A beginners guide to Intuitive Eating: a non-diet, weight inclusive, self-care eating framework that honors both physical and mental health, so you can make peace with food and your body.
What is Intuitive Eating?
We live in a weight obsessed world where the pursuit of the ideal body, perfect diet or perfect eating is the norm. The culture of diets is failing us and the pursuit of intentional weight loss is a failed paradigm. We’ve been told for so long that diets and intentional weight loss efforts are healthy, but the truth is they actually create problems. Studies show the following:
- weight stigma
- weight cycling
- anxiety and stress around weight
- body and food preoccupation
- body dissatisfaction
- lowered self-esteem
- depression
- disordered eating
- eating disorders
These things do not lead to health!
Intuitive eating is a framework with a set of tools and skills that takes into consideration physical health as well as your mental health and was created by two dietitians, Evelyn Tibole and Elyse Resch in 1995. It is a mind-body health approach that utilizes your body’s innate intuition, instinct, emotions, and rational thought where you trust your own body’s natural signals. It is “a weight-neutral, evidence-based model with a validated assessment scale and over 100 studies to date.”
Intuitive eating is based on 10 core principles. These principles provide a foundation on how to become attune to your own body’s physical sensations, such as hunger, fullness and satisfaction to meet your biological and psychological needs, while learning to trust your body’s inner wisdom. It’s about listening to your internal guide when making food and exercise choices instead of following external rules of what, when and how much you “should” be eating and doing dictated by diet culture, societal trends, or your own diet mentality. It’s through these 10 principles that you learn how to transition to a life where you let go of the false sense of control so you can honor your health with self-compassion and you can begin a life where you nourish your body, mind & soul.
The 10 Core Principles of Intuitive Eating:
1. Reject Diet Mentality
This first and very crucial step towards to finding food and body freedom is letting go of dieting and diet thoughts. Recognize how diet culture has played a role in your life and reflect on your own history of pursuing weight loss – Where has focusing on weight loss gotten me at this point? Has it given me the results I want long-term? Have I found happiness after following diets? Has it changed how I feel about how my body looks? Am I eating foods I enjoy without guilt or shame? What has dieting done to my weight long-term? How has it impacted my relationships? How has it affected my mind and my mood? Once you’ve identified diet mentality beliefs and values, you can begin to dismantle them.
Think of all the diets or food rules you’ve tried. Were they short lived? If it failed, it’s not because you failed. It’s because the diet failed. They don’t work! We’ve known for some time now that diets don’t work. Maybe you’ve heard the statistic 95% to 97% of diets fail. And studies show diets are associated with an increased risk of gaining weight over time, slowing of the metabolism, increased cravings, binge eating, and weight cycling which is associated with higher mortality risk.
So why the hell do we diet?!
Clearly the weight loss industry is very good at what they do with the competitive market peaking at $72.7 BILLION per YEAR! The diet industry convinces us that we have a problem and that we have something that needs improved or fixed. They have also made us believe they are the ones that hold all the answers to a solution for the problem -the one they convinced us we have! They created the problem! Very NOT cool (in my opinion).
Recognizing that dieting is the problem will help you break through the cultural myth that diets work. Realize they only set us up for failure. Toss any diet books and magazines that claim they have the answer for quick weight loss and anything else that you associate with trying to lose weight, as well as anything that allows any kind of lingering hope that there’s a dieting solution. Unfollow social media accounts that offer quick, easy and permanent weight loss solutions, not to mention the ones that make you feel like you’re not good enough or bad about yourself. When you hold onto any diet mentality thoughts or any glimmer of hope that there might be a better diet out there, it holds you back from being able to find a life free of diets, rules and restrictions and hinders you from being free to discover intuitive eating.
2. Honor Your Hunger
Our bodies need energy. It’s important to understand our bodies need energy and it’s important to give our bodies the calories it needs. If you go too long without energy or suppress primal hunger, you set yourself up for feelings of deprivation, low energy, urges to overeat and binge eat. Think about it. When was the last time you suppressed your hunger or went to long without eating and became overly hungry? Did your body even care what you were eating at that point? It’s at that point the body just wants energy and it wants it fast and any intention of conscious eating goes out the window. Our bodies are designed to be able to tell us when we are hungry and need fuel. When you learn to recognize biological signals of hunger and you honor those signals by adequately nourishing your body, you begin to build trust between you, your body and food so you no longer feel out of control around food.
3. Make Peace with Food
While factually food does vary in nutrient density, restricting yourself from certain foods, labeling them “good” or “bad” or having rules around certain foods, you inevitably increase a drive, uncontrollable cravings or pre-occupation with those forbidden foods. Telling yourself “I can’t” or “I shouldn’t” eat certain foods can lead to a tug of war between your belly and your brain, increasing the likelihood for bingeing or overeating when you finally give into the “bad” food. Or you may be tempted to eat more of the food because you tell yourself this is the last time I’m going to eat this food, so I’d better stock up now before I can’t anymore. And when you give into eating those foods, it can lead to feelings of being out of control, guilt, shame or failure. When you shift your brain to where all food remains neutral, you allow for the same emotional response from those foods, whether it be a bowl of chia seed oatmeal or a bowl of ice cream. When you make peace with food, give yourself unlimited permission to eat the foods you want, know that you will always be allowed to eat those foods whenever and you let go of the all or nothing, good vs. bad mentality you can learn to eat foods you enjoy in the amounts that satisfy you. And once your body trusts it will no longer be deprived, all foods become part of a balanced way of eating where you can eat from a place of self-care rather than self-control for long term sustainable wellness free of stress, guilt, and shame.
4. Challenge the Food Police
“The food police monitor the unreasonable rules that dieting has created.” Today’s society is saturated with unreasonable messaging about what we should eat, what we shouldn’t eat, what our bodies are supposed to look like, what the best exercise is to burn the most belly fat, what diet is better than the rest, etc, etc, etc. When you hold onto these guilt-ridden messages and rules, your inner policing or psyche takes control, scrutinizes and places judgement on every choice you make causing feelings of guilt while holding you back from becoming in tune with your own body. When you can shut down external messaging and become self-aware to any internal policing and buried thoughts that have been planted over time, you can disarm the food police while allowing you to create a different internal voice that supports finding a healthy relationship with food.
5. Feel Your Fullness
Dieting often leads to a “clean plate” mentality or it encourages the thought “eat while you can” when meals are small portioned or timed. Instead of recognizing feelings of satiety, you eat all the food allowed and maybe eating eventually turns into an unconscious behavior. Regardless of how someone might have come to join the “clean plate” club or even if you don’t clean your plate, it’s possible someone might have difficulty recognizing comfortable satiety without feeling overly full. Recognize what comfortable fullness feels like by turning off autopilot and becoming a conscious, mindful eater without distractions. Check in with yourself and assess your body’s sensations and signals for fullness. Assessing your body’s feelings of fullness will help you identify your body’s eating end point. And when you’re done eating, knowing you can always go back to it when you are hungry again. The most important part of being able to stop eating when you are full is allowing yourself unconditional permission to eat.
6. Discover the Satisfaction Factor
We’ve gotten so caught up in the pursuit of perfect health, seeking wellness and weight reduction that food has become the enemy and eating is a war between self-discipline and temptation and a very important role of eating has taken a back seat. Pleasure and enjoyment from eating is just as important and nourishing as eating for nutrition and fuel. Have you ever eaten a salad when you wanted a burger? Or have you ever felt like you wanted a piece of cake and tried to suppress the desire by eating an apple, a protein bar, then trail mix, but still yearned for cake? If you are left feeling unsatisfied you are likely to continue to try to fill the void regardless of your satiety level. When you eat foods you enjoy and provide yourself pleasure from eating meals without judgement and guilt, you are able to find feelings of content and satisfaction. By experiencing food in this way, you will start to find it takes less food to reach the point of satisfaction.
7. Honor Your Feelings without Using Food
Feelings of boredom, anxiety, stress, anger, loneliness are all part of being human. Eating or using food as a coping mechanism may numb, distract, provide comfort, make you feel good in the moment, however, this tactic for working through feelings is ineffective, short-lived and does not fix the issue that’s happening and may only leave you feeling worse. Learning how to deal with feelings and emotions outside of eating by understanding how to separate emotional needs from physical needs and finding alternate methods to address emotions.
8. Respect Your Body
We all come with our own unique set of genes that don’t allow for a one-size-fits all body type. We are all kinds of different shapes and sizes, so trying to reach the “ideal” body shape that we’ve been subjected to over and over and over again in media can lead to unhealthy behaviors and cruel and criticizing treatment to our bodies. Recognize how unrealistic beauty standards are and banish the lie that there is a perfect body. When you say goodbye to the goal of achieving the dream body, you allow yourself the opportunity to find peace with your body. When you give your body recognition for all that is does for you and all that it is capable of instead of bashing it for what it’s not, you can begin to respect it by nurturing it in a way that feels good.
9. Exercise – Feel the Difference
“Burn off those tacos!” “What do you need to make up for today?!” “Push harder for the weekend!” “How do you want to see your body in 3 months? Don’t stop now!” “Your summer body is just around the corner!” “Keep pushing towards your goal, no matter what!’”– These are all things I’ve personally heard in gyms or fitness classes. Physical activity is often centered around weight and body appearance. Exercise for the purpose of weight loss, changing body image or burning calories is maybe a motivator initially but it usually wears off, especially if you’re exercising in ways that do not feel good or you don’t enjoy.
Instead shift the focus from burning calories and weight loss to learning how activity and movement make you feel, both physically and mentally. There’s a big difference in how exercise can feel when it comes from a place of self-control, where it can feel like a chore, punitive, exhaustive to a place of self-care, where it feels good, invigorating, energizing and therefore becomes enjoyable and sustainable.
10. Honor Your Health with Gentle Nutrition
You don’t have to eat a perfect diet to be healthy. When you allow yourself the permission to eat foods you want and foods that make you feel good, it ultimately results in more balanced food choices and eating behaviors. Nutrition and health are not sabotaged by one food or one meal. Instead, health is an ongoing process of progress, and “it’s about what you do consistently over time that matters.”
Be Kind to Yourself
This is a snippet of intuitive eating and a simple break down of each principle on how to create a healthy relationship with food, mind and body. Learning how to eat intuitively is not something that happens overnight. It is a process of learning, discovery, practice and it is something that will look different for each individual. Be patient and be kind with yourself and your journey, so you can find true peace with food and your body.