Is Intuitive Eating Right For You?
You’re ready to start taking care of your health, but you’re unsure as to what you may need to do in order to achieve that. You’ve tried Keto, Weight Watchers, Optavia, and countless other programs, and they “worked” for a while, but nothing seemed to last. Maybe you went back to your old habits of overeating, stopped moving your body, or gained your lost weight back.
Maybe you’ve heard of Intuitive Eating, but are unaware of what it truly stands for because of the many misconceptions that float around on social media. One of the most common myths about Intuitive Eating you’ve probably heard is that you can “eat whatever you want, whenever you want it!” And, while yes, that is a piece of Intuitive Eating, it doesn’t encompass the whole framework.
In this blog post, I’m giving you all the details on what Intuitive Eating is and isn’t, the benefits, why it's not working for most people, if it’s actually healthy, and much more so that you feel empowered to know if this is the route you need for improving your health, both physically and mentally.
What Is Intuitive Eating?
First and foremost, Intuitive Eating is not a diet.
I believe it’s important to define the word diet here as well, because it can mean a few different things. The diet I’m referring to is one that restricts an individual from foods for the sole purpose of losing weight and/or because of food rules.
Intuitive Eating is an evidence-based, self-care eating framework that empowers you to build a healthy relationship around food by giving yourself unconditional permission to eat.
The enlightenment that Intuitive Eating brings is that there is no guilt, shame, or judgment around the foods you eat. While the diet-obsessed culture we live in makes you feel bad for eating a donut or fries rather than egg whites or kale salad, Intuitive Eating gives you the space to choose without feelings of guilt.
You aren’t relying on any external factors like calories or macros, diet rules, or weight loss programs. With Intuitive Eating, you’re relearning how to trust your body and intuition, and letting yourself be your own guide. Truthfully, you don’t need a rule book to tell you what you should or shouldn't eat, all you need is reconnection to your own inner cues.
The History of Intuitive Eating
Intuitive Eating was developed by two registered dietitians, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, in 1995. After working with individuals in eating disorder treatment and weight management, they noticed repeating patterns of weight gain, low self-esteem, and disordered behaviors amongst their clients. With time, these two dietitians wrote the original book for Intuitive Eating and are continuing to educate on this scientific evidence-based framework.
Intuitive Eating highlights how traditional, fad diets actually don’t work and further perpetuates unsustainable health behaviors.
The Intuitive Eating framework is based on 10 guiding principles working together by either cultivating or removing obstacles to body awareness.
The Principles of Intuitive Eating
Principle #1: Reject the Diet Mentality
Say goodbye to all things diet—the tracking apps, Facebook groups, magazines, weight watchers, and gut cleanses! Being able to reconnect with your body and find your intuitive eater will be impossible if diets are still in the picture.
Principle #2: Honor Your Hunger
To begin building back body trust, you must first start honoring what your body is giving you - hunger cues. This principle can be HARD if you’ve been dieting for a long time or if you’ve simply been ignoring your body. Your body can actually be giving you inaccurate cues by not giving you hunger cues at all, so establishing a good routine with eating is crucial — you can read more on that here.
Or even better — work with a Registered Dietitian to get individualized support and defined steps for your unique health journey.
Principle #3: Make Peace with Food
The principle by which you start giving yourself unconditional permission to have all foods. This principle gets a bit tricky, especially coming off of ditching all things diet, and of course you’d be wanting to eat all the foods you “couldn’t” have for so long. But Intuitive Eating isn’t “free for all.” It’s about learning to notice how foods make you feel, physically and mentally, and growing from there.
Principle #4: Challenge the Food Police
Your mentality around food is keeping you stuck. And this principle allows you to challenge those thoughts of:
I should really be eating a salad instead of the pizza.
Uhhh! I ate so bad today, I’ve got to do better tomorrow.
I don’t need to eat the whole sandwich.
This ice cream has too much sugar.
Again, this principle can be HARD, especially when you’ve had these circulating thoughts for years and years (I’ve had clients trace down thoughts from childhood). Getting to the root, redefining, and making an empowered choice around these thoughts can help you, or seeking support from a Registered Dietitian who can walk you through just that.
Principle #5: Discover the Satisfaction Factor
Physical fullness is not the same as being mentally satisfied. By learning how to integrate both physical and mental desires into your meals, you’ll become more aligned with your body, helping you discover your feel-good way around nutrition.
Principle #6: Feel Your Fullness
While honoring your hunger is a crucial part of Intuitive Eating, so is knowing when and how to feel your fullness so you can stop eating at a comfortable level rather than feeling stuffed every time. Dieting can alter hormones, strengthen food noise, and keep you further away from your body. All of this can make it difficult to understand your fullness factors.
Being present during meals and using mindfulness techniques can help you learn to feel your fullness sensations, but only if you truly know that food isn’t going anywhere (aka, no more restricting).
Principle #7: Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness
Emotional eating gets a bad rap in today’s world, but emotional eating is human nature, and it’s actually a helpful tool. Emotional eating is one of the four types of hunger, so of course food is enticing when emotions are high, but you have to realize that food isn’t going to fix the emotional problem.
Principle #8: Respect Your Body
If you have a poor relationship with food, then you probably have a poor relationship with your body. For a long time, you’ve attempted to change your body (aka lose weight) for a multitude of reasons based on society’s standards (standards that will never be met). With Intuitive Eating, you begin learning how to respect your body, despite what it may or may not look like.
Principle #9: Movement - Feel the Difference
Shifting your focus from calorie-burning and trying to change your body size or shape to focusing more on different ways to move your body in ways you enjoy will help you feel your very best.
Principle #10: Honor Your Health with Gentle Nutrition
My favorite principle — I call this one your Feel Good Nutrition. Intuitive Eating doesn’t dismiss all the science we know about nutrition. Of course, it’s not going to be the wisest decision to eat donuts for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day, but eating a donut when you actually want it can be enjoyed.
You can understand nutrition and make healthful choices without it being all-or-nothing. Nutrition isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach, so tailoring to your specific needs (for example if you have diabetes, high cholesterol, PCOS, etc.) is important, but it can be difficult to navigate when you are immersed in diet culture. Working with a registered dietitian who specializes in your unique needs is always advised.
The Benefits of Intuitive Eating
Intuitive Eating is not a diet, rather it’s an evidence-based approach with over 200 studies supporting its framework.
Here are some ways that Intuitive Eating is beneficial to overall health:
Improved psychological well-being
Better body image and self-esteem
Improved cholesterol levels
Better blood sugar management
Reduced stress
Improved digestion
Reduction to binge eating or chronically overeating
Emotional regulation
Maintaining a Healthy Weight
Your Weight & Intuitive Eating
Now, the burning question is: will Intuitive Eating help you lose weight?
Notice I mentioned in the benefits section that you’re more likely to achieve and maintain a healthy weight with Intuitive Eating, but what does a healthy weight mean?
Health is and will look different for every single person. What may be "healthy" for one person may not be so for the next. As a dietitian, I believe it's important for you to define what health means to you and for your life. Now here's the thing: when you're defining what healthy is for you, I want you to focus on removing numbers and focus more on how you want to feel, physically and mentally.
Look, we are surrounded by diet culture, and we’ve been made to believe that our health, or what is considered "healthy,” is defined by a specific number. But your weight is not an indicator of your health. The number on the scale tells you nothing about your habits, behaviors, attitude, or mindset.
Most of the time, when you focus purely on numbers and losing weight, your behaviors to achieve that may actually be unsustainable. Hello, yo-yo dieting and weight cycling, which have been shown to cause negative health consequences.
With Intuitive Eating, weight loss isn’t the primary focus, but it could happen, as can weight gain or weight maintenance. There’s not a specific timeline of events, but once you’re able to make peace with food and your body, honor your hunger and fullness cues, understand how to cope with your emotions, and apply nutrition in a way that feels good to you and your body, your weight will adjust to what is most comfortable for your body.
I want to make this very clear — Even if you desire to lose weight, you can still take the steps towards improving your relationship with food, body, and movement through the Intuitive Eating principles.
As a non-diet dietitian, I am not all against weight loss, and I believe you can lose weight when your intentions are within reason. This may go against all things Intuitive Eating, but I’m here to support you in the best way, and I think this is where Intuitive Eating gets a bit icky. If you’re in agreement with focusing on making peace with food, establishing healthier habits, removing your all-or-nothing thinking, and understanding nutrition primarily, then I don’t see a problem in meeting your weight loss goals.
When Intuitive Eating Doesn’t Work
Some individuals may try Intuitive Eating and struggle with the “intuitive” part (many of my clients do! ), and maybe you’re in the same boat. Oftentimes, the missing piece for people is that they dive headfirst into Intuitive Eating, but lack structure.
The truth is: we are all born with the innate ability to be intuitive, but if you’re someone who has a history of chronic dieting, restrictive eating patterns, vague hunger and fullness cues, or feels totally out of control around ultra-processed foods, then diving into ditching all things diet and “listening to your body” isn’t going to work out in your favor. You have to take the time to relearn how to be intuitive with a structured approach.
A lot of the time, people go into Intuitive Eating with the mindset that they can just eat all the things whenever, and while yes, you’re allowed to eat chips, cake, cookies, ice cream, burgers, tacos, etc., it may not feel physically pleasant in your body. Again, many people may need more structure around the Intuitive Eating principles to get to a place where food is physically and mentally pleasant, and that’s okay.
You wouldn’t expect a person to go out and run a marathon who has never run a mile before, so don’t expect yourself to find your intuitive eater overnight.
Intuitive Eating May Not Be For You
Intuitive Eating won’t be the wisest approach for those struggling with medical conditions that require a much higher level of dietary supervision — chronic kidney disease, cardiovascular disease, anorexia, etc.
Tips on How to Get Started with Intuitive Eating
If you’ve decided that Intuitive Eating is the path for you and want to start out on the right steps, here are a few tips on how to do just that.
Clean Out All Things Diet
Prepare yourself for success. This journey will be hard enough, and you don’t want diet-related things surrounding you because it’ll be easy to fall back into the game. My advice — get rid of any diet books, magazines, apps, social media groups and accounts, etc. and give yourself the space to start on a clean, cleared-out road.
Gather Your Resources
As you’re removing diet-related materials add in non-diet/intuitive eating materials! This can range from books, podcasts, social media accounts, and supportive groups.
Books:
Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch
The Body Is Not An Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor
Fitness For Every Body by Meg Boggs
Unapologetic Eating by Alyssa Rumsey
Gentle Nutrition by Rachel Hartley
Podcasts
Food Psych with Christy Harrison
Find Food Freedom with Sam Previte
Willing To Be Wrong with Joshua Wolrich
Maintenance Phase with Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes
Seek Support
The best advice I can give you is to seek out support near the start of your Intuitive Eating journey because it can get confusing and will be hard at times. Take it from me, who didn’t seek out the support and spent more time trying to figure it all out on my own rather than finding someone I trusted to guide me.
As a non-diet dietitian, I’ve created my program, Nourished with Freedom, to make this journey a whole lot easier so you don’t fall back into diet culture. Seeking support from a professional who has also struggled in their own relationship with food—like me—can be your ticket to success.
Final Note
Intuitive Eating is not for everyone, and that’s okay, but it can be a helpful framework to get you out of the all-or-nothing mindset, stop overeating and binge eating, and get to a place where you do care about your nutrition, just without all the extra stress and overwhelm. If you’ve read this blog post and are interested in diving deeper into your journey of healing, I’m here to support you!
My personal struggles with food and the work I do with clients as a registered dietitian have allowed me to build out my simplified method. I’ve created Nourished with Freedom to give you the guiding tools and support to drop diet culture and start making peace with food. I teach you the exact strategies you need to find your intuitive eater and reach a balanced relationship with food within a simplified and supportive framework.
Click HERE to sign up for Nourished with Freedom!