What is Intuitive Eating?
So you want to start Intuitive Eating?
Then this is what you need to do… trust me when I say that the key to creating your new way of eating is to 1) Simplify: go back to the basics and unlearn the damaging protocols that diet culture taught you. And 2) Take things nice and slowly, the more you ease your way into it the less teething “problems” you’ll have, and I say “problems” because in the end it’s all a learning experience, not a “failing” experience. With each day that you feel you are further away from the strict and harsh rules of dieting, the more in balance you will become until before you know it, you’re not even thinking twice about whether you fancy a delicious piece of cake, a delicious fresh salad, a delicious snack, a delicious takeaway or a delicious home-cooked meal…. it’s all equal when you do it in balance and the more connected you are with your body and what it needs and wants in the moment, the more in balance you’ll be.
Intuitive Eating is a self-care eating framework…
…which integrates instinct, emotional and rational thought, Intuitive Eating is a weight-inclusive, evidence based model with a validated assessment scale and over 140+ studies to date. With 10 defined principles it helps you regain trust with your body. It is applicable for every-BODY (shape, size, colour and medical disease)!*
In short, intuitive eating is an evidence-based tried and tested approach that has shown unparalleled results in the quest for improved physical and mental health in the way we think about food/our bodies, how we eat and move, and how we feel holistically.
It is an anti-diet approach that challenges the status quo which currently endorses the labelling of foods as “good” and “bad”, shames larger bodies, celebrates thinner bodies and assumes that anyone who simply eats less and moves more would unequivocally reach what is deemed “healthy” and aesthetically pleasing. This can lead to detrimental thoughts and habits that have promoted disordered eating and warped ideologies for many people.
So instead, intuitive eating offers a different path…
There are 10 Main Principles
1. Reject the Diet Mentality
Throw out the diet books and magazine articles that offer you the false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently. Get angry at diet culture that promotes weight loss and the lies that have led you to feel as if you were a failure every time a new diet stopped working and you gained back all of the weight. If you allow even one small hope to linger that a new and better diet or food plan might be lurking around the corner, it will prevent you from being free to rediscover Intuitive Eating.
2. Honour Your Hunger
Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates. Otherwise you can trigger a primal drive to overeat. Once you reach the moment of excessive hunger, all intentions of moderate, conscious eating are fleeting and irrelevant. Learning to honor this first biological signal sets the stage for rebuilding trust in yourself and in food.
3. Make Peace with Food
Call a truce; stop the food fight! Give yourself unconditional permission to eat. If you tell yourself that you can’t or shouldn’t have a particular food, it can lead to intense feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings and, often, bingeing. When you finally “give in” to your forbidden foods, eating will be experienced with such intensity it usually results in Last Supper overeating and overwhelming guilt.
4. Challenge the Food Police
Scream a loud no to thoughts in your head that declare you’re “good” for eating minimal calories or “bad” because you ate a piece of chocolate cake. The food police monitor the unreasonable rules that diet culture has created. The police station is housed deep in your psyche, and its loudspeaker shouts negative barbs, hopeless phrases, and guilt-provoking indictments. Chasing the food police away is a critical step in returning to Intuitive Eating.
5. Discover the Satisfaction Factor
The Japanese have the wisdom to keep pleasure as one of their goals of healthy living. In our compulsion to comply with diet culture, we often overlook one of the most basic gifts of existence—the pleasure and satisfaction that can be found in the eating experience. When you eat what you really want, in an environment that is inviting, the pleasure you derive will be a powerful force in helping you feel satisfied and content. By providing this experience for yourself, you will find that it takes just the right amount of food for you to decide you’ve had “enough.”
6. Feel Your Fullness
In order to honour your fullness, you need to trust that you will give yourself the foods that you desire. Listen for the body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry. Observe the signs that show that you’re comfortably full. Pause in the middle of eating and ask yourself how the food tastes, and what your current hunger level is.
7. Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness
First, recognise that food restriction, both physically and mentally, can, in and of itself, trigger loss of control, which can feel like emotional eating. Find kind ways to comfort, nurture, distract, and resolve your issues. Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, and anger are emotions we all experience throughout life. Each has its own trigger, and each has its own appeasement. Food won’t fix any of these feelings. It may comfort for the short term, distract from the pain, or even numb you. But food won’t solve the problem. If anything, eating for an emotional hunger may only make you feel worse in the long run. You’ll ultimately have to deal with the source of the emotion.
8. Respect Your Body
Accept your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect to realistically squeeze into a size six, it is equally futile (and uncomfortable) to have a similar expectation about body size. But mostly, respect your body so you can feel better about who you are. It’s hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly critical of your body size or shape. All bodies deserve dignity.
9. Movement—Feel the Difference
Forget militant exercise. Just get active and feel the difference. Shift your focus to how it feels to move your body, rather than the calorie-burning effect of exercise. If you focus on how you feel from working out, such as energised, it can make the difference between rolling out of bed for a brisk morning walk or hitting the snooze alarm.
10. Honour Your Health—Gentle Nutrition
Make food choices that honour your health and taste buds while making you feel good. Remember that you don’t have to eat perfectly to be healthy. You will not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency or become unhealthy, from one snack, one meal, or one day of eating. It’s what you eat consistently over time that matters. Progress, not perfection, is what counts.
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*Source: www.intuitiveeating.org. There are a few key thinkers in the field of intuitive eating, but this the official definition and main principles that come from Evelyn Tribole (MS, RDN, CEDRD-S) and Elsye Resch (MS, RDN, CEDRD-S, FAN-RD) who coined the term Intuitive Eating, founded intutiveeating.org and are the authors of ‘Intuitive Eating, 4th Edition: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach
