Do you recognize feelings of hunger and fullness? How do you respond?

If you’ve gotten into the habit of ignoring your feelings of hunger or intentionally under-eating when they come up, it’s time to tune back in.

If you’ve gone through periods of restriction, you can’t expect an instant ability to tune into your body. You’ve been denying your true, physical feelings for a while, so it will take time to recalibrate.

Here’s what happens when you get into the habit of ignoring your hunger cues:

1. You’ll have a hard time maintaining energy because you can no longer feel hunger or fullness, and it becomes harder to recognize these cues.

2. You start to crave foods without much nutritional value. It’s likely that if you’re ignoring hunger cues, you’re also paying little attention to what food you might actually need to power through your dancing.

A common practice that encourages you to ignore your hunger altogether:

Dieting.

It’s true. Most diets suggest that you ignore your hunger cues and undereat to meet your goals. I’m sure you’ve heard the myth of “calories in vs. calories out” and the principle that to lose weight, all you need to do is create a calorie deficit.

So many dancers fall into the trap of severely undereating to meet body goals. This compromises your bone health, recovery, energy, and strength.

The value of listening to your body.

Dance training and development is served by the ability to tune in closely to your body. The ability to know when to stop dancing due to injury is invaluable, and knowing when to eat more to support your dancing is equally essential.

Many dancers have a hard time with both those skills — do you?

By listening to your body, you’ll avoid worsening an injury as it’s starting. Early injury intervention can, of course, help lessen time away from dance and speed recovery time.

When you listen to your body and give it the food it needs when it needs it, you’re boosting immunity, keeping cravings at bay, and supporting strong muscles and bones.

If you’re already disconnected from your body’s cues:

Put some regular practices in place to tune back in.

Dancers often say, “it feels good when I feel hungry.” While I understand where they’re coming from (yes, I’ve been there), when you get to a place where you feel good running on empty, it’s possible you’re in disordered eating territory. Obviously, there are other factors, but if you relate to that feeling, take a closer look.

The more disconnected you get from your body’s cues, the harder it is to find balance with food and to reach your personal best body.

You’ll also be more likely to give in to cravings and fall into patterns of undereating or restricting and overeating or binge eating.

If you have the goal to reconnect to your body so you can identify your hunger and fullness cues, but you’re not there yet, start with these tenants of “Structured Eating.”

Structured Eating maintains the following guidelines: 

• Eat within the first 30-60 minutes of waking.
• Eat every 3-4 hours so that you are eating 3 meals and 1-3 snacks per day.
• Balanced meals include proteins, carbohydrates, fats, fruits, and vegetables.    
• Balanced snacks include protein, fats, and either complex carbohydrates, fruits, or vegetables. 
• Mini meals may help with blood sugar and symptom control in the late afternoon. 

Here are some additional tips to tune into your body again.

1. Make sure you keep healthy snacks handy — that way, when hunger strikes, you’ll be able to respond.
2. Stay aware of the timing of your meals and snacks, and eat every 3-4 hours. Never go more than the 5-Hour Rule.
3. When you’re hungry, EAT.
4. While you eat, pay attention to how you feel (physically, mentally, AND emotionally).
5. Stop eating BEFORE you’re “full.”
6. If you use an app to track your food intake and calories, STOP.
7. Try to move away from letting food choices be influenced by friends or family.

If you find that these tips aren’t quite getting you to where you want to be, don’t be afraid to seek support from a health coach who works with dancers in order to create a balanced relationship with food and your body. It is often necessary to get an outside perspective to make these adjustments. A holistic health coach can help you adjust your lifestyle and approach to food so you can wholly tune into your body. 

The post Why honoring your hunger cues is essential. appeared first on The Whole Dancer.

Say “yes” to dietary fat.

Protein, carbohydrates, and fat are essential macronutrients. Your body needs them (all of them) to function. Even with the popularity of higher protein and fat diets, dancers tend to be somewhat fat-phobic.

While this is purely anecdotal, my experience adding healthy fats to my diet was transformational. For a long time, I thought low fat was the way to go. At 13, I created the silly rule that I couldn’t eat anything with more than 3 grams of fat.

This was the plan I stuck to for years until finally some diets started touting the benefits of healthy fats. When I started eating healthy fat consistently, that’s when my personal best dancer body revealed itself.

The dancers I work with have seen a similar physical response to adjusting their macronutrient intake to include more healthy fats.

Evaluate your current meals.

When you think about your usual daily meal plan, assess whether there’s a focus on one macronutrient over another — specifically, if you’re avoiding fat. Some dancers get caught up in the numbers and fear that since fat has more calories per gram, it will make you fat.

It’s definitely not that simple, but we don’t have to overcomplicate things either.

Eating fat will help you feel more satisfied.

When you look at calorie equations and body goals — which, in general, dancers can ignore — the potential for increased calories from more healthy fats might be scary to you.

Rather than getting caught up in that thinking, consider this: when you eat more healthy fat, you’ll be more satisfied by your meals. When you also tune into your body and it’s hunger + fullness cues, you’ll likely end up eating less overall.

All meal plan changes should be gradual.

If you think you’re lacking in healthy fats, make small adjustments so you can really observe how your body reacts.

Here’s an example: if you eat oatmeal with banana and 1 tbsp. of nut butter for breakfast, try adding an additional tbsp. of nut butter and cutting the oats by 1/4. If you don’t measure your oatmeal, that’s fine too. Add the fat, eyeball the oats as usual, and pay close attention to your levels of satisfaction as you’re eating.

Stick to just that one change for 2 weeks. Notice how you feel as far as energy, satisfaction, and digestion. Maybe, depending on the outcome, you’ll try a similar adjustment with lunch. Again, stick to that additional shift for a couple of weeks before you evaluate.

Quality fuel is key.

All the time, dancers tell me suggestions they’ve heard about limiting certain foods. Usually, it’s dietary fat that is demonized. People are so wary of the caloric density that they ignore the quality of the fats in question.

Healthy fats include monounsaturated fats (among the healthiest) and polyunsaturated fats.

Eating lots of dietary fat from unhealthy sources like processed, packaged foods is likely to have a negative impact on your body goals. The unhealthy fats include trans fats and saturated fats. However, some saturated fat is OK — nutrition science has gone back and forth on this, likely one more reason to acknowledge that everyone’s body reacts differently to food.

When you eat more healthy whole food fat sources, especially those that also contain fiber, you’ll likely feel satiated for longer. Add plant foods for healthy fat (which all include fiber) like nuts, nut butters, hemp seeds, flax seeds, and avocados.

As far as oil, some of the healthiest oils include olive oil, avocado oil, and coconut oil (even though it is high in saturated fat). Oils could comprise their own post, but keep it simple and stick to those highest in anti-inflammatory omega-3s and avoid those with a high omega-6 content (e.g.,. corn oil, soybean oil, sunflower oil, etc.).

As there is no “one size fits all” for serving sizes, some will do better with more fat while others will do better with less. There’s also no one meal plan that works for everyone.

Become an expert on your body.

To reach your body goals healthfully and sustainably, you have to become an expert on your body. This takes time, experimentation, and often support from a Health + Nutrition Coach, Nutritionist or Dietitian.

Find the person whose approach resonates with you, and start the process of figuring out the best eating style and complimentary lifestyle for you.

The post Why Dietary Fat Won’t Make You Fat appeared first on The Whole Dancer.