What Is Intuitive Eating?

In 2024, the U.S. weight loss and diet industries were estimated at $21.09 billion and is on trend to increase yearly thereafter. Why is this industry so profitable? Diets are not sustainable; therefore, once one diet stops working, the dieter typically jumps to another diet in hopes of more success the next time. Even in cases where weight loss may occur on a diet, restricting specific types of food, calories, or food groups is nearly impossible to follow long-term. Our bodies are not built to restrict food to adhere to socially constructed beauty norms. Our bodies are meant to be of varying shapes, colors, and sizes, and all bodies are meant to eat intuitively.

Trusting Your Body

Your body has the innate wisdom to choose foods that promote well-being. The most prominent study that proves this was conducted as early as 1928 by Dr. Clara M. Davis. In this study, fifteen infants of weaning age (between six to eleven months) were studied for six years total. Infants were chosen for this study, as they have yet to be influenced by older people and thus do not have biases and preconceived notions about food. The babies were provided with an array of foods, ranging from sweetbreads to kidneys. These foods were placed in front of them at different times of the day, and the nurses were instructed to follow the infants’ lead, only giving them the foods they pointed out themselves without any direction or influence. One of the infants came into the study with severe rickets, so a small glass of cod liver oil was placed on his tray to take if he wanted. He did this “irregularly and in varying amounts until his blood calcium and phosphorus became normal and x-ray films showed his rickets to be healed, after which he did not take it again.” This remarkable study shows that infants can eat food that nourishes them without needing instruction or outside input. Davis’s study serves as a powerful example even for adults. We can make food choices that give our bodies the nutrients they need without influence from diet culture. Yet today it is incredibly difficult to make food choices without undue influence from diet culture, media, family, and friends. This is where intuitive eating comes into play!

Intuitive Eating: Step by Step

Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch coined the term intuitive eating and defined it in their 1995 book Inutitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach. There are ten key principles outlined in the book, as follows:

1.     Reject the Diet Mentality

Say goodbye to the diet books, calorie trackers, food plans, and harmful social media content about weight loss. Don’t even donate these books; nobody needs to read that harmful content!

Instead of feeling angry at yourself for not sticking to a diet and going into a shame spiral every time it doesn’t work, channel that anger towards the systems in place (hello patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism that funds a billion-dollar diet industry) for setting an impossible standard for women to follow and trying to capitalize off your suffering. Your body was born with such immense wisdom to care for itself. It provides you with signals every day in the form of hunger and cravings. Now is the time to recognize and harness that power.

2.     Honor Your Hunger

If you wait to eat until you’re absolutely ravished and could eat everything but the kitchen sink, you’ve waited too long, my friend. This could activate a primal drive to eat to the point of discomfort to restore energy balance. Honoring the first signs of hunger creates trust with your body that food will always be accessible, and therefore you do not need to overeat.  

If you’ve been dieting for so long, chances are you might have trained your body to ignore hunger cues. It might take some time to relearn what hunger feels like, so be mindful of the following hunger signs:

·      stomach noises like rumbling, gurgling, and growling

·      stomach pain

·      feelings of emptiness in your stomach

·      light-headedness

·      nausea

·      shakiness

·      irritability (aka: hanger danger!)

·      faintness

3.     Make Peace with Food

Give your body unconditional permission to eat. Many diets demonize certain foods or food groups. Therefore, giving yourself permission to eat a certain food, like ice cream, or a whole food group, like carbohydrates, can be extremely uncomfortable!

Let’s use an example: say you allow yourself to eat ice cream after you’ve been restricting it. Not only is it scary to eat a food that was once off limits, but you may also feel uncontrollable around it. Will you feel so out of control and eat the entire pint in a wide-eyed frenzy, barely tasting the deliciousness of your favorite flavor? Probably! Since ice cream was forbidden, your body doesn’t know when it will get it again, so it thinks it needs to binge it. However, as you train your body to understand that you will no longer be depriving yourself of ice cream, it will become accustomed to eating it, a pattern known as habituation. Chances are you’ll require less of it as the allure wears off!

You may feel guilty for eating an off-limits food or feel the need make up for it later through restricting or a compensatory action like exercising. Recognize these impulses and sit with those feelings of discomfort and guilt. The beauty about feelings is that no feeling lasts forever! You don’t need to try and change the feeling, simply notice it and allow it to run its course. Eventually that feeling will pass and be replaced by another one.

It's also important to note that in this step of intuitive eating, nutrition is not the primary goal. The main goal lies in removing the attachment to long-restricted food, so your body can experience food freedom.

4.     Challenge the Food Police

The food police dictate what foods are considered “healthy” and “unhealthy.” It can also look like a self-deprecating voice inside your head when you choose to enjoy a brownie. Sure, it might not say, “Put the brownie down and your hands in the air!” but it might say things like, “You’re so out of control around food. You should be stronger than this.” When the food police sirens go off in your head, take a moment to notice where these thoughts originate. Is it a comment that your mother used to make? Did you hear this from a magazine article you read or a show you watched? It could also be helpful to work through these ingrained beliefs with a therapist as you begin to challenge them.

5.     Discover the Satisfaction Factor

Instead of thinking about what you should eat, what do you want to eat? Should often implies morality, as if there is a correct or right thing to do. When it comes to food, take the morality out of it! It’s not that serious! You can get pleasure and enjoyment from eating what your body truly wants, which then leads to a greater sense of satisfaction. When you sit down to eat what you want, tap into each of your senses to truly savor the experience. Notice how it looks, smells, and tastes. Take your time while eating. Remember, you don’t need to eat food that you don’t want to eat. Experience the sweet smell of food freedom!     

6.     Feel your Fullness

This step might involve quite a bit of trial and error as you become aware of your body’s fullness cues. If you have consistently restricted your food intake, you might be afraid to overeat to the point of feeling uncomfortably full. You may even feel afraid to experience total fullness, since restricting actively avoided that sensation. The bottom line is that you need to give yourself unconditional permission to eat. As you become accustomed to this newfound freedom, you’ll develop a better understanding of what fullness means to you. Check in with your body halfway through your meal and then again at the end of your meal. Are you full? Did you eat more than felt good for your body? Notice how different types and amounts of foods elicit different responses in your body.

You also may feel the pressure to eat to not waste food. We’ve all heard the “There are starving kids in Africa!” comment. Eating the entirety of your plate is not going to solve the hunger crisis in the United States, let alone abroad. There are more systemic factors involved in food insecurity, so if you do want to try to address the system head on, consider joining a political activist or mutual aid group in your community. Think about it this way: whether you eat your entire plate to uncomfortable fullness or throw the food away, it will wind up as waste one way or another. The former winds up as refuse in the toilet and the later ends up as garbage in a trash can. If you’re devastated to see good food in the trash, you can save it for your next meal. Even if it’s not enough to serve as a full meal, you can add some extra greens or grains to make it a more complete and filling meal.      

7.     Cope with your Emotions with Kindness

First let’s address the elephant in the room: emotional eating is not a bad thing! Food serves a lot of purposes, and in some cases, it can provide a lot of comfort during difficult or distressing times. We all have our go-to comfort foods! The goal of intuitive eating isn’t to eliminate emotional eating altogether. It aims to expand the repertoire of coping skills to not avoid or numb uncomfortable emotions by eating food. The next time you notice yourself grabbing food, ask yourself, “Am I really hungry?” You may be sad, stressed, or bored. If that’s the case, try adding in other activities to address the emotion directly, such as the following:

·      Journal

·      Have a good cry

·      Talk with your therapist

·      Take things off your schedule

·      Go for a walk

·      Read a book

·      Dance

·      Call a friend

·      Enjoy a cup of hot tea

·      Play with a pet

·      Take a nap

If you do end up using food to cope with emotions, it’s okay! Don’t berate yourself but rather respond with a little self-compassion. Using food to cope is one strategy, and maybe you try another strategy the next time.

8.     Respect your Body

This is an especially hard task when society teaches us to hate our bodies. There are such unrealistic expectations put onto our bodies of how they should look. Just like you wouldn’t expect to fit into a smaller shoe size, uphold that expectation with your body. When have you really benefitted from hating your body, anyways? Respond to your body with some self-compassion. For example, when you look in the mirror and feel the need to criticize the stretch marks on your belly, take a moment to consider all the hard work your stomach does. Thank it for taking the time to digest all the nutrients in food and transport them to the necessary areas in your body that rely on those nutrients to keep you alive. You don’t need to love your body, but you also don’t need to hate it either.

9.     Movement—Feel the Difference

You may have noticed that the first eight principles have absolutely nothing to do with nutrition and exercise. Taking time to unlearn diet culture creates a strong foundation to add in next steps, like movement. This type of movement may also feel different than previous workouts geared towards losing weight. The goal is to choose a movement that feels good for your body. What feels right for someone else’s body might be very different than what feels aligned for your body. Take time to try different activities and notice how you feel afterwards.  

Note: your body may not have the ability to move much if at all. This further reinforces the need to listen to your body.

By removing the pressure of weight loss from movement, you may notice the plethora of other benefits to movement, such as:      

·      Better mood (thank you endorphins, you gorgeous hormone)

·      Improved muscle strength for more energy to complete daily physical tasks

·      Enhanced sleep

·      Increased cardiovascular health and lung strength

·      Advance joint mobility

·      Build bone density

·      Reduce risk of chronic diseases

·      Sharpen your brain function (i.e.: thinking, learning, judgment, and concentration skills)

And the best part is that you can experience all these benefits independently of weight loss! Focusing on how you feel after movement makes it more enjoyable and sustainable. Whereas if you’re focused on working out to lose weight, it’s easy to feel discouraged when you don’t see the results you want. This can then cause you to lose out on all the other benefits of movement. If you’re not sure where to start with movement, try going for a walk, dancing to a favorite playlist, or doing yoga.

10.  Honor your Health—Gentle Nutrition

One snack or meal will not lead to a nutrient deficiency, so focus on getting all your nutrients consistently over time. We could all do with being a little less intense around food! Make food choices that enhance your well-being, activate your tastebuds, listen to cravings, and honor your culture.   

Systemic Factors Affecting Food Accessibility

It’s important to note that systemic factors influence food choices, access to fresh food, and one’s ability to intuitively eat. Food deserts are geographic areas where there is limited access to affordable, fresh produce within a convenient traveling distance. They are predominately found in low-income neighborhoods and Black and Brown communities. Studies show that wealthy neighborhoods have three times as many supermarkets than poor ones, and mainly white communities have four times as many grocery stores as predominantly Black ones. This inequality affects food choices, as people in food deserts are forced to frequent convenient stores and fast-food chains that primarily sell highly processed foods. Food is political. When the government is sending billions of dollars in weapons to other countries while food insecurity in the United States is alarmingly high, there are broader systemic factors at play. Capitalism, imperialism, colonization, and white supremacy are all to blame for a broken system, so how can we work towards health and liberation from oppressive forces not only individually but collectively?