
Intuitive Eating vs. Calorie Counting - Which is Best for Brain Health?
Discover the difference between intuitive eating and calorie counting, as well as which option is best for your brain health.
Intuitive eating and calorie counting are two approaches to healthy eating. Intuitive eating — made popular by the book, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works — focuses on 10 principles of intuitive eating, such as honoring hunger, respecting when you feel full, rejecting the diet mentality, and making peace with food. Calorie counting, on the other hand, involves counting the total calories you consume every day to ensure you stick to estimated requirements for your body.
While both options have the potential to help you lose weight, which one really offers the best option for brain health?
Counting calories focuses mainly on weight loss, and there’s definitely a lot more to being healthy than just the number on a scale. Intuitive eating offers a number of benefits, including:
- Helping you learn to cultivate trust in your body, listening to hunger cues and awareness of fullness.
- Rejecting restriction, deprivation and the “diet mindset.”
- Confronts stress eating, helping individuals find ways to nurture, resolve issues, comfort, and distract without turning to food.
- Respecting the natural shape, size and power of your body.
Studies even find that intuitive eating offers great psychological flexibility and emotional functioning, along with better mental health. Many factors are involved in losing weight and keeping it off, and there’s a whole lot more to your health than just your weight. There’s also a lot more to the food you eat than just the number of calories being consume — in both quality of life and nutrition. Listening to your body and eating more whole foods that offer brain benefits and fewer processed foods that can harm your brain offers the best way to eat for physical health and your brain health.
Don’t let your health be all about the number on a scale or the number of calories you consume. Instead, consider intuitive eating and enjoy better physical and brain health. And add your Prevagen supplement to the mix daily for an extra memory boost.