What is Intuitive Eating?
It’s Friday night, you’re getting home from work and you have successfully honored your diet for the entire week. Not only did you honor it- you crushed it! Every morning you ate the plain oatmeal with no flavor, only a precisely measured half cup of blueberries (a natural sweetener, or course- no added sugars here). You skipped the creamer in your morning coffee and convinced yourself you prefer it black anyway. You managed to overcome the immense hunger pains around 11AM, and told yourself you were excited to eat the grilled chicken salad you packed for lunch (dressing on the side). You were grateful to have a sweet snack in the afternoon to look forward to, usually an apple and non-fat plain Greek yogurt. And every night for dinner you successfully talked yourself out of ordering DoorDash and ate the salmon, brown rice, and broccoli meal as planned. You did it! You were “so good!”
But tonight is different- it’s Friday! And you have successfully stuck to your diet all week! You’re feelin’ like you deserve a little treat. You know it’s a slippery slope, but you’ve earned it. You tell yourself, “What’s one cookie gonna hurt?” You decide to celebrate and stop and get your favorite cookies on the way home. Again, YOU’VE EARNED IT. Once purchased and on your way home you start to eat them in the car, telling yourself it’s fine because no one is around so these don’t count. You get home, have a few more, and try to put them away. Out of sight, out of mind. You have your unsatisfying baked salmon dinner for the fifth time this week, but all you can think about are the cookies and how they would taste much better than this stupid salmon. After dinner you try to distract yourself with TV, but the thought of the cookies won’t disappear. You start to question yourself asking why everyone in the world can eat dinner and not think about cookies but you. You feel badly for the ones you’ve eaten because they weren’t part of your diet, but you also want more. You eventually come to the conclusion that the only way to stop thinking about the cookies in the house is to just eat them so they’re not available. “I’ve already blown it tonight, why not enjoy them?” Your thoughts of feeling proud for following your diet all week shift to feelings of shame and you tell yourself you’ll do better next week. Everything is your fault for not being able to follow a diet yet again. You don’t understand why you don’t have the same willpower to not eat cookies that are in the house like others do.
So, you say fuck it and finish off the cookies. Then order a better dinner from DoorDash because, let’s face it, that salmon wasn’t that great and you’re still hungry. DoorDash offers to double dash, you say why not and throw in a milkshake. Your food comes. You eat it. You feel horrible. You’ll do the same thing again next week.
Why Diets Don’t Work
As a registered dietitian for nearly a decade, the story above is a repeated scenario I have heard from clients time and time again. It doesn’t matter what diet it is; you can literally plug any one of them in and the story still stands. That’s because diets are restrictive. They limit you on either how much food you can eat or the type of food you can eat- and usually it’s both. And when you can’t stick to the diet plan the diet makes you, the dieter, feel like you are the problem. But you are not the problem. The diet is the problem. It was never meant to be successful because diets are essentially restriction- and restriction leads to bingeing. Which is why you always end up “blowing it.” They are not sustainable ways to eat. The diet industry is a multi-billion-dollar industry that thrives off people failing. Because every time you fail you will likely always “start again on Monday.” But one thing diets do that really makes them unsuccessful (even harmful I would say) is they teach you to not trust your body and trust the diet instead. It’s as if the diet knows best because you cannot be trusted to listen to and feed your own body. Here’s a few examples:
#1: When you power through the 11AM hunger because you’re not supposed to eat till lunch.
#2: When you don’t want to eat salmon, brown rice, and broccoli for dinner AGAIN and would rather have literally anything else.
#3: When you choose to not go out with friends because it will be too tempting to stick to your diet at a restaurant.
Our bodies are smart and they want to take care of us. Our bodies have biological cues such as hunger and fullness to tell us what we need. Diet culture teaches us that it is better to listen to the diet rather than rely on our own biological cues. A similar biological cue is the urge to go to the bathroom. Imagine if someone laid out a scheduled plan of when and how much you were to go the bathroom in a day. It would look something like this:
8AM – 400mls
12PM – 300mls
5PM—500mls
If someone told you they were following this urination schedule you would probably think they were crazy and have some questions. What if you have to go more than 400mls in the morning? What if you have to go in between the scheduled times? What if you have to go after 5PM? Diets work in the same way: What if one cup of oatmeal with blueberries for breakfast is not enough to keep you full till lunch? What if you are hungry in between meals? What if you get hungry after dinner but already met your calorie goal? They tell you to not listen to your body’s biological cues of hunger and instead listen to the restricted plan created for you and a million others by someone who is not in your body. Often causing you to feel unsatisfied and hungry, which then leads to overeating. Restriction leads to bingeing. It’s a viscous cycle.
What is Intuitive Eating?
Intuitive eating is trusting and listening to your body. It is a self-care framework about learning to listen to your hunger and fullness cues, eating what you want without diet culture rules, and honoring your health with gentle nutrition. It is a weight-inclusive, evidence-based approach- meaning it is not about losing weight and there are studies to back it up. Research shows that people who are more intuitive have better health outcomes (1). Intuitive eating follows a set of ten principles created by two dietitians, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. Here are the ten principles:
1. Reject Diet Culture
2. Honor Your Hunger
3. Make Peace with Food
4. Discover the Satisfaction Factor
5. Feel Your Fullness
6. Challenge the Food Police
7. Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness
8. Respect Your Body
9. Movement- Feel the Difference
10. Honor Your Health with Gentle Nutrition
In my experience, when people first hear about intuitive eating their initial thoughts are, “If I let myself eat whatever I want I’m just going to eat (insert whatever food, let’s say cookies) all day.” And the truth is for some time- you might! However, intuitive eating focuses on how you feel, and most people won’t feel very good after only eating one food for a period of time. After a while you won’t want constant cookies anymore. Your body will start to miss the nutrients it gets from other foods. When you take out the forbidden aspect around food a natural balance tends to follow. You can still eat cookies all day if you want, but eventually you will learn that probably doesn’t make you feel the best. Instead, getting balanced meals throughout the day with a variety of nutrients does- and you can still have cookies if you want! But now you will likely not feel inclined to eat them all at once. You will be able to feel satisfied and honor your fullness. Intuitive eating is not just eat whatever you want when you want. And it is also not engaging in rigid diet rules that often take the pleasure out of food and are impossible to follow. It includes honoring your health with gentle nutrition while still making food enjoyable.
Now, take the scenario above through the lens of an intuitive eater:
It’s Friday night, you don’t feel good or bad about following your diet this week because you weren’t on one. You just ate food and didn’t really think twice about it. You ate what you wanted for breakfast- sometimes it was oatmeal, sometimes it was eggs. One morning you were really hungry and had both. You drank your coffee exactly how you like it. When you got hungry at 11AM you ate a snack that had some fiber and protein because you knew that would hold you over till lunch. You tried to bring lunch most days because it’s just easier. One day you didn’t want the salad you packed so you went out for a sandwich instead because that sounded better at the time. You saved your salad for the next day. You planned your dinner meals for the week and were able to decide what sounded good the night of. One day was salmon with rice and veggies, another day was pasta with meatballs and salad. One night you ordered DoorDash because you forgot to take the meat out of the freezer. You had dessert every night because you like it. It was a couple of your favorite cookies. You were able to have a few then put the box away without it haunting you. And now it’s the end of the week and you will do the exact same thing you have done all week and will continue to do next week: listen to your body and not stress about food.
We are all born naturally intuitive eaters. Sometimes our environment, the media, and diet culture (among other things) can interfere with the trust we have with our bodies and our natural intuitiveness around food. Relearning intuitive eating is about rebuilding the trust you once had within your body, listening to your body’s cues without diet rules or restriction, and honoring your health with gentle nutrition.
How to Get Started with Intuitive Eating
If you’re interested in breaking the diet cycle and healing your relationship with food through intuitive eating I would recommend a few things to get started:
First, listen to this podcast. I always recommend this podcast to my clients who are interested in intuitive eating. It is a wonderful conversation between the podcast host and Evelyn Tribole, one of the authors of intuitive eating. It gives a great overview of the principles with added context from Evelyn’s experiences with her own clients.
Second, buy the book. The intuitive eating book goes over the research and discusses each principle in-depth. If you REALLY want to understand the science behind intuitive eating this is a great option (you can also listen).
Third, buy the intuitive eating workbook. This is a great tool with thought-provoking exercises to help you really understand your relationship with food and how to improve it.
And lastly, find a certified intuitive eating counselor. Unlearning diet culture and food rules you have been taught your whole life can be difficult on your own. To get started with healing your relationship with food I would look into finding a certified intuitive eating counselor, which is usually a dietitian or therapist, but can also be other health clinicians as well. There is a helpful directory to help with this here. I often find it helpful to go through the workbook with my clients and help them along the way.
Start Your Intuitive Eating Journey
As a registered dietitian and certified intuitive eating counselor I am passionate about helping people heal their relationship with food. Dieting takes people’s time, money, energy, and causes them to miss out on moments with friends and family. Have you ever skipped the dinner out with friends because it didn’t fit in your diet that week? It doesn’t have to be that way. There is a way to honor your health and still make food enjoyable. Click here learn more about working with me, registered dietitian and certified intuitive eating counselor, to put an end to the chronic dieting and get back to honoring your body and overall health with intuitive eating.
References: 1. https://www.intuitiveeating.org/studies/