enjoy or find satisfaction in are equally important when it comes to intuitive eating. You are going to learn so much about yourself, what you actually like eating, and what you were eating because you thought you had to. You might find that you hate protein shakes, but love salads. Maybe you start eating a lot more fruit, but no longer want a snack before bed.
3. Contemplation
It is always a good idea to shut off the noise and just sit with your feelings for a bit. Even if you are not doing this for the purpose of mindfulness, and just to take a pause. Feel each part of your body, listen to what it wants, understand what you are craving, decide if you want some movement right now.
4. Journaling
As you go through your intuitive journey, start writing things down as they come up. Write down your hunger and fullness when eating meals, write down changes you experience, workouts you try, really anything you can think of.
Write as much or as little as you want to, but really try to make this part of your daily routine.
5. Happen Naturally
We are always so in need of control, that we forget sometimes life just happens naturally. Your body knows what to do, if you can learn to listen.
This might mean stopping a workout video 10 minutes before it’s over because you feel exhausted, or choosing a bowl of cereal over your usual eggs for breakfast because that’s what you craved when you woke up.
Daily Habits without Restrictions
Choosing to live a more intuitive life where you listen to your body and its needs instead of trying to control everything is an amazing first step to being healthy and balanced. A great way to start incorporating this into your life is by creating daily healthy habits that will improve your wellness without including any type of restriction.
Choose Your Habits and Routines Wisely
When it comes to being intuitive, you want your daily habits and routines to be about improving your health, happiness, and wellness, but not restrictions. This means you are not making any rules about your habits or creating habits that are going to change your body in some way, and are instead for a fuller, healthier life.
Do you want to drink water in the morning to hydrate your body, or because it helps you to go longer without eating breakfast? This is a subtle difference, but your motivations behind your healthy habits make all the difference.
Categorize Your New Habits
Once you have written down some healthy habits you want to implement into your life, put them into different categories.
This might be hygiene, nutrition, movement, self-care, learning, and so many more categories. What this does is not only let you see the big picture by seeing how balanced your different habits are, but you will also use this to determine which to start with.
Focus on One Category of Habits at a Time
Don’t try to change everything at once, or you will quickly get overwhelmed and give up. This is a very common mistake people make when they are trying to make changes in their life. If you have 10 new habits on your list, you should not be adding 10 new habits on the first day. An easy way to go slow is choose all the habits in one category, and implement those first.
Stop What Isn’t Working for You
What have you found isn’t quite working out when you added some new habits? Do you have old habits that are no longer serving you? This is a great time to get rid of them. This can be something you have been doing for a while but aren’t seeing benefits from, a bad habit you didn’t realize you were doing, or something you started recently but found has actually hindered your happiness, instead of improving it.
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I am very interested in living an intuitive lifestyle. It is something I am going to work on throughout this year. I will be sharing more information with you all as I learn more and as I attempt to achieve this.
DO YOU LIVE AN INTUITUVE LIFESTYLE? IF YES, HOW IS FOR YOU? IF NO, ARE YOU INTERESTED IN IT? SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS WITH US IN THE COMMENTS PLEASE.
