All about Intutive Eating
If you have ever dieted or you are currently dieting, you may feel like you are stuck on a roller coaster. At first, it seems fun and exciting when you jump on the roller coaster. As you start going up the roller coaster the anticipation and excitement build. But suddenly, out of nowhere and outside of your control, the roller coaster takes a turn and comes racing down. You lose all sense of control and the roller coaster has full control of you.
While I actually think roller coasters are quite fun, the up and down roller coaster experience is not ideal when it comes to your diet and relationship with food.
Unlike real-life roller coasters, as the dieting roller coaster continues you can lose trust in yourself and your own body. Fad diets are not designed to be sustainable long-term which is why many people feel like they have failed when they can’t maintain the diet when really it is the diet that has failed you.
The diet culture roller coaster can destroy your relationship with food, negatively impact your physical and mental health and lead to eating disorders that can be life-threatening.
What if I told you there was an answer to end the misery of the diet culture roller coaster. A way for you to experience total control over what you choose to eat, feel at peace with food, make peace with your body and ultimately experience freedom from any rules or restrictions.
There is an evidence-based solution to help you get off the miserable diet culture roller coaster - a concept to eating and nutrition called intuitive eating.
What is intuitive eating?
Intuitive eating is an approach to nutrition and exercise that eliminates traditional restrictive eating and focuses on learning to trust your internal cues. Intuitive eating is a dynamic mind-body integration of instinct, emotion and rational thoughts (1). Intuitive eating honours the fact that YOU are the expert of your own body and you have the ability to determine what, when and how to eat.
Nearly every human has the natural ability to know when you need to eat, how much you need to eat and the foods that will satisfy you. These are called your hunger and satiety (fullness) cues.
If you don’t believe that you have the ability to eat the right amount for your body, part of the process of intuitive eating is gaining body trust.
Compare eating to going to the washroom - would you ever ask someone for a schedule of when you will have to use the washroom? Likely not, because your body is fully equipped to give you an accurate personalized signal based on it’s changing needs at any given moment. The same goes for your hunger and fullness cues. Your body is equipped to tell you what it wants to eat, when, how, where and why it wants to eat. It’s a personal process of relearning how to honour your health by paying attention to your body’s messages and meeting your physical and emotional needs (1). It takes work to learn how to listen and understand these cues and signals because many things in our society disrupt our natural ability to tune into these cues, most notably chronic dieting.
Intuitive eating is an adaptive eating style, which influences positive physical and psychological well-being. It is an evidence-based approach that has demonstrated psychological benefits such as improved body image, self-esteem and well-being (3).
There are 10 key principles of Intuitive Eating, created by 2 dietitians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch.
10 Principles of Intuitive Eating
Adapted from Intutive Eating, Fourth Edition (2)
1. Reject the Diet Mentality
Rejecting traditional dieting mentality and messaging that offers false hope and unrealistic expectations. Learn to tune out the noise and lies of diet culture, which will allow you freedom to discover intuitive eating.
2. Honor Your Hunger
Learning to understand your internal hunger cues and keeping your body adequately nourished. Honour your hunger instead of trying to repress, avoid or ignore it. This helps ensure you are well-nourished and can help avoid triggering a drive to overeat. Once you become excessively hungry, it is nearly impossible to make conscious, moderate and intentional food choices. Honouring your hunger will help you to build trust in yourself and is part of the foundation of intuitive eating.
3. Make Peace with Food
Learn to love food again. Allow yourself permission to eat, without rules or restrictions. Having rules about particular foods can lead to feelings of deprivation that lead to uncontrollable cravings and often binge eating. This often leads to guilt, shame and a recurring vicious cycle. All foods fit with intuitive eating and there are no foods that are “off-limits”. You will never have to feel deprived again.
4. Challenge the Food Police
Challenge the evidence behind diet beliefs that are usually not founded on good scientific evidence. Don’t let other people tell you that you are “good” or “bad” based on what food you decide to eat. Food police monitor the unreasonable rules that diet culture sets out. This principle encourages you to stand up against the food police so that you can succeed with intuitive eating.
5. Discover the Satisfaction Factor
Discover the satisfaction of food. Everyone should be able to experience pleasure and satisfaction with eating. Learn the different components of food that lead to true satisfaction. When you allow yourself to eat what you really want, you will feel true satisfaction and no longer deprived or craving food. Give yourself permission to love and enjoy food again, it will help you regain control of eating and food choices.
6. Feel Your Fullness
Learn to understand and listen to your body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry. Understand how to truly listen to your body and tune out distractions so that you can be comfortably full. Slow down when eating to reflect on how the food tastes and how your current level of hunger is.
7. Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness
Food restriction and dieting can affect you physically and mentally and lead to emotional eating. We all experience emotions of anger, sadness, boredom and loneliness. It is important to know that although food can feel like a solution it is only temporary and important to deal with the source of the emotion. It is also important to find non-food related coping strategies for your emotions.
8. Respect Your Body
Learn self-love and body respect. Instead of focusing on what you don’t like about your body or what you want to change, learn to embrace your unique and beautiful body just the way it is. We all have a unique genetic blueprint that largely affects our body size. It will be hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and critical of your body. Give your body dignity and respect it deserves.
9. Movement—Feel the Difference
Learn to develop a healthy relationship with movement that feels good. Shift your mindset to focus on how it feels to move your body instead of thinking about how many calories you will burn or physical changes.
10. Honor Your Health—Gentle Nutrition
Learn to create a balanced, healthy approach to nutrition that is supportive of maintaining a positive relationship with food. You don’t have to eat perfectly to be healthy. It is all about consistency and balance over time.
Although these principles might sound simple at face value, within each principle there is a lot to explore and very insightful work you can do with a dietitian to explore how you can gain competence with the principles.
Check out our intuitive eating quiz here, to understand if you are an intuitive eater already or if there are areas of intuitive eating that you need to work on to gain competence in intuitive eating.
Intuitive eating is a personal, lifelong process. There is no right or wrong with intuitive eating, there are no rules and there is certainly no shaming or failure.
Becoming an intuitive eater takes practice and patience. For many, you must undo years of diet culture programming - and this is hard work. A good place to start is to cultivate self-compassion for yourself as you begin to embark on this process and to seek out support from a registered health care professional.
So, as you move forward, remember to nourish your body, participate in movement that you enjoy, practice self-compassion and ignore external messaging that your body needs to be anything other than what it is.
By: Julia Celestini, RD & Sarah Hunt, RD
As Registered Dietitians, our team at Happy Bellies use an intuitive eating approach with many of our clients, even for those seeking support for digestive health, IBS, pregnancy or pediatric nutrition. We encourage you to work with a registered dietitian if you are looking to improve your own relationship with food and become an intuitive eater!
What does intuitive eating look like for children and teens? Stay tuned for our future post on this.
Resources
References
Tribole E and Resch E. Intuitive Eating, Fourth Edition. St. Martin’s Essentials. (2020). New York, NY.
Linardon, J., Tylka, T. L., & Fuller-Tyszkiewicz, M. (2021). Intuitive eating and its psychological correlates: A meta-analysis. The International journal of eating disorders, 54(7), 1073–1098. https://doi.org/10.1002/eat.23509
