Many of you shared positive feedback about my Molasses Cake blog. Here's another intuitive eating story... though kinda the opposite.
This story takes place before I knew about intuitive eating, back when I was tracking calories in hopes of being ever-smaller and evermore in control. I was also hyper-focused on "health" and raw spinach seemed the epitome of healthy.
Everyday I ate a raw spinach salad for lunch.
But weirdly, every afternoon, I got a stomachache! This did not compute: I was doing everything right, so why? But I ignored it (it being my body). Then one day I was out of spinach and instead used romaine lettuce. Lo and behold, I didn't get a stomachache! This was shocking. Could it be that the healthiest thing of all was hurting me? I still couldn't understand it, but I stopped eating raw spinach salads and my stomach felt much better. Back then I could only see food in black and white, good or bad, so you can see why this was confusing. What I know now with intuitive eating is much more complex and also feels much better:
Just because something is healthy for one person, doesn't mean it is healthy for another
I can pick foods based on what I want to eat, not what I think I should eat (AKA I don't ignore what my body tells me)
It's not all or nothing: turns out cooked spinach never hurts my stomach, and periodic raw spinach is totally fine too! (it was just that eating it every day made my body go nooooooo!)
(actual image of my stomach when I try to feed it daily raw spinach)
Have you had that experience? A supposedly "healthy" food item that your body rejected?