What is Intuitive Eating?
Intuitive Eating is both a philosophy about food and an approach to eating that helps to foster a healthy, happy, and balanced relationship with food. In a nut shell, it encourages you to tune into your body’s natural cues. Instead of relying on external rules, diets, and calorie limits, it emphasizes self-awareness, listening to hunger and fullness, and trusting your body to guide your eating choices. In this way, it’s a more compassionate, gentle, and sustainable approach to nutrition and health overall. Also in this way, it’s a stark contrast from traditional dieting because it helps make peace with what you eat instead of instilling fear, guilt, and stress around food with rigid rules and restrictions. Apart from food, Intuitive Eating also invites us to rekindle our relationship with our bodies and our physical and mental well-being. We learn to trust our instincts and the messages our body sends us instead of second guessing everything to the point that we feel totally detached from ourselves. If you’ve ever been on a diet, you know how this feels.
Intuitive Eating was created by two dietitians and is defined a compassionate, self-care eating framework that treats all bodies with dignity and respect. It combines our instincts, emotions, and rational thoughts about food (and exercise!) and how we interact with it. At this point, a lot of people get the sense that Intuitive Eating doesn’t really support one’s health, because how could it without any rules to follow?! But this couldn’t be further from the truth! Intuitive Eating has been studied extensively, even for chronic disease management (like diabetes!), and it has over 140 studies showing benefits like:
Body appreciation
Life satisfaction
Less binge & emotional eating
Improved blood sugar levels
Improved blood pressure
Improved cholesterol
More motivation to exercise
Improved positive affect
Increased dietary variety
Improved self-esteem
More pleasure in eating
No correlation with junk food intake
Positive emotional functioning
So it truly is something that has beneficial outcomes on your physical and mental well-being, all without any sort of dieting or excessive exercise.
The backbone of Intuitive Eating are its ten principles, or parts:
Reject the Diet Mentality
Honor Your Hunger
Make Peace with Food
Challenge the Food Police
Discover the Satisfaction Factor
Feel Your Fullness
Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness
Respect Your Body
Movement - Feel the Difference
Honor Your Health with Gentle Nutrition
I have another post that goes over each principle in detail - this post is just to give you an overview of what Intuitive Eating is.
There’s no right or wrong way to work through each of these steps, and there isn’t a timeframe either. Someone may find Intuitive Eating after they’ve learned about the harmful nature of diet culture but haven’t yet learned how to tap into their hunger and fullness cues yet. Someone else may start with learning to respect their body and decouple their weight from their health, but they still have lingering beliefs about certain foods or feel guilty after enjoying one of their favorite foods. Or perhaps they’re struggling with binge eating. Either way, think of these principles as ten ways to have a healthier, happier, and more balanced relationship with food rather than a set of steps or a roadmap that must be followed.
So, what’s the goal of these principles? The goal of these principles is to:
Free you from the restrictive dieting cycle so that you can listen to the signals your body sends (like hunger and fullness), learn to trust your body and those signals, and ultimately nourish yourself in a way that feels physically and mentally good.
Let’s dive into each of those components to learn a little bit more.
Intuitive Eating frees you from the restrictive dieting cycle.
We all know the cycle…
The one that starts with dieting, rules, and restrictions. Maybe you’re trying to lose weight, maybe you’re trying to clean up your diet. Either way, at some point, those rules leave you feeling so deprived that you just “give in” at some point. You’re left feeling totally out of control, and you don’t trust yourself around food at all so you start another diet to get yourself “back on track.” And the cycle continues…
It is exhausting.
Does this sound familiar?
This is where Intuitive Eating can help because it’s designed to liberate you from that exhausting cycle between deprivation to loss of control to deprivation again. When we constantly chase after weight loss diets or rigid meal plans, we lose touch with our body’s innate wisdom. In other words, we stop trusting our own bodies and the signals they send us. Intuitive Eating encourages us to step off this rollercoaster and embrace a more compassionate approach to food and our bodies. By rejecting the diet mentality, we can focus on nourishing our bodies without guilt or deprivation. Intuitive Eating helps you to learn to trust your hunger cues, honor your cravings, and learn how to nourish your body in a way that feels physically and mentally good AND supports your metabolism.
Carry this mantra with you: Our bodies are not problems to be fixed but rather beings deserving of care and respect.
Intuitive Eating improves the connection with your body.
“Are you really hungry again? You just ate!”
“I’m always hungry for more food after dinner no matter how full I am.”
“Is that actual hunger, or am I just having a craving?”
“Why do I always clean my plate, even when I’m already full?“
In a world bombarded with external messages about what we should eat, it can feel impossible to know what’s actually right for our bodies… and it’s really easy to lose sight of our internal compass. Intuitive Eating helps get you back to you by inviting us to cultivate body awareness and connection. In other words, it helps you learn to actually listen to your body - the gentle rumble of hunger, the subtle signs of fullness, and the specific foods that truly satisfy us - instead a set of food rules and calorie limits.
By tuning in, we build a bridge of trust between mind and body. With Intuitive Eating, you learn and develop self-compassion and acceptance, fostering a positive (or at least neutral!) relationship with food and body image. Beginning to see our bodies as allies, not adversaries, and recognizing that they hold more innate wisdom than any diet plan, is one of the most beautiful outcomes of Intuitive Eating.
Intuitive Eating removes disrupters to your self-attunement.
“You shouldn’t eat gluten, it’s inflammatory. ”
“Eating carbs is going to make you fat.”
“I don’t let myself have any refined sugar.”
“I ate so bad yesterday, I need to eat really clean today to make up for it.”
We all know this voice: the food police. They’re everywhere - judging our choices, dictating portion sizes, and holding us to unrealistic standards. They get in our head after scrolling social media, seeing something diet-y on TV, talking with friends, or after hearing some unsolicited thoughts about your body. The food police are a type of external influence that interferes with our ability to do things like choose food to eat, clothes to wear, and exercise that feels good to us vs. what someone or something else thinks we should do.
Intuitive Eating helps you identify these disrupters and negative voices, challenge their authority, and reject the guilt & shame they cause. The goal of this is to start rejecting long-held food & exercise rules and instead make peace with food and your body. You learn how to align principles of nutrition with your physical, mental, and emotional health. In other words, you learn to eat in a way that honors your health without letting it rule your life. You learn how to move your body in a way that’s joyful and health-promoting rather than punishment. And you learn to talk to yourself in ways that show kindness and respect instead of self-hate and punishment.
As an eating disorder dietitian, who do you think Intuitive Eating can help?
The use of Intuitive Eating in eating disorder recovery is complicated and I won’t go over all of it here. Of course, Intuitive Eating has a time and place in eating disorder recovery, and it’s almost never at the start of someone’s treatment. However, it can be a helpful tool for some people when they are well into their eating disorder recovery maintenance phase (and who are ready to turn inward, with the support of their therapist, and medical team including dietitian).
Outside of this, Intuitive Eating can be really helpful for those who:
Have diet cycled/weight cycled for years
Want to learn to eat without a diet or food rules
Have disordered eating patterns, which might include:
Restricting certain foods or food overall
Binge eating
Engaging in compensatory exercise (such as trying to “work off” what you ate last night)
Feeling guilty or shameful after eating certain foods
Feeling out of control around certain foods
Analyzing or stressing about every little thing they eat
Judging your self-worth by what you ate or didn’t eat
Finding it difficult to stop eating when you are comfortably full instead of physically uncomfortable
Having a “clean plate club” mindset
Fearing certain foods (or feeling like you can’t have certain foods in the house)
Thinking about or obsessing about food all the time
Attach their self-worth to their weight
Have a difficult time decoupling the concept of health from weight
Have a chronic disease (like diabetes) and want to learn how to manage it without a restrictive diet
Wants to learn how to eat in a way that supports their metabolism instead of working against it
As you can see, I really feel like everyone can benefit from becoming more of an intuitive eater. In fact, as a Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor, I incorporate it into all of my nutrition therapy (especially the concept of gentle nutrition).
If any of this resonated with you…
Then it's time to try something new with your relationship with food.Want to chat more and see if we’re a good fit to work together?
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