What is Intuitive Eating?

By: Sammi Haber Brondo | NYC Dietitian

 

As a registered dietitian who’s very much in the Intuitive Eating space, I often forget how new this framework is to many people. Even though IE has been around for 20+ years, it only really entered mainstream popularity over the last few years.

It started when my husband called me last week. “Can you help someone lose weight?” he asked me.

 

“No, I don’t work with weight loss,” I told him.

 

“Then what do you do?” he asked. “I work on Intuitive Eating,” I explained.

 

“What does that mean?!” he wanted to know.

 

Despite the fact that my husband didn’t understand what I do (he claims he was joking… that’s a story for another day!), this did remind me how foreign Intuitive Eating is to many.

 

And, even if you are familiar with it, it’s unfortunately a concept that gets misconstrued a lot on social media.

 

So, whether you’re new to IE or have been practicing it for some time, this basic introduction will be helpful to just about anyone.

 

What is Intuitive Eating?

 

Straight from the book, Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole, MS, RDN, CEDRD-S and Elyse Resch, MS, RDN, CEDRD-S, FAND, IE is “a personal process of honoring health by listening to the direct messages of the body in order to get your needs met.”

 

IE looks at introspective awareness – the ability to perceive sensations in the body.

 

It’s more than just “eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’re full.” It’s the concept of listening to your body’s needs and honoring them in a way that feels good to you.

 

It’s also the idea of banishing food rules and any associated guilt and shame. Food is meant to make us feel good both physically and mentally. And to feel good mentally, we need to make peace with food.

 

IE rejects dieting – something that has been shown to have many negative effects, from increased risk of disease, to disordered thoughts around food, to regaining all of the weight lost plus more.

 

In fact, the biggest predictor of weight gain is dieting.

 

Instead, IE focuses on finding the pleasure and satisfaction in eating. And, rather than focusing on body size, it’s a weight neutral model that appreciates that there is no one look to health.

 

Interestingly, intuitive eaters have shown remarkable health outcomes, including but not limited to:

  • Diverse diets and more pleasure in eating (1)

  • Weight stability (2)

  • Greater body respect and appreciation

  • Beneficial emotional functioning

  • Higher life satisfaction (3)

 

What Intuitive Eating is NOT

I think critics of intuitive eating often misunderstand what it is. Here’s what it’s not.

 

It’s not

“eat whatever you want with no regard to health.”

 

On the contrary, IE really values and honors health. But it also recognizes that stress around food is more detrimental than eating the occasional less nutritious food. One food or meal will not make or break your health.

 

IE uses gentle nutrition – letting nutrition guide your food choices in a neutral way so that you can feel your best physically. No one feels good when they eat only cake all day, every day and IE acknowledges that.

 

But the caveat is that gentle nutrition is the last component of IE. This is because until you’ve fully healed your relationship with food and can look at all foods on an even playing field, it’s too difficult to use gentle nutrition to guide your food choices. It becomes intertwined with rules – the ones we’re trying to get rid of.

 

Once you have made peace with food though and know that foods are good or bad, gentle nutrition is a key component.

 

Not only that, but as IE teaches you to honor feelings of hunger and fullness, it also helps you recognize that overeating doesn’t feel good. And that eating things that don’t feel good  isn’t even satisfying.

 

So, no, IE does not encourage you to eat cookies and cake all day every day. But, in order to get to a point of eating a balanced diet, it does encourage you to explore previous “off limits” and fear foods.

 

It’s also not

the “hunger and fullness” diet

Again, contrary to what I’ve seen on social media, IE isn’t just “eat when you’re hungry, stop when you’re full.”

 

Life isn’t as simple as that!

IE looks at the full picture – noting that there are reasons to eat outside of physical hunger and that things may happen that prevent you from stopping when you’re exactly full.

 

On top of that, IE recognizes that if you’ve been dieting for a long time – and even more so, if you’re recovering from an eating disorder – your hunger and fullness cues may be off and difficult to pay attention to.

 

IE doesn’t come with rules. It’s not just eating when you’re hungry and stopping when you’re full.

 

Instead, it’s looking at the big picture of overall health and aiming to honor what feels good in your body, most of the time.

Lastly, it’s definitely not

“black and white”

Similarly, IE is not a black and white diet to follow.

There’s no way to do it perfectly. And there’s no way to mess it up.

Instead, it looks at the gray area.

 

Turning IE into something black and white that can be done either right or wrong adds pressure and an element of perfectionism. This pressure is exactly what IE aims to reduce!

There’s no right or wrong way to do it. IE involves honoring health and listening to your body as best as you can, most of the time.

The 10 principles of Intuitive Eating

IE is based on 10 principles. The below is straight from the Intuitive Eating book, which explains it the best.

 

1.   

Reject the Diet Mentality


Get angry at diet culture that promotes weight loss and the lies that have led you to feel as if you were a failure every time a new diet stopped working and you gained back all of the weight. If you allow even one small hope to linger that a new and better diet or food plan might be lurking around the corner, it will prevent you from being free to rediscover Intuitive Eating.

 2.   

Honor Your Hunger

Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates. Otherwise you can trigger a primal drive to overeat.

3.   

Make Peace with Food

Give yourself unconditional permission to eat. If you tell yourself that you can’t or shouldn’t have a particular food, it can lead to intense feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings and, often, bingeing.

 

4.

Challenge the Food Police

Scream a loud NO to thoughts in your head that declare you’re “good” for eating minimal calories or “bad” because you ate a piece of chocolate cake. Chasing the food police away is a critical step in returning to Intuitive Eating.

5.

Discover the Satisfaction Factor

When you eat what you really want, in an environment that is inviting, the pleasure you derive will be a powerful force in helping you feel satisfied and content.

6.

Feel Your Fullness

In order to honor your fullness, you need to trust that you will give yourself the foods you desire. Listen for the body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry and observe the signs that show that you’re comfortably full.

 

7.

Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness

Find ways to comfort, nurture, distract and resolve your issues. Anxiety, loneliness, boredom and anger are emotional we all experience thought life. Food won’t fix any of these feelings.

8.

Respect Your Body

Accept your genetic blueprint. It’s hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and critical about your body size or shape. All bodies deserve dignity.

9.

Movement – Feel the Difference

Shift your focus to how it feels to move your body, rather than the calorie-burning effect of exercise. If you focus on how you feel from working out, such as energized, it can make the difference between rolling out of bed for a brisk morning walk or hitting the snooze alarm.

 

10.

Honor Your Health with Gentle Nutrition

Make food choices that honor your health and taste buds while making you feel good. Remember that you don’t have to eat perfectly to be healthy. It’s what you eat consistently over time that matters.”

 

Again, these are straight from the Intuitive Eating book. Hopefully they show that you IE isn’t a black and white concept that totally ignores health. It’s one that honors your health in a way that respects your emotional, physical and mental health – combined.

Can I practice Intuitive Eating and lose weight?

 Hopefully you see by now that IE is not a weight loss diet.

 

There’s a chance you may begin to eat more intuitively and lose weight. There’s also a chance you may gain weight, or your weight may not change at all.

 

I can tell you this: your healthiest weight is the one which you can maintain comfortably without micromanaging what you eat.

 

If you’ve been restricting what you eat for a while, dieting on and off or on a restrict/binge cycle, there’s a chance your weight will change.

 

Most importantly though, you cannot actively pursue weight loss while working on IE.

 

IE looks at internal motivations for eating: how food feels, what sounds good, how hungry we are, what feels satisfying and more.

 

Whereas weight loss, on the other hand, looks at external factors: what we weigh and how our clothes fit.

 

If you’re focused on external factors – like the scale – they will distract you from listening to your internal cues.

 

You must let go of the notion of weight loss to truly become an intuitive eater.

 

Remember that you can be healthy at any weight and that health does not have size. Read more about Intuitive Eating and weight loss in this blog post.

Where can I learn more?

To learn more, I highly recommend reading the book Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach by Evelyn Tribole, MS, RDN, CEDRD-S and Elyse Resch, MS, RDN, CEDRD-S, FAND.

 

The following books and IE colleagues are also incredible resources:

 

Social media (in alphabetical order by last name):

 

 And, Natalie and I are currently working on becoming Certified Intuitive Eating Counselors!

 

It was important to us to be fully trained and versed in IE before teaching it to you and our clients. We’re so excited to be finally taking this step and have already spent months learning more and diving in.

 

We can’t wait to continue to share with you as we continue to learn more and finally, become certified.

 

Questions? Ask us in the comments! We’re always happy to share more and create other blog posts about this topic.

References:

1)    Smith, T., and Hawks, S. (2006). Intuitive eating diet composition, and the meaning of food in healthy weight promotion. American Journal of Health Education.

2)    Tylka, T., Calogero, R., and Danielsdóttira, S. (2019). Intuitive Eating is connected to self-reported weight stabilith in community women and men. Eating Disorders.

3)    Ricciardelli, B.L. (2016). A systematic review of the psychosocial correlates of intuitive eating among adult women. Appetite.

 

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