In a world saturated with diet advice and weight-loss pressures, intuitive eating offers a refreshing alternative. It's a path to a healthier relationship with food, focusing on satisfaction, nourishment, and enjoyment rather than restrictive rules and calorie counting.
What is Intuitive Eating?
Intuitive eating is an approach that emphasizes listening to your body’s internal cues of hunger and fullness, rather than adhering to strict external diet rules. It's about making peace with food and trusting your body's wisdom. This approach helps create a healthier relationship with food, focusing on satisfaction, nourishment, and enjoyment rather than calories and restrictions.
Benefits of Intuitive Eating
Adopting intuitive eating can lead to numerous benefits, both physically and emotionally.
Healthier Relationship with Food
By attuning to your body's signals, you can break free from the constraints of dieting and develop a more comfortable and natural relationship with food.
Reduced Guilt and Shame
Intuitive eating encourages you to stop feeling bad about your food choices. It shifts the focus from labeling foods as "good" or "bad" to finding balance and enjoyment in eating.
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Enhanced Body Acceptance and Self-Love
This approach promotes accepting your body as it is, without fixating on weight loss or appearance. It's about respecting your body's natural shape and size.
Better Digestion and More Energy
Eating when you’re truly hungry and stopping when you’re satisfied can improve digestion and lead to more consistent energy levels throughout the day.
Greater Overall Well-Being
Embracing intuitive eating can boost your mood, help you feel more balanced, and bring joy back to your meals. It's about finding pleasure and satisfaction in eating.
The Downside of Dieting
Dieting, a commonly used method for attempted weight loss, often proves unsuccessful in the long run. Research consistently shows that dieting behaviors do not predict weight loss or maintenance. Instead, they often predict weight gain and overweight status. Furthermore, dieters may experience large weight fluctuations, emotional distress, depression, and an increased risk of developing eating disorders.
The Principles of Intuitive Eating
Intuitive eating is guided by ten core principles that help you reconnect with your body's wisdom and develop a healthier relationship with food.
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Reject the Diet Mentality
This first principle involves recognizing and rejecting the pervasive diet culture that surrounds us. Throw out the diet books, food plans, and articles that offer false hope that food restriction will grant all of your wishes for a better life. Get angry at the lies from diet culture that have led you to feel like a failure every time a new diet or food plan stopped working. Identify when you see ads related to dieting, media around dieting, and social media posts that are promoting fad dieting or unhealthy dieting techniques. If you allow even one small hope to linger that a new and better diet might be lurking around the corner, it will prevent you from being free to rediscover Intuitive Eating.
Honor Your Hunger
Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates. Otherwise, you can trigger a primal drive to eat beyond comfortable fullness. Learning to honor the first biological signal of hunger sets the stage for rebuilding trust with yourself and food. Hunger is a biological response and a need. In our diet culture world, we are often taught to look at hunger as the enemy, something that we ignore, that we run away from, that we curb our cravings. The more you say no, no, no, the more you want something. Ask yourself, what are you hungry for?
Make Peace with Food
Call a truce-stop the food fight! 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. Making peace with food is about stop fighting with food. This includes putting an end to statements like, "I shouldn't eat that," or, "I shouldn't have this." All these languages that indicate that you're at war with food.
Challenge the Food Police
The food police monitor the unreasonable rules that dieting has created. The police station is housed deep in your psyche, and its loudspeaker shouts negative barbs, hopeless phrases, and guilt-provoking indictments. Chasing the food police away is a critical step in returning to Intuitive Eating. No foods are good or bad. Instead, certain foods are healthier than others, but it just is what it is. It's OK to have a donut. It is OK to have some of these foods. Ask yourself, “Where is this food police voice coming from?” Sometimes, it's coming from a parent, it's words that they have said to you. Sometimes, it is your own internal judgment. Sometimes, the food police are actually an external voice.
Discover the Satisfaction Factor
The Japanese have the wisdom to promote pleasure as one of their goals of healthy living. In our fury to be thin and healthy, we often overlook one of the most basic gifts of existence-the pleasure and satisfaction that can be found in the eating experience. When you eat what you really want, in an environment that is inviting and conducive, the pleasure you derive will be a powerful force in helping you feel satisfied and content. By providing this experience for yourself, you will find that you’ll eat the right amount of food to feel physically and emotionally satisfied. Savor the food with all of your senses. What does the food look like? Is it appealing, or unappealing? What do you hear? Is the food sizzling? Is the music you chose relaxing? What does the food smell like? Are there smells other than the food? How does the food feel in your hands or in your mouth? What’s the texture like? How does the food taste? Is it savory, or sweet? Taste everything and chew slowly. Try to identify ingredients and flavors.
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Feel Your Fullness
Listen for the body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry. Observe the signs that show that you’re comfortably full. Pause in the middle of eating and ask yourself how the food tastes and what your current fullness level is.
Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness
First, recognize that food restriction, both physically and mentally, can, in and of itself, trigger loss of control, which can feel like emotional eating. Find kind ways to comfort, nurture, distract, and resolve your issues. Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, and anger are emotions we all experience throughout life. Each has its own trigger, and each has its own appeasement. Food won’t fix any of these feelings. It may comfort for the short term, distract from the pain, or even numb you. But food won’t solve the problem. If anything, eating for an emotional hunger may only make you feel worse in the long run. You’ll ultimately have to deal with the source of the emotion, as well as the discomfort of eating beyond comfortable fullness.
Respect Your Body
Accept your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect to realistically squeeze into a size six, it is equally futile (and uncomfortable) to have a similar expectation about body size. But mostly, respect your body so you can feel better about who you are. It’s hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly critical of your body size or shape. All bodies deserve dignity.
Movement-Feel the Difference
Forget militant exercise. Just get active and 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. Choose activities you enjoy, rather than just focusing on burning calories.
Honor Your Health-Gentle Nutrition
Make food choices that honor your well-being, taste buds, and culture; while attuning to how your body feels. Remember that you don’t have to eat perfectly to be healthy. You will not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency from one snack, one meal, or one day of eating. It’s what you eat consistently over time that matters. Make food choices that nourish your body and make you feel good, without guilt. Track how different foods make you feel, both physically and emotionally, to better understand what works for you.
Tips for Getting Started with Intuitive Eating
- Eat When You’re Hungry: Listen to your body’s signals and eat when you’re truly hungry, not just because it’s “time.”
- Pay Attention to Fullness: Stop eating when you’re satisfied, not stuffed. This helps you find a natural eating rhythm.
- Focus on Health, Not Weight: Instead of worrying about the scale, focus on feeling good and nourishing your body.
- Eat Foods That Nourish and Satisfy: Choose foods that fuel your body and make you feel good, without guilt.
Intuitive Eating vs. Mindful Eating
Intuitive eating and mindful eating are closely related, often described as "cousins." They share similar principles, such as honoring your hunger, paying attention to the foods that make you feel satisfied, and understanding your internal cues of satisfaction, hunger, and fullness. However, they differ in their approach. Intuitive eating has ten specific principles to follow, while mindful eating is based on the broader concept of mindfulness, emphasizing awareness, observation, noticing, and non-judgment. You can practice both intuitive and mindful eating simultaneously.
Research on Intuitive Eating
While research on intuitive eating is still growing, studies have shown promising results in promoting healthy dietary practices and improving physical and emotional health outcomes. Intuitive eating is associated with several markers of improved physical health, including lower body mass index (BMI), cholesterol, and blood pressure, indicating lower cardiovascular risk. Furthermore, research has suggested that intuitive eating is associated with a number of measures of better psychological health.
Potential Challenges of Intuitive Eating
While intuitive eating offers numerous benefits, it's important to acknowledge potential challenges.
May Not Cause Weight Loss
The IE model is not intended to cause weight loss, but to promote a positive self-image and healthy lifestyle changes. People who are seeking a plan that causes weight loss may not prefer this approach, because there are no specific amounts or types of foods recommended and body weight is not measured. However, a decrease in behaviors like restrained eating and emotional eating may naturally lead to weight loss for some. If a person has been advised to lose weight by their physician to improve medical conditions (e.g., prediabetes, high blood pressure, fatty liver), an IE approach may be used in conjunction with a weight-reducing eating plan.
Fear of Weight Gain
A concern with individuals is letting go of diet rules and “forbidden” foods. They may fear a lack of control around these foods that are now permitted without restrictions. In certain cases, less boundaries may lead some people to overeat or choose low-nutrient-dense foods (e.g., processed high-sugar beverages or foods).
May Not Improve Health Outcomes Related to Weight Gain or Chronic Disease
IE concepts encourage self-care and a positive response to food, which may or may not cause a change towards healthful eating patterns (consuming more fruits and vegetables, less sweetened beverages and foods, less fried foods, not skipping meals, etc.).
Does Not Address Food Addiction
Does not address the concept of food addiction from “hyper-palatable” foods, which can lead to food cravings. Cravings for food may stem from a neurobiological source that is neither caused by physical or emotional hunger. The notion of a food addiction is controversial, but research shows that the brain can activate reward regions of the brain in response to flavors like fat, salt, and sugar when they are eaten in excess and on a regular basis. These foods tend to be highly processed, calorie-dense, and low in nutrients.