What is Intuitive Eating?
What are the Intuitive Eating Principles?
Intuitive eating is a self care eating framework that encourages you to engage in behaviors that innately serve your own definition of positive healthIntuitive eating is a self care eating framework based upon 10 principles. Using these ten principles, intuitive eating will help you understand the dynamic interplay between instinct, thought, and emotion so that you can better serve the needs of your own body.
The ten principles of intuitive eating are
#1 - Reject the Diet Mentality
#2 - Honor Your Hunger
#3 - Make Peace with Food
#4 - Challenge the Food Police
#5 - Discover the Satisfaction Factor
#6 - Feel Your Fullness
#7 - Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness
#8 - Respect Your Body
#9 - Movement - Feel the Difference
#10 - Honor Your Health with Gentle Nutrition
Diet culture is the reason many of us feel it is our life’s mission to lose weight. Diet culture insists that health should be defined strictly by a number: your weight. Intuitive eating insists that health should be defined by YOU.
The purpose of this article is to outline the benefits and importance of practicing intuitive eating as it relates to reclaiming your relationship with food and exercise. Intuitive eating is not a diet or set of rigid rules that once followed will lead you to live a perfect, and happy life at a size that is smaller than you are now. Instead, intuitive eating is a practice by which you reclaim your health by learning to reject the diet mentality and honor the body you’re in now.
Why is Intuitive Eating Important?
Intuitive eating is important because it is a way to reconnect with your body. When you learn to reconnect with your body’s innate wisdom you’re able to tune into your hunger and fullness in order to better serve your body’s needs. Intuitive eating is important because it allows for space to truly uncover what feels good (and what doesn’t!) in your body, and allows the space to re-discover how a positive self care framework can enhance your health by letting go of preconceived ideas that losing weight will solve all your problems.The importance of intuitive eating is to disengage from diet culture such that you have more space to reconnect with your own definition of wellness, not trying to fit into a narrow definition of “health.” Taking weight loss off the table doesn’t mean you’re not focused on taking care of your body, in fact, it means you’re most invested in doing what’s best for you for the long term.
What are the Benefits of Intuitive Eating?
With over 150 scientific papers to support the validity of intuitive eating and body liberation as a modality of health, such as, The Body Politic: The Relationship Between Stigma and Obesity Related Disease, Weight Science; Evaluating the Evidence for a Paradigm Shift and Learning to Eat Intuitively: A Qualitative Exploration the benefits of intuitive eating are vast and far reaching. It has been found that those who practice intuitive eating have lower levels of disordered eating, lower triglyceride levels, lower incidence of emotional eating, lower levels of loss of control or binge eating, blood pressure, weight bias internalization, and body dissatisfaction. On the flip side, intuitive eaters have higher self-esteem, higher levels of well-being and optimism, body appreciation and acceptance, HDL (good cholesterol), proactive coping, psychological hardiness, conditional self-regard, interoceptive awareness, and greater life satisfaction (How Neuroscience Can Help You Become an Intuitive Eater).
How to Start Eating Intuitively
Here are a few questions you should ask if you think you’re ready to start eating intuitively:
Are you ready to call a truce with the war on your body?
Do you wish you could reclaim the constant thoughts about food and body image and use them to pursue what actually interests you?
Do you wish you could go out to eat and order what you truly want on the menu?
Are you finally ready to let go of the “perfect body” and find love and acceptance as you are right now?
Great! Then intuitive eating is right for you.
In order to start eating intuitively, you must cultivate within you the belief that you are worth unconditional positive regard. The process towards repairing your relationship with food and body image can be a long, and complex one—especially if you’ve been dieting all your life—and so in order to embark on the road to becoming an intuitive eater, it is important you approach the work with compassion for yourself. You didn’t learn the rules of diet culture overnight, so it will take longer than a day to un-learn them as well. The very first step in learning to eat intuitively is to give yourself permission to mess up. Intuitive eating is not a linear process, and coming to terms with that right from the beginning will be instrumental in your healing. Intuitive eating is about reconnecting with your body, and unlearning the myriad of “diet rules” that keep you stuck seeking external validation and justification for how your body should function.
The 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating
There are 10 principles of intuitive eating. Once you’ve fully unpacked and understood them, these principles will help you heal your relationship with disordered food behaviors, and poor body image.
#1 Reject the Diet Mentality
Intuitive eating is about calling a truce with yourself, and reattuning yourself with your body’s signals. Once you can let go of the idea that a diet will cure your problems, you can begin to truly reconnect with how to properly care for your body. Rejecting the diet mentality asks that you get rid of the tools that help keep you ingrained in the ways of dieting such as your scale, fitness tracker, calorie counters, and clothes that don’t fit. Alternatively,to reject the diet mentality, get rid of the tools that help keep you ingrained in patterns of self-doubt.
#2 Honor Your Hunger
When you keep your body biologically fed, you are better equipped to make decisions that truly honor your health. When you don’t eat enough food, your body will constantly believe it’s in danger (think about a primal drive to eat), making it challenging to adequately tune into what your body will feel best consuming. Hunger looks and feels different for every body, and learning how to figure out what hunger feels like in your body is the first step in making peace with all foods. Try putting yourself on an eating schedule to make sure you’re eating enough. From there, you’ll be able to reconnect with what hunger feels like in your body such that you can learn to better tune into its signals.
#3 Make Peace with Food
When you learn to eat intuitively, no food is off limits because all foods are morally equivalent. That means learning to take food off their pedestal so that they no longer have power over you. Morally equivalent and nutritionally equivalent are different, but if we continue to stigmatize that eating candy is “bad” for you, we will never be able to make peace with candy, which is what often leads many to overeat or binge on it. Making peace with food is about understanding the merits of eating a cupcake and steamed broccoli without fretting that one will kill you and one will cure you...because no foods have that ability. When all foods are morally equivalent, it lessens the urge to binge or overeat on what was previously off limits.
#4 Challenge the Food Police
Challenging the food police is about actively talking back to the inner voice that demands you “never eat processed food.” Some other common refrains your inner critic might make would be to, “limit your sugar intake or you’ll get fat” “you already had a piece of bread today so no more grain based carbs,” or even messaging that you need to “slim down for the big event,” might play into negative self talk. You, as an intuitive eater, are in charge of what goes in your body without judgement. When you’re able to push back against that critical inner voice, it frees you to make decisions based on what you truly desire eating. Being able to challenge the food police means first identifying your inner critic by carefully examining when you hear it most often. Are the thoughts around food mostly negative? Do you frequently chastise yourself for choosing certain foods? Does your inner critic sound comparative? Judging your merits based on those around you? Spend time trying to identify when you hear the voice most often, and then pinning down what the rhetoric often is (is it shame, guilt, or anger based?).
#5 Discover the Satisfaction Factor
Food is meant to be pleasurable! When you learn to eat intuitively, seeking satisfaction extends beyond just what you eat. Learning to make time to slow down, savor each bite, and become more mindful of what’s on your plate will allow you to truly enjoy the food you decide to nourish your body with. In addition to enjoying life with more attention towards satisfaction, you are reducing a huge amount of daily cognitive load and stress you would otherwise spend worrying about food.
#6 Feel Your Fullness
Like hunger, learning what your limits are with food is a huge step in learning to eat intuitively. Learning to feel your fullness is about discovering what your food threshold is. Sometimes you may eat past fullness, and sometimes you might eat too far below it - the key component with this principle is being able to identify what that goldilocks point is for your body. There will be moments when you eat too much or too little, and becoming an intuitive eater means meeting that situation with compassion. When you’re able to tune into self compassion rather than shame, or guilt, you give yourself more resiliency to build better coping strategies rather than turn towards unhealthy or maladaptive coping strategies like those proposed by diet culture (yoy-dieting, binge eating, etc).
#7 Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness
Food has a huge role in our emotions. We eat to celebrate big events, milestones, and generally speaking, to comfort ourselves. Being able to unpack what you’re feeling to make a neutral and non-judgemental decision about whether or not food will help remedy your emotions is key in reclaiming your relationship with your body and food. Working with an intuitive eating coach can help you unpack your feelings about food, and take you through various strategies (such as structured journaling, and embodiment work) to help untrain your aversion to eating foods with guilt.
#8 Respect Your Body
You don’t have to love your body to take care of it. The work of intuitive eating is about learning to give your body respect, while cultivating a deep sense of appreciation for all it does. Your body is more than an ornament to be looked at, it’s an instrument to be used! As you work through the principles of intuitive eating and unpack the deeply ingrained anti-fat rhetoric that makes up the world of diet culture, you will begin to understand just how important it is to love your body for the way it is now, not the way it could be if it were smaller.
#9 Movement - Feel the Difference
Reclaiming your relationship with food also means learning to reclaim your relationship with movement! In this principle you’re encouraged to explore the different ways (and benefits) movement can impact the way you feel in your body. As you explore different forms of movement, notice what resonates most with your body. Do you enjoy running, dancing, lifting, swimming, or all of the above? Nourish your body with healthy forms of movement, while being mindful to do so from a place of love and growth rather than aggressive or restrictive discipline.
#10 Honor Your Health with Gentle Nutrition
Once you’ve fully accepted—and rejected—diet culture, the final principle in intuitive eating is gentle nutrition. This principle is not to be confused with “clean eating.” Remember: there are no rules with intuitive eating. Just because steamed broccoli has more nutrition than a cupcake doesn’t mean you have to always say no to a cupcake. Practicing gentle nutrition means eating when you’re not hungry if you know you won’t have access to food for longer than normal, deciding to experiment with more (or less) vegetables at dinner, or even choosing a packaged meal if you don’t have time to cook after a stressful day.
Can Anti-Diet Athlete Coaching Help with Intuitive Eating?
Relearning how to reconnect with hunger and fullness is easy in principle, but actually being able to sift through the noise can be incredibly challenging! That’s where an anti-diet coach—such as myself—can help you. Anti-diet athlete coaching is about better understanding how to train smart, and sustainably. There are no rules, or restrictions with athlete programming, rather a guided approach to help you set and achieve the goals you set for yourself. In the process you’ll learn how to eat in a way that best supports your body and athletic goals. Having the accountability of a coach can help keep you centered on your fitness goals, in addition to giving you the one-on-one support you need to reclaim your relationship with food and exercise.
Final Tips for Intuitive Eating
Remember that intuitive eating is a self-care eating framework. There is no right or wrong way to engage with intuitive eating so long as what you decide to eat (and how much of it) is done so without any associated morality attached to it. That means that whenever you eat a meal you should never feel guilty, ashamed, or angry at yourself, and likewise you should never feel as though you’re “good” for eating an apple (for example). When it comes to food and exercise, try asking yourself these questions;
Do you LIKE the food you’re eating on a daily basis?
Do the foods you eat bring you a sense of joy?
Do you actively seek satisfaction and enjoyment in your meals?
Are you making time to truly check in with yourself as you’re eating - such as taking time to slow
down and be present at any given mealtime?
Are you using food to satisfy your physical hunger, or emotional hunger? Key indicators might be, are you actively trying to nourish your body, or do you feel like you are appeasing certain emotions like anger, frustration, stress, or a desire for comfort?
Are you eating based on personal preference? Or a set of rules/restrictions?
Take some time to reflect on the questions above, and if you’re noticing a pattern of negative responses, consider reaching out for coaching. You can book a free discovery session with me using this link.
Frequently Asked Questions About Intuitive Eating
#1 - What’s the first step in intuitive eating?
The first step in intuitive eating is to remember that intuitive eating is not a diet! It is a self care eating framework that will grow and evolve over time, and for the rest of your life. If you are serious about making a truce with your body then you’re ready to begin eating intuitively. It doesn’t mean you need to love your body, only that you’re ready to begin the work to reclaim your relationship with it. Once you’ve called a truce, begin by reading the book Intuitive Eating, and getting in touch with a counselor. You can book a free discovery session with a counselor such as myself to help give you starting points for your journey.
#2 - How do you deal with weight gain and body image after letting go of food rules?
Dealing with body changes might be one of the most challenging aspects of intuitive eating, the reason for this being that we live in a society that celebrates unrealistic—and unhealthy—expectations of bodies for both men and women. When you begin to eat intuitively, you’ll notice how prevalent diet culture is in the fabric of our society (speaking namely about American ideals). When you can discern and unpack the rigidity of diet culture, you can get fired up to demand change. When this isn’t enough (because you’re only human), working through principle #8, respecting your body, will teach you how to cultivate self care even when you’re struggling with poor body image. Remember: you didn’t learn to hate your body overnight, so it will take time to relearn how to love it.
#3 - How can you trust your body to eat anything without going overboard?
When you begin to eat intuitively, it makes sense that you’ll probably eat past fullness! Why? You’ve most likely been restricting for so long, that having “no rules” will be really enticing. But over time, and as demonstrated by scientific research on the subject, the body’s ability to self-regulate will kick in and you’ll no longer feel the primal urge to “go overboard.”
#4 - How do I deal with the guilt that comes with eating sweet/sugary foods?
Learning to unpack the morality attached to food is central to repairing your relationship with it. In principle #7 you’ll learn how to unpack the emotions that are often so heavily associated with food and eating, and learn to approach each sensation with kindness and a sense of body neutrality.
#5 - Where can I find more resources on Intuitive Eating?
Check out the following books for more on how to get started with intuitive eating.
