You may well find, if you start the practice of listening to your body, that even though you are able to hear your body, and wish to honour it, you aren’t necessarily always responding to it in the way that you’d like to.
There is a difference between the needs of the mind and the needs of the body. It’s crucial for our health that we learn to notice this difference.
“The needs of the mind are not the needs of the body. If the need for food is in the mind, if the need for sex is in the mind, you cannot satisfy the need.” – Don Miguel Ruiz
If the need for food is in the mind, there’s no way you can satisfy that need with food. Similarly, if the need for sex is in the mind, there’s no way you can satisfy that need with sex. The same goes for drink, and even exercise, and any other confusion of mental needs and bodily needs. If you think about it, it becomes obvious. So we have to sort our needs into two ‘piles’: These are the needs of the mind, and these are the needs of the body.
An upside of this is realising that we can achieve effective weight management without having to deny ourselves anything we like, and without having to force our body to do any exercise it doesn’t want to.