If you feel like the diet and weight loss medication talk is everywhere all the time and you’re sick of it — or you’ve just been there, done that, and now you know it doesn’t work — there may be an obvious call to look for something different, something better.
Although it’s not new—it’s been around since the mid-1990s—intuitive eating is an attractive, tempting option. (Certainly, it has changed the lives of many of my clients.) Unfortunately, there is a common misconception that intuitive eating is simply the “starvation and fullness diet” — eat only when you are hungry, stop eating as soon as you feel full.
While this is a very common misconception, intuitive eating is much more than that. At its core, it’s about removing morality (“good/bad”) from food. It is also approx restoring confidence in your body’s signs so you can feed yourself well without the guilt associated with diet culture.
Brief overview of the 10 Principles
In case you’re not familiar, intuitive eating is organized into 10 principles that interact and support each other:
- Ditch the Diet Mindset: Recognizing and recognizing the damage that restrictive dieting can cause, becoming aware of the characteristics of eating mindset and thinking (such as willpower, obedience, failure), letting go of dieting tools (such as a scale), and showing self-compassion.
- Honor your hunger: Recognizing signs of biological hunger as well as those of gustatory hunger and emotional hunger.
- Make peace with food: Get rid of the pendulum of deprivation food, the food of the Last Supper and so on, by getting used to “forbidden foods” to eliminate the urge to overeat these foods when you choose to enjoy them. This principle also aims to eliminate the labels of “good” and “bad” foods.
- Challenge the food police: It focuses on quiet negative self-talk and black-and-white thinking about food and eating, which opens the door to neutral observations about how different foods make you feel and making healthy food choices without guilt or deprivation.
- Discover the satisfaction factor: When we eat foods we enjoy and “hit,” ideally in a pleasant environment, we feel more satisfied and satisfied.
- Feel your fullness: This has to do with learning to recognize comfortable satiety, but it also depends on prior principles, because it’s harder to stop eating when you’re comfortably full, if you start eating when you’re angry, you’re choosing foods you “need” to eat but don’t like, or don’t fully believe that you have permission to eat something delicious the next time you’re hungry, or the next time you want it.
- Deal with your emotions with kindness: This is about being more attuned to when the urge to eat is due to emotion rather than hunger, the emotions we feel, and how we can best meet those needs with kindness, which can sometimes include eating.
- Respect your body: It includes making your body comfortable and responsive to its basic needs, as well as respecting body diversity.
- Movement—Feel the difference: This includes disassociating exercise from weight loss and focusing on movement as a form of self-care.
- Honor your health with gentle nutrition: It’s about making food choices that honor your health and taste buds while making you feel good.
Because intuitive eating is not a weight loss plan
As I mentioned at the beginning, two of the most well-known principles — “honor your hunger” and “feel your fullness” — are often misconstrued as a kind of “starvation diet” without dieting. An “intuitive” path to weight loss, if you will.
Even food culture and the diet industry have tried to co-opt intuitive eating. (I’ve gotten emails from diet programs and calorie-counting app creators who wanted me to write about how they help people eat intuitively.)
But no matter who says or implies that intuitive eating is a “non-diet” way to lose weight or that it helps you lose weight “naturally,” Intuitive eating is not a weight loss diet, nor was it ever intended to be. It’s about healing your relationship with food, mind and body. It offers a way to eat nutritiously without dieting.
Focusing on weight loss prevents you from making food choices based on your body’s internal cues. Why? Because when you focus on weight, you pay attention to external measures of food—like portion size, calories, macros—rather than connecting to your internal cues of hunger, fullness, and satisfaction.
Taking weight loss out of the equation* opens the door to food freedom. It allows you to focus on enjoying the food and treating your body with respect and kindness.
My experience is that some people lose weight after adopting and practicing intuitive eating for a period of time, some people gain weight, and some people stay essentially the same weight. Often, this depends on whether they are above or below their genetically predetermined weight* when they start intuitive eating.
*This is why I believe body image work is an essential partner to intuitive eating work.
The difference between “impulse eating” and “intuitive eating”
It’s not unusual for me to have a new client who says they’ve practiced intuitive eating by “letting myself have whatever food I want whenever I want it.”
Unfortunately, this is impulsive eating, not intuitive eating.
Yes, part of being at peace with food is the unconditional permission to eat, another thing that is often misunderstood. Just as intuitive eating is not the “starvation diet,” it is also not the “everything diet.”
Intuitive food pairings that give unconditional permission to eat in coordination at physical sensations such as hunger and fullness as well as the physical sensations that accompany emotions.
- When you think you want a food and automatically find and eat that food, you are not listening to your body.
- You don’t check in to see if you’re hungry at the time. (Or, maybe you do, but you don’t take a moment to decide which foods will best nourish and fill you up until your next meal.)
- You don’t think about how that food might make you feel physically.
- You don’t assess whether something other than hunger is causing the urge to eat, such as stress or boredom. (The things that could be better dealt with than things other than food.)
Sometimes, Eating impulsively in people who are new to intuitive eating happens because they haven’t fully come to terms with food yet. They give themselves “pseudo-permission” to eat.
This means that you may tell yourself that there are no “good” and “bad” foods and that no food is off limits, yet (consciously or subconsciously) not believe it. So when you think about having a cookie, you rush to have that cookie before you change your mind. This is eerily similar to the “my diet starts on Monday” type of The Last Supper.
Other times, a simple misunderstanding leads to impulsive, not intuitive, eating. One hears a little about Intuitive Eating and jumps to the wrong conclusion. Or maybe the person who explained about Intuitive eating was not very clear.
Ultimate food for thought
As I often explain to clients, when you eat intuitively, you are honoring your hunger and also knowing that hunger is not an emergency. Hunger is just a sign that you should think about eating sooner rather than later. There may also be times when you eat when you are not hungry.
Maybe you’re at a birthday party and there’s cake and you’re not hungry, but it’s really good cake and you’d like a slice and It’s nice to be a part of this communal, festive dining experience.
Maybe you have a meeting or a date when you would normally eat lunch, but you decide to eat before, even though you’re not hungry yet, because if you wait until you are hungry you will not have the opportunity to eat.
Make food choices based on:
- How hungry are you?
- What will satisfy you now and keep you satisfied until you plan to eat again
- What foods do you have available?
- How food will make you feel physically (ie, do certain foods affect energy levels, digestion, etc.)
- What the food gives you nutritionally (in a soft nutritional sense, not a rigid sense)
- How they support any diet-related health conditions you may have
Ultimately, this is far more respectful of your body and mind than endless cycles of restriction and chaotic eating.
Need more help improving your relationship with food, eating and body image? Click here to schedule a free 20-minute Discovery Call to talk about your concerns and whether you would benefit from nutritional therapy.
Intuitive food reading list
And, if you’re looking for a gift for an intuitive foodie in your life (maybe that’s you!), here’s a quick list:
This post contains Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon affiliate I earn on qualifying purchases.
Disclaimer: All information provided here is general in nature and provided for educational purposes only. This information should not be taken as medical or other health advice related to an individual’s specific health or medical condition. You agree that use of this information is at your own risk.
Hi, I’m Carrie Dennett, MPH, RDN, a weight that includes registered dietitian, nutritionist and body image consultant. I offer compassionate, personalized care for adults of all ages, shapes, sizes and genders who want to break free from eating disorders, disordered eating or years of dieting. If you need to learn how to management of IBS symptoms with food, or improve your eating and lifestyle habits to help manage a current health concern or just supporting your overall health and wellness, helping people with that too.
Need 1-on-1 help with your nutrition, food or body image concerns? Program a free 20-minute Discovery Call let’s talk about how I can help you and explore if we’re a good fit! I am in network with Regence BCBS, FirstChoice Health and Providence Health Plan and can bill Blue Cross and/or Blue Shield insurance in many states. If I don’t get your insurance, I can help you claim compensation yourself. To learn more, explore our insurance and service areas page.
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