“What in the Intuitive Fuck?” On Intuitive Eating, and how Western Ambition Poisons Intuition

This is the best example I can give, outright, on how intuitive eating works.

I love bananas. There is rarely a time when I don’t love a banana. However, on December 27th or some shit like that (right after Christmas), I went to eat a banana and it just wasn’t good. It tasted awful to me.

The banana wasn’t rotten or overripe. It wasn’t a bad banana in the bunch. Simply, my body just didn’t want a banana— probably due to the 25 or 30 Christmas cookies I ate the day before. Sugar and carbs, something my runner body usually craves during intense training, were not needed or desired at that point. Instead, it wanted some other shit… probably vegetables and eggs.

This is how intuitive eating works. Your body tells you what it wants and what it doesn’t.

However, a lot of people who struggle with weight, diet culture, and eating disorders cannot manage to understand intuitive eating. This is because they often do not center themselves in the body to receive the information. Rather, they view their bodies more like science experiments, something to be tackled from the outside.

We are taught in Western society that there is a rigor and a checklist for just about everything. It’s our advancement model which hardly serves us. It also takes a direct SLAP at intuition, which doesn’t follow a checklist or rule book.

I was listening to Ram Dass’s series of lectures on the Bhagavad Gita this weekend and he quoted the line “Ambition does to intuition what a weevil does in a granary.”

How does that look?

I had a call with someone this week, who was feeling down on themselves because all they did for a week was minimal work, and spent the rest of the time playing video games.

This is one of the most ambitious people that I know, and they came to me wondering why their life was “such a mess.”

It wasn’t until we were talking a while that they told me just how much of an aggressively physical, emotional, and professional roller coaster the last two months had been. This person simply needed a break.

Their intuition said, “play video games for a week.” WESTERN AMBITION said “this is wrong. You should be exercising. You should be grinding. You should be x, y, z.”

But intuition said, “you need a break.”

I told them their work was to release the judgment about following their intuition. It rarely lies.

People will often sacrifice listening to intuition to follow a process of ambition, thinking that the thing to do is a checklist of activities that are labeled as “good” or “bad,” but the truth is, we need more sleep at times than others. Sometimes we need to grind, and sometimes we need to pause. Sometimes we need to meditate, and other times we need to distract ourselves. Your intuition knows the way.

People’s lack of being able to follow intuition is contributing to the Burnout epidemic.

What would your life look like if you just listened?

The first chunk of this episode is all about intuitive eating and then moves to broader intuition. Like most things, starting small with things like your body is a gateway to understanding broader intuition.

For those of you looking to work with me, I do a highly discounted first six weeks for new clients. I understand coaching is a large emotional and financial commitment and this gives us an opportunity to see if we’re a good fit for one another.

You can use this link to schedule your first call. Don’t feel weird if you’ve never met me. I was a bartender for a lot of years. It’s not gonna be awkward AF.