What Is Intuitive Eating?

by Kelly | Intuitive Eating

Eating should be effortless and stress-free, right? But for many of us, it’s riddled with second guessing and guilt. A gentler and kinder approach to food and our bodies is intuitive eating.

What is intuitive eating?

Intuitive eating is a method developed to help people heal from the side effects of chronic dieting. 

People who continually diet often experience a “diet backlash” – increased strictness regarding good and bad foods, restriction leading to increased binging, reduction in trust of self with food, feelings about not “deserving” food, social withdrawal, and shortened duration of “successful” dieting attempts.

An intuitive eater is defined as a person who “makes food choices without experiencing guilt or an ethical dilemma, honours hunger, respects fullness and enjoys the pleasure of eating.” 

Intuitive Eating has become very popular over the last few years. I love this because it’s one of the core philosophies I use with my clients. But I also know there’s a lot of misunderstanding and misapplication about the “hunger and fullness diet”, as one of my client’s calls it.

I was first introduced to the book Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch about four years ago when I was in therapy overcoming long-term Bulimia. Evelyn and Elyse were among the first people to provide a clear alternative to dieting.

Tribole and Resch, describe Intuitive Eating as a way of paying attention to and honouring your body’s cues about what it needs. This means trusting your body to know what and how much it needs.

It has only been in the last two years that I’ve started to really appreciate the potential of Intuitive Eating and truly live it. Unlike a diet, it’s meant to be explored as a journey.

It doesn’t come instantly – after all, it’s a completely different way of looking at food and your body.

It’s especially difficult to grasp after years of chronic dieting. Diet’s explicitly train you to not pay attention to your body cues. Intuitive eating is the polar opposite of a diet.

What is Intuitive Eating?

First of all – IT’S NOT ANOTHER DIET.

It’s far more than the “hunger and fullness diet”. More accurately it is an approach to eating that hopes to achieve a more sensible weight moderation through raising awareness about an individual’s psychological relationship with food. 

We are all born as natural intuitive eaters.

Kids grow up as intuitive eaters and are innately able to balance out their food and energy intake throughout the week. Some weeks kids are ravenous, while other weeks they barely eat.

It isn’t until rules and restrictions are set around food that our inner intuitive eating compass goes all out of whack. We learn to finish the entire plate. We learn that dessert has to be earned, or can be taken away if we misbehave. We learn that we have to eat our vegetables before getting dessert.

The 10 principles of Intuitive Eating are:

1. Reject the Diet Mentality.
2. Honour your Hunger
3. Make peace with Food
4. Challenge the Food Police
5. Respect your Fullness
6. Discover the Satisfaction Factor
7. Honour Your Feelings without Using Food
8. Respect your Body
9. Exercise – Feel the Difference
10. Honour your Health

What Intuitive Eating is not?

Intuitive Eating is not a magic pill. It’s a journey and a practice. Going from chronic dieter to intuitive eater doesn’t happen overnight. But I think it’s the best we’ve got at the moment.

Intuitive Eating is not another set of rules to follow – there is no right or wrong. Once you’re eating (and living) intuitively, what works for you, will be the way you do it.

You don’t have to only eat when you’re physically hungry. There will be many occasions where you will want to celebrate with food and that’s perfectly normal, and ok.

You don’t have to stop eating when you hit a certain number on the hunger scale. Use the hunger scale as a guide only.

Intuitive Eating isn’t all or nothing, every day is different, everyone’s physical requirements are different. Some day’s you’ll eat salads and some days you’ll eat cake. It’s called balance.

Every single person and every single day is different. Every person’s definition of “normal eating” is different.

You can’t eat normally like someone else, because their normal doesn’t mean it is right for you. Once diet thoughts, and restriction, and fear are out of the way, your body will start to eat intuitively.

Let the principles of Intuitive Eating guide your eating and heal your relationship with food. It’s about connecting back to your body’s cues and taking action. Not another diet to obsess, worry and get ‘perfect’. Don’t over-complicate it.

The Intuitive Eating Journey

I’m not going to tell you that the journey to becoming an Intuitive Eater is easy. Because it’s not.

It’s not as simple as following the 10 principles and you’ll lose weight and end up the happiest and healthiest you’ve ever been. We have to literally unpack years of unhealthy eating habits and our dieter’s mentality.

Although I can tell you, no one else has come up with a better plan. Even the government are still recommending diets, even though they do. not. work.

Without a doubt behaviour change can be hard and uncomfortable, but I can honestly tell you it feels so amazing to feel free of the worry, stress and obsession about food and your body 24/7!

You do eventually appreciate that food is fuel for your remarkable body to flourish; yet it’s also a wonderful source of pleasure and enjoyment, and a way to connect and bond socially.

You’ll find that true nourishment is found in many sources other than just food. By exploring all of your hungers – physical, emotional, mental and spiritual – you’ll find nourishment in unlikely places. For example, I often feel nourished and satisfied inside and out, when I spend time with my closest girlfriends or my partner, or a snuggle on the couch with my dog. 

You’ll begin to really savour and enjoying the slice of chocolate cake or caramel slice, rather than trying to be “good” with a low-calorie, low sugar, fat free, “guilt-free” muffin…

“Normal eaters”

For “normal eaters” (those that do not diet), hunger is a cue that food is needed. When individuals ignore hunger, they are fighting an inborn evolutionary set of biological processes that are in place for the sole purpose of survival. Restrictive or restrained eating may trigger cues to fight for survival, and this may intensify cravings. Over time, individuals adapt to a lower food intake and the individual learns to ignore hunger cues, until they become ravenously hungry. 

This triggers the common diet phenomenon of then eating more than our bodies actually need. This then leads to people believing they cannot be trusted with food and the psychological relationship with food then becomes complicated. 

While in most “normal eaters” food regulation is an inherently well-built system, after repeatedly following external rules (diet attempts), individuals instead form maladaptive habits. Advocates of Intuitive Eating believe in doing so, people lose touch with internal hunger and satiety cues. Intuitive Eating suggests first rejecting everything people have ever learned about dieting.

This means forgetting all the rules about what to eat, when to eat, counting calories, carbs, or fat grams. Advocates of intuitive eating believe getting rid of these external rules will help most individuals get back in touch with internal cues about what and how much to eat.

It’s human nature to sometimes eat when not hungry. 

In many cultures, food plays a part in celebratory events and you may find yourself presented with food when you are not necessarily hungry. The key is to be aware that in these circumstances eating is a way to bond, celebrate, or simply an opportunity to eat food that tastes good, that you may not ordinarily come across often.

Intuitive eating is about eating with awareness and permitting yourself to eat mindfully at these times. This will help guard against overeating and help prevent feelings of guilt afterwards. Which can undermine your self-confidence with food and the intuitive eating process.

People will also eat certain foods at certain times for practical reasons. For example, fitting meals into a busy schedule may mean that a meal may be eaten earlier or later than normal. Eating before you’re hungry would obviously be more sensible than waiting until food is unavailable, or when you become ravenously hungry.

People often eat for emotional reasons not physical reasons 

This is often a powerful cue for many people. It is customary to celebrate successes by going out to eat and people often grow up associating food with comfort. Movies and television programs reinforce this by showing people who are sad soothing themselves with a tub of ice cream.

Furthermore, people also eat out of boredom or as a way to procrastinate. How often has your child asked for a snack or drink as a way to postpone going to bed at night? Adults do this too. It is less difficult to recognise that you may eat or overeat when you are stressed, sad, or angry. 

Intuitive eating proposes the disconnection from hunger cues is fostered by these learned connections between food and emotions. The key is to become aware when you are eating for reasons other than hunger. Look for ways to meet your emotional or other needs without food. For example, getting rest, self-nurturance, expressing and dealing with your feelings, and looking for ways to receive comfort from another source other than food.

For individuals who recognise they are eating to meet emotional or other needs, there is no benefit from feeling guilty. Instead, the recommendation is to explore what need is not being met and work to meet it in other ways.  For some individuals, this may require the help of a psychologist.

Our physiology

Our brains and bodies respond to not only hunger cues, but also satiety (fullness) cues. Satiety cues are those cues that trigger messages in the brain that we have had enough food. It generally takes your brain 20 minutes to catch up to your stomach. As with hunger cues, you can become disconnected from satiety cues too.

Disconnection from satiety cues are also be learned. As children, many of us were taught to finish everything on our plates. This becomes a habit and instead of stopping when full, people continue to eat until all the food on the plate is gone and are then over full. Disconnection from satiety cues can also occur when people wait too long to eat and are so ravenous they quickly finish their food without giving the body enough time to sense satiety  awareness. This often occurs when not enough time is prioritised to eat due to busy schedules.

Foods are “bad”

Possibly an under recognised reason for overeating is because individuals come to believe certain foods are “bad” and they restrict it. Some people get into the habit of subconsciously making a pact with themselves that after this piece of chocolate they will never eat chocolate again. Intuitive eating believes that giving oneself permission to eat chocolate whenever wanted, will actually result in eating less of it, and will result in less desire for it.

From my personal experience, you may want to eat a lot of your previously “bad” or “forbidden foods” initially, but after a while they lose their appeal and you will no longer want to overeat them all the time.

Intuitive eating in a nutshell comes down to this: eat when you are hungry and stop when you are full. This sounds simple enough, but in truth learning to eat intuitively is much more complex and takes a lot of practice, patience, and persistence.

But eating intuitively CAN be learned.

It is important to note that while the principles of Intuitive Eating are gaining the attention of researchers there is a lot to learn about how this style of eating relates to and fits with the larger body of knowledge on body image, chronic dieting, obesity, eating disorders, and other health issues. So far, the findings suggest that those who score higher on a measure of Intuitive Eating score lower on measures of disordered eating, report less body dissatisfaction, greater interceptive awareness (awareness of internal bodily cues), less pressure for thinness, and are less likely to internalise society’s thin “ideal” body type.

Based on research

There is also some support for a link between intuitive eating and greater self-esteem, satisfaction with life, optimism, and proactive coping skills.

*Like most things in life, there are limitations. While the principles seem straightforward, eating, diet, and individual’s relationship with food is often quite the opposite – complicated. Advocates and the authors of the above book, do caution readers that Intuitive Eating is not appropriate for those with an eating disorder, as they are particularly dissociated with their bodies and would instead first benefit from a well thought out meal plan to normalise eating and food intake, before attempting Intuitive Eating.

I offer programs and services to help people heal their relationship to food and their bodies, by learning to reject dieting and move towards an effective intuitive eating approach.