What the Heck is Intuitive Eating?

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Intuition. We all have it. Some of us are more attuned to it than others. Growing up, my mother always taught me to trust my gut, and for the most part I do, she’s a pretty trusty gut.

If we’re taught to “trust our gut” when it comes to making decisions in life or sussing out a bad situation, why do so many of us struggle to literally “trust our gut.” I’m talking about trusting that gut to tell you how to nourish your body, listen to your hunger and fullness cues, etc.

This is where Intuitive Eating comes in. I know it can sound a little woo-woo, but it’s a skill that we were all innately born with and were basically pros at. You know how babies know how to tell people they’re hungry? They fuss or cry, they make gestures to signal it’s feeding time and when they’re done, they push it away, turn it down, throw the spoon, whatever. 

The same goes with toddlers. Your kid only wants to eat meat for a meal? He’s likely listening to his body’s needs, maybe he’s going through a growth spurt and needs more protein to support those needs, or maybe it’s a carb phase and he leans towards eating more spaghetti than vegetables because he started going to school and is burning through fuel faster than before.

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As adults, we know how to do these things too!

But most of us lose sight of it as we grow up. We’re constantly bombarded with external factors that make us question our internal cues like being forced to clean your plate, messages received in school or the media (being forced to finished your milk before recess was the worst). Or maybe it’s a health condition or medication that causes us to lose the ability to trust or even receive those internal cues.

A lot of us have to relearn how to listen to these cues and reframe the thoughts we’ve believed for years or decades (gasp). Thankfully, some fabulous ladies, Evelyn Tribole, MS, RD, CEDRD-S, and Elyse Resch, MS, RD, CEDRD-S, FIAEDP, FADA, FAND, created Intuitive Eating in 1995.

Intuitive Eating is a weight neutral, evidenced based (I’ll link some studies at the end) approach to health that helps people develop body awareness and learn to honor their health by listening and responding to the internal needs of their body.

Studies on Intuitive Eating have shown improvement in HDL cholesterol, increased enjoyment of food, self compassion, quality of life, coping skills and self esteem and linked to reduced rates of eating disorders, disordered eating, cardiovascular risk and triglyceride levels, body dissatisfaction, and body shame.

Intuitive Eating is based on ten principles that incorporate unconditional permission to eat, relying on internal hunger and satiety cues and eating for physical needs rather than emotional. These principles help us learn that we are the experts at listening to our bodies and empowers us to ditch the pursuit of weight loss and Diet Culture.

The 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating

  1. Reject the Diet Mentality

    • What has our history of dieting taught us? For many of us, it has taught us that we are not good enough the way we are; that we cannot trust our mind or body to guide our eating habits. There is a large body of evidence that has shown us that dieting for weight loss purposes often leads to weight gain and weight cycling, which has negative effects on our mental and physical well-being. Throw out your diet books, unfollow social media accounts that make you feel like crap, and reject the diet mentality. Shift the focus to building healthy behaviors that support overall well-being regardless of size. Diet Culture makes it easy to fall into the traps of chasing weight loss and following diets, but can dictate how we speak to ourselves. Recognizing that diet mentality when we start to feel bad for what we did/didn’t eat, labeling it as diet mentality and rejecting that old frame of thinking can help us foster self-compassion and learn to let go of thoughts and diets that don’t serve us.

  2. Honor Your Hunger

    • Hunger is normal. Have you ever come home from work and felt ravenous? Like you wanted to eat all the snacks in your house before dinner, cuz same. This is a normal response to hunger. There’s a good chance we didn’t eat enough throughout the day. Not feeding our body enough triggers a primal instinct to overeat. By honoring our hunger, we learn to listen to our body’s cues and discover what our individual hunger really feels like. Hunger feels different for everyone and sometimes our thoughts around hunger can mess with our hunger interpretation. Learning to acknowledge those thoughts and honor cues helps to rebuild trust with food. 

  3. Make Peace with Food

    • Food is not the enemy, Diet Culture is. We deserve unconditional permission to eat. If we deprive ourselves of a food we enjoy, that restriction often manifests itself into uncontrollable cravings, bingeing and feeds into a “Last Supper” eating mentality. When we stop giving food morality, like “good” or “bad,” we can start finding peace with food. All foods fit.

  4. Challenge the Food Police

    • “Who are you the food police?” <backstreet boys song-ish, if you’re a fan, you know>. The food police are the thoughts in our head that tell us eating this X is “good” and eating Y is “bad,” judging other people's food choices. Examine where these rules and thoughts were created. Is it reasonable? Is there scientific evidence?

  5. Feel Your Fullness

    • Feeling like we have to clean our plate, feeling like we have to say yes to more food from family or being distracted while eating are a few things that can interfere with our natural ability to feel our fullness. It is important for us to check in partway through a snack or meal and see how we are feeling. How does the food taste? What is our current hunger level? Checking in helps us discover where and how we feel fullness.

  6. Discover the Satisfaction Factor

    • Diet Culture pushes away from the simple gift of finding pleasure and satisfaction in food and eating. If we feel full, but we aren’t quite satisfied, we might keep searching for that one salty or sweet food that will help us reach satisfaction. When you finally eat what you really want to be eating and allowing yourself to feel joy from foods, it will help you feel more content and satisfied.

  7. Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness

    • Often times, our response to food restriction can feel like emotional eating. Food is emotional. We use it to celebrate, comfort and nurture, but we can also use it to self-soothe. Recognize that emotional eating has served a purpose in your healing journey, but allow yourself space to welcome other healing practices to help you deal with difficult emotions. 

  8. Respect Your Body

    • You deserve it. And so does your body. Learn to accept your bio-individuality and your genetic makeup. It’s hard to reject the diet mentality when we’re busy beating ourselves up.

  9. Movement- Feel the Difference

    • Reframe your relationship and perception of exercise. It doesn’t have to be this strict, all or nothing process. Learn to find joy in moving your body and engaging in physical activities that make you feel good. Exercising for the purpose of weight loss can make exercise not feel good, mentally and physically, causing you to burn out. Think about the other benefits you gain from exercise like sleeping better, better digestion, or improved mood, or socializing with others while moving your body will help you build a routine that works for you.

  10. Honor Your Health- Gentle Nutrition

    • No one is perfect. You can be healthy, meet your nutrient needs and eat foods that bring you joy. You don’t have to eat kale for everyone meal. One meal, snack or food will not unravel your health. It’s more important how you eat over time. Some weeks have more vegetables, some weeks have more pasta. Whatever. All foods fit. 

How long does this take? I don’t know. It depends on the person. It depends on how long you have had trust problems with food and your body. It depends on how long you’ve been receiving false messages and taking the time to untangle those ideas. It depends on your health history; if you have a history of eating disorders or disordered eating, these messages can be very overwhelming.

If you’re not ready for Intuitive Eating at this phase in your life, that’s okay, we are not “bad” because we don’t already eat intuitively, or haven’t “mastered it.” Intuitive is not another weight loss program, there is no winning or losing, and if anyone tries to sell it to you in that way, or frame it as such, it is not Intuitive Eating.

One of the reasons I hate fat diets, there’s many, is the huge focus and dependency on external cues: following a list of the foods you can/can’t eat for 30 days, foods labeled good/bad, eat more of this/less of that, only eat during this window period daily. These are all external based food rules and restrictions.

And many of us don’t realize that, because we’ve been conditioned to believe that we cannot be trusted around food and we cannot trust our body to tell us what it needs.

Most of us have that one food that we love and don’t feel safe around. Part of Intuitive Eating is addressing that fear and restriction and it’s normal to feel some resistance around that process because it is scary!

What if all we do is eat ice cream all day every day?!

That very well could be a part of someone’s journey, but if that’s all that’s happening, we’re missing something. There’s a good chance you won’t just eat ice cream for ever and ever. You’ll burn out, you’ll get bored, you likely won’t feel good and your body will start craving other foods for variety and to meet nutrient needs that ice cream can’t provide. Unless it’s like meaty, vegetable, pasta ice cream, which sounds terrible.

When we depend on external cues to tell us how/what/when to eat, we’ll continue to depend on them and never trust ourselves or our intuition. We can experience external cues in other areas, not just fad diets, but through cultural messages, family food rules, medical conditions and beauty standards.

Intuitive Eating is about the journey, of the self-discovery, challenging your thoughts and biases, and learning to foster self-compassion for your body.

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The beauty of Intuitive Eating can trickle into other areas of life. Through Intuitive Eating we learn how to cultivate mindfulness with food and our body, discover neutrality, and awareness of how we are feeling in the moment. There’s so much we can do with these skills! For me, these skills have helped to have more awareness in social situations, check in with my body during emotional moments, and learn how to be more authentic to myself and foster more self-compassion.

Nutrition is important, but so is finding joy in the little things, and sometimes those little things are food or the act of doing nothing. When we get caught up in health and nutrition, we often lose sight of ourselves and drift away from things that bring us joy. Intuitive Eating can help us discover/rediscover joy, happiness and pleasure, which are important factors of health.

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Interested in Learning More?

I often recommend clients (or anyone) to get the book Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program that Works
And if my clients are ready, we dive into the Intuitive Eating Workbook

If you would like to learn more or get started into the world of Intuitive Eating, I offer specific packages for clients :) To get started click here.

A Few Intuitive Eating Studies