What is Intuitive Eating, and is it right for you?
A Review by: Amelia Baker, RDN, CDCES, (Certified Diabetes Care and Education Specialist), CSSD
Edited by: Briana Bruinooge, RDN, CSSD (Certified Specialist in Sports Dietetics)
A recent article in the New York Times cited Intuitive Eating as the #1 book on a list of recommendations for healing your relationship with food. But what is Intuitive Eating? Is intuitive eating right for you?
What is Intuitive Eating?
Intuitive eating is a concept developed by Registered Dietitians Evelyn Tribole, M.S., R.D., and Elyse Resch, M.S., R.D., F.A.D.A.. It is a process of approaching your daily nutrition and lifestyle with self-awareness, compassion, and understanding of hunger and satiety cues. Intuitive eating is also known as a non-diet approach to managing your nutrition. Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch created the idea of intuitive eating to include many steps on how to establish a healthy relationship with food, but also break habits or mindsets that don’t ultimately serve health and wellbeing. We will review the 10 principles of intuitive eating below:
#1 Principle of Intuitive Eating: Rejecting the Diet Mentality
It’s been well established that short-term changes to diet for the goal of weight loss are unsustainable and can lead to:
· Increased binge eating
· Decreased metabolic rate
· Increased preoccupation with food
· Increased feelings of deprivation
· Increased sense of failure
· Decreased sense of willpower
The first part of the intuitive eating journey is to retrain your brain toward thinking about food as nourishment.
#2 Principle of Intuitive Eating: Honoring Your Hunger
The concept seems simple: Eat when hungry. For many people, it’s not that easy. If you’re used to life on the go, or have in the past restricted your intake, honoring hunger cues takes a major re-set. It involves practicing learning to listen to our first physical cues for hunger, before the body reaches excessive hunger, and has the potential to signal to overeat. Recognizing that the body craves nourishment at regular intervals and honoring those needs is an important step toward learning to trust our biological signals and feel comfortable honoring the feeling of hunger by eating.
#3 Principle of Intuitive Eating: Making Peace with Food
This speaks to the emotional burden related to food or triggers from specific foods that can develop over a lifetime of living in a society with diet culture. It could range from feelings of guilt about eating certain foods or eating secretively when feeling judged by others. It could also be noticing that being in the presence of certain foods can cause anxiety or negative feelings. This step involves giving yourself unconditional permission to eat. Making peace with food is a difficult step for many people because there must be an understanding that disconnecting emotions from food can allow for a more neutral and, therefore, healthy relationship with food.
#4 Principle of Intuitive Eating: Challenging the Food Police
Who are the food police? Society, family, friends, and you. The food police are the internal and external voices that tell us that certain foods should not be consumed, or if consumed, the eater should feel shame. These inner critical voices need to be silenced to restore intuitive eating. There are no good or bad foods, because inherently, food provides nourishment for the body.
#5 Principle of Intuitive Eating: Discovering Satisfaction
Perhaps the most enjoyable step of intuitive eating. Consciously creating the conditions and environment to have pleasure from food. If dieting has been a big part of your life, you may have lost the ability to enjoy a meal. Discovering satisfaction is about reclaiming pleasure from eating. This radical act of savoring food and experiencing eating in a positive way can result in the person practicing it feeling fullness or contentment earlier than previously. Enjoying food can prevent mindlessly overeating or overeating from not feeling content with the taste of our food.
#6 Principle of Intuitive Eating: Discovering Fullness
Similar to the principle of honoring hunger, discovering fullness is about connecting with our body to understand when it is appropriate to stop eating. Intentionally eating and pausing to gauge how the body feels in terms of satiation help to re-establish how ‘full’ feels to a person. Discovering fullness is about learning to trust our body’s feelings to guide us when a meal is done.
#7 Principle of Intuitive Eating: Coping with Your Emotions Without Using Food
We all experience the gamut of emotions in life. Negative emotions like anxiety, loneliness, boredom, and anger inevitably affect everyone. Becoming an intuitive eater means recognizing moments when one uses food as a mechanism to manage difficult moments. It can look like overeating to dull strong feelings or restricting food as a response to rejection. It’s important to be gentle with yourself, as it is natural to feel comfort from food, but this is a different interaction than using food as a distraction, sedation, or punishment.
#8 Principle of Intuitive Eating: Respecting Your Body
The authors define this as ‘accepting the blueprint of your genetics’ and advise in this principle to first respect your body by accepting basic premises:
· My body deserves to be fed.
· My body deserves to be treated with dignity.
· My body deserves to be dressed comfortably and in the manner I am accustomed to.
· My body deserves to be touched affectionately and with respect.
· My body deserves to move comfortably.
#9 Principle of Intuitive Eating: Feeling the Difference of Movement
Shift the focus off of exercise to burn calories or to look a certain way. Focus on other motivators for movement such as stress relief, enhanced energy, and improved sleep.
#10 Principle of Intuitive Eating: Honoring your Health with Gentle Nutrition
Choose foods that make you feel good. This can include a balance of foods generally deemed as ‘whole foods’ and those deemed as processed or ultra-processed foods. Consistency in your eating habits over time is key, rather than striving for perfection in every meal. Focus on progress rather than absolute adherence to a strict diet.
Reading this book will provide you with a comprehensive guide to understanding and embracing intuitive eating, free from guilt, shame, or fear. By rejecting the diet mentality and reframing food as nourishment, readers can begin to honor their hunger cues, make peace with food, and challenge internal and external food policing. Through discovering satisfaction and fullness, individuals can reclaim pleasure from eating and learn to trust their body's signals for when to eat and when to stop. Coping with emotions without using food as the only coping mechanism and respecting one's body are essential components of intuitive eating outlined in the book. Finally, the book emphasizes the importance of healthy movement and honoring health with gentle nutrition, ultimately empowering readers to develop a positive and healthy relationship with food and their bodies.
References:
“10 Principles of Intuitive Eating.” Intuitive Eating, 19 Dec. 2019, www.intuitiveeating.org/10-principles-of-intuitive-eating/.
Todd, Carolyn. “These Books Will Help Heal Your Relationship with Food.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 3 Jan. 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/01/03/well/eat/food-nutrition-intuitive-eating-books.html.
Tribole, Evelyn, and Elyse Resch. Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach. St. Martin’s Essentials, 2020.
