Intuitive Eating with the Bible, Feel Your Fullness
The fifth principle of intuitive eating, Feel Your Fullness, embraces listening to your body for signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry. Learning how to stop overeating begins with getting in-tune with those signals and developing a healthy mindset that encourages you to honor them.
Once you become attuned to those signals, you can make a conscious choice to stop eating when you’re comfortably full. Reacquainting ourselves with our bodies’ fullness signals after years of dieting takes conscious effort.
Learning how to stop overeating requires that we make peace with food, practice mindfulness, make eating a time to connect with God, and respect our fullness.
How to Stop Overeating: Step 1
Make Peace with Food
Respecting fullness starts with unconditional permission to eat. If you have not worked through principle three of Intuitive eating, Make Peace with Food, you’ll want to start there.
When we truly know that we can eat what we want when we want without any rules or regulations, we are able to chose to stop eating when we’re full because we know we can eat what we desire the next time we are hungry.
How to Stop Overeating: Step 2
Be Mindful of Your Eating
In this mindful eating post, I discuss what Christian mindfulness is and give specific tips on how to develop and integrate mindfulness into our daily lives.
When we slow down to practice mindfulness, we allow for a connection with the Holy Spirit and with our bodies. In this space we will find the body signals God created us with and the confidence to respond to them appropriately.
When we pay attention to our eating experience, we are more likely to find satisfaction with our meal. Furthermore, we become much more attuned to our bodies’ fullness signals.
How to Stop Overeating: Step 3
Make Eating a Time to Connect with God
When Jesus was feeding the 4,000, he took a moment to pause and give thanks to the father for the meal before they ate.
Can you picture it? Jesus is surrounded by 4,000 hangry people who have been with him for 3 days without food. He commands them to sit down, and then he takes the time to pray.
“He took seven loaves and the fish, and He gave thanks, broke them, and kept on giving them to the disciples and the disciples gave them to the crowds”
Matthew 15:36
When we pause to express genuine gratitude towards our Father for His provision, we experience food much differently than we do if we are taking our food for granted or making an idol out of food.
How to Stop Overeating: Step 4
Respect Your Fullness
Here are some easy ways to start respecting your fullness at the dinner table.
- Start taking note of your fullness level during and after meals using the infographic below. This will help you identify when you’ve had enough.
- Reinforce your decision to stop eating by pushing your plate away, wrapping up leftovers, or getting up from the table. This step prevents eating mindlessly as you conversate or mingle.
- Practice saying “no thank you” when you are offered more food. Remember that you are not obligated to eat past fullness regardless of how special the meal is or how much someone is pressuring you to do so.
My prayer is that these four steps will bring you to a place of respecting your fullness.
Be careful not to create a rule that you MUST stop eating when you are full. The goal is to be aware of the signals your body is sending you and make conscious decisions from that feedback.
It is normal to choose to eat past fullness sometimes. We all have foods that we really enjoy, and we are allowed to make the decision to overeat at times. My hope is that we make our eating choices from a place of honoring God, our bodies, and our preferences.
Are you ready to dig into the Bible to see what it has to say about eating? Be sure to grab my Intuitive Eating Bible Studies below!
