“Intuitive Eating is a journey back to your authentic self.”
Are you struggling with your relationship with food and your body?
Are you stuck in cycles of endless dieting and patterns of restricting and binging?
Do you have a constant stream of self-criticizing thoughts around your food choices and your body?
What would it be like for you to finally find some peace and ease around food?
How would it feel to receive your guidance from within, trusting your body’s innate wisdom over external food rules?
Would you like to learn a new way of relating to food that has nothing to do with weight or calories?
If you’re wanting to step away from diet culture, create a healthy and sustainable relationship with food, develop more patience and kindness toward yourself and your body, Intuitive Eating is where it’s at.
Intuitive Eating is a self-care eating framework created in the 90s by two dietitians, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, which they shared in their popular book, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach.
Since they wrote the original copy in 1995, there has been tons of research to back up what they found working with clients: diets don’t work and cause serious harm, while developing an intuitive eating approach is what creates a healthy relationship with food and deeper well-being in mind, body, and spirit.
I won’t go into all the research here (I definitely suggest reading their book for that!), my intention is just to share a brief overview of the 10 principles that make up the Intuitive Eating framework to introduce you to this approach if you’ve never heard of it:
Principle 1: Reject the Diet Mentality
Diets don’t work. This might be a hard one for many, but understanding this is a key piece to developing an Intuitive Eating practice. Diet culture has led you to believe you need to follow outside food rules to be healthy, that your body needs to be a certain size to be healthy and lovable. When you go on any kind of restrictive diet and it inevitably fails, you most likely blame yourself and think you somehow failed. What we need to realize is that it’s the diets that have failed us, not our bodies. Dieting leads to worse health outcomes, weight cycling, eating disorders, and much more. The answer lies in moving away from a diet mentality and rebuilding self-trust and autonomy through the rest of the Intuitive Eating principles.
Principle 2: Honor Your Hunger
In order to function properly, your body needs nutrients. When you feel hungry, this is your body signaling to you that it needs energy. When this message is ignored, you will eventually reach a state of excessive hunger and trigger a primal drive to overeat. If you’re looking to outside sources to tell you what to eat or restricting in any way, you are not honoring your own individual hunger cues. One of the first steps in recovering your body’s innate wisdom is learning how to listen to and trust its biological hunger signals.
Principle 3: Make Peace with Food
When you tell yourself you can’t have a food you want, you create an inner war with yourself. This leads to feelings of deprivation, leading to cravings and often binging along with self-judgment and guilt. It can sound scary especially if you’ve been following any kind of food rules for some time, but making peace with food means giving yourself unconditional permission to eat what you want and letting go of all restrictions. The paradox is that once no food is off limits, you will begin to see all foods as more neutral, knowing you can have them whenever you want if it feels good for you, and the intense desire for specific foods will greatly diminish. This principle has to be implemented in the context of the rest of them including listening to hunger and fullness cues in order to truly eat the food and amount that is satisfying for your body.
Principle 4: Challenge the Food Police
You may notice feelings of guilt, shame, and judgment around your food choices. If you consider certain foods “good” and others “bad,” this is the voice of your inner food police. It’s become common in our society to view food through this moral lens. It’s the voice that says not to eat after 8pm or that food has too many carbs in it. Often these rules and beliefs were adopted from someone outside of us and need to be examined to see if they even feel true for us. Letting go of any harmful inner self-talk that has developed as a consequence of living in diet culture is an essential part of reclaiming your innate Intuitive Eater.
Principle 5: Discover the Satisfaction Factor
As we’ve given away our power to outside food rules and diets, one of the most basic and essential pieces in our eating experience has been lost for many: pleasure. You deserve to have a satisfying relationship with food and eat what feels good for you. Eating slowly, savoring your food, and eating what you really want will help you feel satisfied with each meal. Part of this process is checking in with yourself and seeing how the food you’re eating tastes. As you pay attention, you’ll notice the kinds and amounts of food that truly satisfy you.
Principle 6: Feel Your Fullness
This goes hand in hand with honoring your hunger, and they both begin with developing awareness and trust within your body. Pausing when you eat will support you in discovering what it feels like to be comfortably full. If you’ve been a chronic dieter, you may not be used to paying attention to how your body actually feels when you’re eating, instead focusing only on consuming the exact kinds and amounts of food that you’re “supposed to” have on whatever plan you’re following. Eating without distraction and learning to listen to your body’s signals that it’s had enough will support you in developing this skill.
Principle 7: Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness
One of the most important components of Intuitive Eating is cultivating a gentle and compassionate approach to your relationship with food. If you use food as your main way to cope with difficult emotions, it can take some time and awareness to develop new patterns of both relating to food and dealing with your emotions. Although food may be comforting in the short term, it won’t solve the problems beneath what you’re feeling. Talking a walk, speaking with a friend, meditating, journaling, doing something creative, or going to therapy can all be supportive alternatives to emotional eating. Learning to reach for these tools to process your emotions in a healthy way is essential on your Intuitive Eating journey.
Principle 8: Respect Your Body
We all have different bodies that come in various shapes and sizes, which all need to be respected. Constantly trying to alter the size of your body or criticizing how it looks in the here and now is harmful and fuels the unhealthy cycle of dieting. You deserve to feel good in your body, speak to it with kindness, and feed it the nutrients it needs without the aim to lose weight. Realize that going on diet after diet and berating your body for how it looks hasn’t worked yet and isn’t going to start now. If the idea of respecting your body feels difficult for you, know you’re not alone and it will get easier as you move through the process.
Principle 9: Movement— Feel the Difference
Move your body in a way that feels good, instead of for the purpose of trying to change it. If you’ve been exercising with the goal of trying to lose weight, shift your energy toward health-promoting movement that feels nourishing. Start with something that you enjoy doing, such as going for a walk out in nature. Focus on how you feel rather than the amount of calories you’re burning, and notice the difference from the inside out.
Principle 10: Honor Your Health with Gentle Nutrition
This is the last principle for a reason. It can be difficult to truly get in touch with your body’s wisdom and learn to step away from a diet mentality when you’re focused on external nutrition guidance. Although this step can absolutely be implemented before or alongside the others, it can be helpful to practice some of the others before in order to develop that inner self-trust first. After establishing a healthier relationship with food, it’s easier to honor your health and choose foods that are satisfying and nourishing without obsessing. If you truly go through the whole Intuitive Eating process, you will be in touch with your body’s signals enough that you will naturally want to choose high-nutrient foods that give your body what it needs to thrive.
One thing that’s important to note is that although there are 10 principles and they are all really essential to going through this process of Intuitive Eating, they are guidelines and not rules. They don’t have to be explored in order and there is no timeline for them.
This approach is meant to be personalized and work for YOU and your unique needs.
I HIGHLY recommend reading the Intuitive Eating book if this resonates, and working 1:1 with a nutritionist familiar with this approach if you’d like to dive deeper into this process (I invite you to book your complimentary 20 minute discovery session with me if you’d like to connect, learn more about how I work with clients, and see if we’re a good fit for your needs!).
How would it feel to TRULY make peace with food and free yourself from dieting forever? Which principle sticks out to you as especially exciting or terrifying? Are you willing to explore this new perspective?
As Evelyn Tribole says, Intuitive Eating’s highest intention is to guide you on a journey back home to your authentic self, which is what it’s all about in my world.