What is Intuitive Eating?
Intuitive eating has gained a lot of popularity over the last few years, in part due to the momentum of the anti-diet and body peace movement on social media. While it’s so exciting to see the curiosity surrounding an alternative to dieting and the interest in rejecting diet culture and the patriarchal, Eurocentric, and fatphobic beauty ideals our society has adopted, I also think it’s important to talk about what intuitive eating actually is. It’s hard to get a sense of an entire mindset framework based on 10 second video clips and info-graphs online. This can create a lot of confusion around intuitive eating, false expectations of what it can do for you, and toxic positivity around the process.
Intuitive eating rejects diet culture and food morality — the idea that food is either good or bad, with no nuance to account for personal experiences and cultural needs. But it’s so much more than “just eat the donut”. And I’m afraid that it’s been oversimplified on social media and in news articles to the point where it feels like just another diet, but one that you can eat donuts on.
Intuitive eating isn’t a diet, it’s an ongoing practice. It’s an evidence-based framework for eating that promotes a positive relationship with food and body image. Developed by two dietitians, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, the principles of IE help us reframe our views and beliefs about health, eating, food, and our bodies. They help us reconnect with our internal wisdom, tune into our body’s cues like hunger and fullness, and respond to our body’s needs in constructive ways. We build a trusting, nurturing, and respectful relationship with our bodies, and our bodies respond by trusting us back.
But IE is not just listening to our bodies, eating when hungry, and stopping when full. It’s also integrating what we know from our lived experience in our body (how individual foods feel in our body, which foods provide us with the most energy, our preferences) with external wisdom — what we know to be true about health and wellness and our values — to achieve what Tribole and Resch call authentic health. We pair what we know is true about our body with what we know is true about most bodies, instead of just relying on one or the other to guide our eating decisions. A great example of this integration is when our hunger cues may go “offline” due to stress. We know our internal experience is telling us we aren’t hungry, but we also know from external knowledge that our body needs consistent and adequate nutrition to function. We decide that we still need to feed ourselves every few hours, even if we don’t feel physically hungry, because that is what we know our body needs even when it can’t tell us.
The majority of people rely only on external sources for information on how we should take care of ourselves, and lose the ability to connect with their internal experiences. We’ve been taught to mistrust our body, to ignore and override our hunger, and to micromanage every meal and movement to optimize our body’s function. IE encourages to unlearn these harmful behaviors and beliefs and to relearn what is true about bodies and health, based on science. And when we consider those truths and our lived experience when making food, movement, and self-care choices, our quality of life and health improves. Research shows that intuitive eating is associated with increased self-esteem, satisfaction with life, and positive coping mechanisms, and a reduction in overeating episodes, and incidence of disordered eating.
Tribole and Resch outlined 10 tenets for intuitive eating that help us make peace with our bodies and food, and truly allow our bodies to thrive the way they were meant to.
The 10 Tenets of Intuitive Eating
Reject the diet mentality. Think about what you’ve gained from spending your whole life focusing on food and eating as ways to manipulate your body size or shape. When we reject the diet mentality, we are committed to the unlearning of diet messages and reframing how we talk to and about our bodies.
2. Honor your hunger. Learn to see hunger as a human experience in the same way we view getting cold or feeling tired. Learn to embrace it, prepare for it, and commit to always giving your body the nourishment it deserves.
3. Make peace with food. Give yourself unconditional permission to eat and enjoy all foods. When we allow ourselves to eat all foods, the fixation and chaos around food choices disappears and we are less likely to overeat and engage in a dieting cycle.
4. Challenge the food police. The food police is your internal dialogue of harmful beliefs about your body and food. Let go of labeling food as good and bad and allow yourself to experience food for pleasure and sustenance.
5. Feel your fullness. Let your body guide when your mealtimes should be and permit yourself to stop eating when you feel full. If you aren’t physically full, allow yourself to eat as much as you need to feel well nourished.
6. Discover the satisfaction factor. The most underestimated part of a meal is the satisfaction factor. You can be physically full but still feel hunger when you aren’t fully satisfied with what you’ve eaten. We may try to find substitutes for our cravings but will usually end up having the food in the end anyway. When you eat what you want to begin with, you're satisfied with less food.
7. Cope with your emotions without using food. Emotional eating is a normal human experience but when eating is your only coping mechanism, you may develop an unhealthy relationship with food. Exploring additional coping skills is a way to honor your body’s needs, both physically and mentally.
8. Respect your body. Work to accept your body’s healthy size, even if that isn’t the ideal society tells you. Work towards viewing your body as a neutral vehicle, tool, or home, rather than an object. Treat your body with kindness and always work to meet its needs, even on the days when you aren’t feeling your best.
9. Exercise mindfully. Shifting your focus to what movements are realistic for your lifestyle and feel good for your body rather than which ones affect your body shape and size the most.
10. Honor your health with gentle nutrition. Cultivate a basic understanding of nutrition science that allows you to build balanced meals to nourish and satisfy. Focus on what you can add to your plate instead of what you should take away.
One of the most common misconceptions surrounding intuitive eating is that if we allow ourselves to eat anything we want, we’ll eat only less health promoting foods. A no rules, anti-diet approach to nutrition isn’t an anti-health campaign. In intuitive eating, we allow ourselves to have a wide range of experiences with different foods. We give ourselves permission to eat what, when, and how we want and we gather information about how our body responds to foods. We honor internal cues rather than the internet, a book, or a social media influencer to understand what foods and movement works best for us. When we allow ourselves to eat all foods, we eliminate the obsession over the foods we’ve deprived ourselves from. We are satisfied by less amounts of these foods because we know that we are allowed to have them again whenever we want. (Please note that our goal is not to eat less, but to learn when to stop eating when we are comfortably full and satisfied by our food). We eliminate the guilt-deprivation-binge cycle and can eat freely without the drama.
An example of how intuitive eating can benefit us:
Say you crave a burger and fries but don’t allow yourself to have it because you think it’s bad for you. It’s pretty likely that because you’ve banned this food, the craving is going to consume your thoughts. You might fight it, try to replace it with a “healthier” option but the craving will still remain. Eventually, you’re going to give into the craving. Because you’ve deprived yourself and have thought about it for a week straight, you feel obsessed and out of control. You get two burgers and overeat past the point of comfortable fullness. And since you feel that you’ve done a “bad” thing by eating these burgers, you believe you may as well have an entire day or weekend that you eat all the “bad” foods. You say, “F*ck it, my diet starts again on Monday!” and continue eating with disregard to your physical needs and experience with food.
With intuitive eating, when you crave the burger, you allow yourself to eat the burger. You enjoy the burger and because you’ve allowed yourself to eat it without guilt and you know you can get another next time you crave it, you stop when you’re full. If by chance you do overeat, you remind yourself that this is normal and you move on. You don’t shame yourself because you know you haven’t done anything wrong — your health and body will not change over one meal. You know that whenever you want a burger again, you can have it. There is no panic, chaos, or guilt. There also isn’t deprivation and then overeating. There’s no spiraling or falling “off the wagon” because there is no wagon.
Even if you ate burgers and fries for three weeks straight, your body is probably going to tell you to take a break eventually. You might feel a slight gravitation towards more vegetable dense meals or your body might tell you it’s had enough through low energy or irregular digestion. You won’t need a cleanse or a detox because you feel confident that your body has your back. You trust your body to tell you what it needs, and your body trusts you to give it adequate and consistent nourishment.
Although I truly believe IE concepts can benefit most everyone, I don’t think it’s fair to present it as something that is 100% possible for everyone. There are many common criticisms to IE that we need to address because it’s in no one’s best interest to ignore the reality — that’s toxic positivity, and it’s not helpful.
The reality is, IE is not accessible to everyone. Making peace with food often requires us to buy large amounts of our previously forbidden foods in order to normalize them in our lives. Depending on how entrenched in diet culture you are, you may have dozens of forbidden foods. This can present a barrier to IE for those with limited access to a variety of foods, those with tight grocery budgets, and the space to store the food.
IE also requires a lot of internal work and deconstructing of beliefs and values, many of while have roots to our childhood. It may require us to work through trauma, which is not possible without the help of a licensed therapist, as well as an IE counselor. This requires time and the mental bandwidth that many do not have. It’s something that you have to be ready to take on emotionally, and that’s often not depicted in social media’s take on intuitive eating.
Unresolved trauma (including past or present food insecurity), certain medications, and medical conditions can also be barriers to connecting with the body because they numb our physical experience. If we cannot hear our body’s signals, cultivating awareness of hunger, fullness, and how foods feel in our body won’t necessarily be possible.
We have to acknowledge that there are serious barriers to IE that make it challenging to implement. Still, many people can benefit from intuitive eating principles even if it’s with a more individualized “take what you need” approach.
If you’re interested in learning more about intuitive eating and how it can fit into your lifestyle to help you build a healthier relationship with your body and food, be sure to check out my e-book, sign up for my newsletter (on the homepage), or send me an email to see if we’re a good fit to work together!
