What is Intuitive Eating?
How would your life change if you weren’t trying to lose weight?
Intuitive eating plays a key role in the counterculture movement against diet culture.
Our obsession with dieting, weight loss and changing our bodies has been influenced by multi-billion dollar industries that are more invested in taking our money than improving our health.
Ironically, the pursuit of weight loss actually contributes to poorer physical and mental health [1]. People are confused, now more than ever, about what to eat for optimal health. Especially since the distinction between health and weight has been drastically blurred. Hint: weight loss ≠ healthier.
Intuitive eating practices have revolutionised the dietetics and health industry. The promising evidence behind intuitive eating and the momentum of the Body Positive movement are ripping through the diet industry by storm.
Intuitive eating has helped many individuals leave behind stressful and restrictive eating habits, and preoccupation with their bodies. With their newfound food freedom, they can now spend their time, money and energy on the things that matter to them.
In this post, we’ll define intuitive eating, explore its 10 principles, and give you some tips and tricks to get you started.
What is Intuitive Eating?
Our bodies are fantastic self-regulators.
It knows when it’s running low on energy and will signal for you to feed it. Likewise, it tells you when it’s full, when it’s well-fuelled or when something has made it feel sluggish. Rather than relying on external dieting rules and restrictions that ignore your natural body signals, intuitive eating reconnects you with these cues to advise you on what it needs to be nourished and feel happy and healthy. Intuitive eating helps to builds a trusting and respectful relationship between you, your body and food.
Diet culture’s rules and restrictions steals precious moments in life like celebrations, social events and dinner with friends.
Why is Intuitive Eating Important?
Food isn’t just about nutrition. It’s also about pleasure, connection, celebration and comfort.
If we only use food to nourish our bodies, we’re missing out on the joys it brings in life.
How many times has your mind been clouded by fear and guilt in overeating at Christmas? What about the times when you’ve turned down dinner with friends because you didn’t want the temptation of tasty restaurant food ‘breaking your diet’? Or when you opted for a salad when you really felt like a burger and ended up binging on sweets later?
This diet mentality is restricting you from living your best life. It makes you obsessed with food, deprived of joy and overall less satisfied with life [2]. It also impacts your physical and mental health.
Studies have found that 95-98% of dieters regain the weight they loss within 1-5 years [1, 3]. Diet culture makes it out to be the fault of the dieter rather than the diet itself, then allures the dieter in by another flashy (but gimmicky) diet. Thus throwing the individual into a perpetual weight cycle (weight loss followed by weight gain and repeat).
The pursuit of weight loss has been associated with reduced bone mass, increased risk for osteoporosis, increased psychological stress and cortisol levels [1], increased blood pressure, increased weight, increased anxiety and depression [1, 2]. It also increases the risk of disordered eating and eating disorders [1, 2].
Most weight loss diets result in weight regain within 1-5 years. Some people go on to gain more weight than before they started the diet. Researchers call this the “Nike Swoosh” effect of weight loss.
Original photo from https://www.weightmanagementpsychology.com.au/thought-38-science-religion-and-why-diets-dont-work/
Weight cycling, aka yo-yo dieting, has many negative health implications of its own. These include higher risk of death, bone fractures, loss of muscle tissue, hypertension, chronic inflammation and some types of cancers [4]
Not to mention the impacts of weight stigma on health outcomes, but we’ll leave that for another blog post.
Intuitive eating is associated with no negative effects but plenty of positive effects [1, 2, 4].
Research shows intuitive eating can [1, 2, 4]:
Improve cholesterol levels
Increase satisfaction with life
Decrease food preoccupation
Decrease disordered and emotional eating
Improve body image
Improve self-esteem
Increased variety and healthy eating habits
Stabilise body weight
As the name suggests, intuitive eating is natural and intuitive. However, since most of us have been governed by external rules for some time, it will take conscious effort to reconnect with our bodies. For some, it will come quickly. For others, it may take a little longer.
Regardless, in the end, you will feel free and confident in making the best food choices for yourself.
Let’s have a look at the 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating.
10 Principles in Intuitive Eating
1. Reject the Diet Mentality
It’s important to disconnect with the diet mentality to make progress with intuitive eating. This means rejecting that weight loss equates to health, that you need to lose weight, counting calories, and any other external rules or restrictions you’ve learnt to try to control your body and eating.
Be sure to get clean out your social media of any toxic diet culture accounts that promote restrictive eating, weight loss or thin idealisation. This includes people you compare yourself against or make you feel bad about yourself, fitness coaches who tell you to earn your food with exercise and ‘health experts’ who tell you what you should and shouldn’t eat.
It can take time to unlearn the deeply ingrained indoctrination of diet culture so have some self-compassion if your mind wanders back throughout your progress.
2. Honour Your Hunger
Get to know your body’s hunger cues. Notice your first signs of hunger and eat or plan to eat soon. Our hunger cues are like our cues to pee. You don’t have to attend to it immediately but the longer you wait, the more urgent it gets.
If you’re super hungry and craving a burger, don’t opt for a salad because it’s lower calorie. Your body is telling you it needs more energy - respect and honour it. Likewise, don’t get a burger if you’re feeling like a salad.
If you let your body get to the point of extreme hunger or starvation, all control will be lost, and your body will fight you to overeat. Remember we want to be at peace with our bodies, not fight it.
Eating according to portion sizes, calories, rules and restrictions encourages us to ignore our body’s needs, which can be damaging to our physical and mental health.
3. Make Peace with Food
Like our bodies, we want to be on the same side as food. Give yourself unconditional permission to eat. Many people fear this, thinking it will cause them to binge on “bad” foods. In reality, restrictions lead to cravings and binging.
When you give yourself permission to eat and listen to your body, you’ll be surprised about how naturally you’re drawn to nutritious foods. Intuitive eating has been associated with improved dietary quality and variety.
4. Challenging the Food Police
Food labelling is a concept of diet culture – in reality, food are not “good” or “bad”. Sure, some foods are more nutritious than others, but other foods may bring pleasure and enjoyment. Both contribute to quality of life.
Focus on how different foods make you feel instead. After each meal, ask yourself how your mind, body and soul feel. Did it give you a boost of energy or make you feel sluggish? Are you still hungry, full and satisfied or over stuffed? Did it make your soul sing?
Food is morally neutral. We need to stop labelling foods “good” and “bad”. Instead, we should focus on how they make us feel.
5. Honour Your Fullness
Throughout your meal, check in with yourself and your fullness. Mindfully choose whether you want to eat past your fullness – sometimes you do and that’s absolutely okay!
6. Discover the Satisfaction Factor
The eating experience can be greatly satisfying. Practicing mindful eating and creating an enjoyable environment can make a huge difference. This can look like putting away your screens, eating with people, using all your senses to appreciate the food, taking smaller bites and chewing thoroughly.
7. Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness
Many people use eating as a coping mechanism for anxiety, boredom, anger, stress, amongst other emotions. This is okay as long as you understand that food is a short-term fix but it’s not going to solve your problems.
It’s important to address your emotions and the reasons behind them. It’s also okay if you need support with this, enlist the help you need. This may be a friend or a professional like a dietitian or psychologist who is versed in non-diet practices.
8. Respect your body
Diet culture’s most successful marketing trick is telling us that our bodies are a problem to be fixed and selling us a product that they claim will fix this fictitious problem. *Slow, unenthusiastic singular claps to the marketing department.*
Let me tell you. Your body is not a problem that needs to be fixed. It’s a vehicle to your dreams!
Make peace with your body. Accept it for all that it is and appreciate everything that it does for you every day without you even asking – breathing, pumping, walking, feeling, digesting, surviving. Respect your body by wearing clothes that fit and speaking kindly to it. You can respect your body even if you don’t like it.
You cannot tell someone's health by their body weight or size. Not all skinny people are healthy and not all fat people are unhealthy. Regardless, all bodies are beautiful and deserve respect, to be cared for and loved.
9. Joyful Movement
‘Exercise’ has a diet culture nuance so I prefer calling it ‘movement’. We know that movement directly contributes to improving our physical and mental health. Use movement as a way to care for and nourish yourself rather than as a punishment for eating or a way to lose weight. We’re more like to continue to engage in movement if it’s something we enjoy.
Remember that movement doesn’t always have to be going to the gym, for a run or high intensity. Other activities like walking, hiking, rock climbing and scuba diving (my favourite) count as well. Fast, slow, intense, gentle - any movement counts.
10. Honour Your Health - Gentle Nutrition
When you’re in tune with your body, you’ll find that you’re eating a healthy, balanced and varied diet naturally without needing external rules and restrictions. You can enjoy less nutritious foods without the guilt because you know that one meal or day will not make you unhealthy. Remember that we’re aiming for progress not perfection.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, that’s okay. I’m so happy and proud of you for making it this far. We all have to start somewhere.
Here are some tips and tricks to get you on your feet.
Have conscious conversations with friends, family and co-workers to put a stop to diet talk. Open up about your thoughts, feelings and journey, and find alternative topics to talk about.
Journal your progress to realise your internal vs external cues. Think about the ‘why’ you’re eating foods – are you eating a salad because it’s delicious and to nourish your body, or because it’s low calorie and you’ve been told you should eat it because its healthy. Likewise, are you eating the chocolate because it gives you pleasure or because you’ve told yourself you can’t but the rebellious teenager inside of you lingers?
Enlist the support you need. It may be helpful to have a health professional guide you in the right direction and keep you accountable. Investing in yourself now means that your future self will have more freedom and joy.
If you live with an eating disorder or chronic condition that affects your food intake (e.g. diabetes, Chron’s, UC) or you’re an athlete, working with a dietitian is highly recommended.
Babies are intuitive eaters. If they’ve had a bigger meal at lunch, they’ll have a smaller one at dinner, and vice versa. On average, their caloric intake each day varies about 10%.
When we were younger, we were natural intuitive eaters. We cried and pestered our parents to feed us when we were hungry, and we turned our head and pushed away when we were full. As we grew older, we started giving our power away to external bodies who seemed like they had the best of intentions but were actually fuelled or influenced by diet culture.
Luckily, we’ve become smarter than that now. We’re rediscovering our inner child that knows what it wants and is brave enough trust itself.
That’s the thing - the answers are already inside you. Your inner body wisdom is still there, and it will always be there. You just have to tune out from diet culture and tune into yourself.
I offer 1-on-1 coaching sessions and programs to help you transform your relationship with food, your body and soul. I promise you a non-judgemental, weight-inclusive and safe space, and an outcome that is aligned with your values and life.
Join the thousands of women and men who were previously trapped and suffering in the dieting mindset but now live free and empowered lives.
References
[1] Bacon, L., Aphramor, L. (2011). Weight Science: Evaluating the Evidence for a Paradigm Shift. Nutrition Journal, 10(9). doi:10.1186/1475-2891-10-9
[2] Tylka, T. L., Calogero, R. M., & Daníelsdóttir, S. (2015). Is intuitive eating the same as flexible dietary control? Their links to each other and well-being could provide an answer. Appetite, 95, 166–175. doi:10.1016/j.appet.2015.07.004
[3] Stunkard, A., McLaren-Hume, M. (1959). The Results of Treatment for Obesity: A Review of the Literature and Report of a Series. AMA Arch Intern Med., 103(1):79–85. doi:10.1001/archinte.1959.00270010085011
[4] Tylka, T. L., Annuziato, R. A., Burgard, D., Danielsdottir, S., Shuman, E., Davis, C. & Calogero, R. M. (2014). The Weight-Inclusive versus Weight-Normative Approach to Health: Evaluating the Evidence fro Prioritising Well-Being over Weight Loss. Journal of Obesity, 2014. doi:10.1155/2014/983495