What is Intuitive Eating?
“There’s magic in our bones,
A north star in our soul
That remembers our way home.””
Listen to your body.
Wellness culture tells us this. After decades of indoctrinating us to do everything but accept our body’s set point (even and especially when it is classified as “overweight” and “obese” — see “Everything You Know About Obesity is Wrong” by Michael Hobbes if you subscribe to the “fat is bad” narrative), our natural hunger cues and cravings, and so much more, it’s no wonder we are disconnected from what our body needs and wants. Considering we have known that dieting does not work since the 1950’s, it’s amazing that special diets not intended for special medical reasons still thrive. I can only guess that the human drive to achieve practical immortality, agelessness, painlessness, efficiency, boundless energy and sex drive, social love and acceptance, and a sense of superiority is keeping these alive and well. Hello, keto and Paleo and intermittent fasting and all. Even working in the industry, I feel overwhelmed at the options and the restrictions. What’s right? What’s wrong? What’ll kill me slowly, and what’ll give me an extra edge?
This is where intuitive eating, coined by Evelyn Tribole, comes in.
The Ten Principles of Intuitive Eating:
1. Reject the Diet Mentality Throw out the diet books and magazine articles that offer you false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently. Get angry at 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 might be lurking around the corner, it will prevent you from being free to rediscover Intuitive Eating.
2. Honor 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 re-building trust with yourself and 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 food, 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 dieting has created . The police station is housed deep in your psyche, and its loud speaker shouts negative barbs, hopeless phrases, and guilt-provoking indictments. Chasing the Food Police away is a critical step in returning to Intuitive Eating.
5. Respect Your Fullness 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 a meal or food and ask yourself how the food tastes, and what is your current fullness level?
6. Discover the Satisfaction Factor The Japanese have the wisdom to promote pleasure as one of their goals of healthy living. In our fury to be thin and healthy, 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 and conducive, 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 much less food to decide you’ve had “enough.”
7. Honor Your Feelings Without Using Food Find ways to comfort, nurture, distract, and resolve your issues without using food. Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, 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 into a food hangover. But food won’t solve the problem. If anything, eating for an emotional hunger will only make you feel worse in the long run. You’ll ultimately have to deal with the source of the emotion, as well as the discomfort of overeating.
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 as futile (and uncomfortable) to have the same expectation with 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 about your body shape.
9. Exercise–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 energized, it can make the difference between rolling out of bed for a brisk morning walk or hitting the snooze alarm. If when you wake up, your only goal is to lose weight, it’s usually not a motivating factor in that moment of time.
10 Honor Your Health–Gentle Nutrition. Make food choices that honor your health and taste buds while making you feel well. Remember that you don’t have to eat a perfect diet to be healthy. You will not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency or gain weight 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.
Intuitive eating gave me the food freedom and body trust to finally deal with my emotions more skillfully, along with the help of a therapist, as well as drop the rules and regulations around food. Sure, this meant that in January of 2015, as I made my one and only resolution to not track my food for the month, I ate a lot. I ate the campus-favorite dining-hall cookies and listened to my satiety and satisfaction levels. I ate cookie butter. I ate all the things I wanted…and then realized that once I had enough, I really did hit a limit. Sometimes, this manifests as getting cheddar popcorn by the bag every week and then getting tired of it in a few months. Or PopTarts. Or sour belts. Or whatever else it is that my body wants. It also 100% lets me know when it wants something cooked at home, served on a ceramic plate, with an array of nutrients and textures.
Do I always get it right? Well, that depends on what we define as “right.” There is no failing at intuitive eating, which separates it from the diet mentality of either following rules or breaking them. Just as sometimes I can try to perfectly take care of my plants, they don’t necessarily only live within a perfect set of rules. Sometimes it’s cloudy all week, and they survive. Sometimes, I don’t water them enough or too much, and they survive. All I have to do is do my best to provide for them holistically and examine the overall plant (one or two droopy or dry leaves are part of the life cycle, after all). Just as with us — we may neglect some aspects of our health here and there, but rules and restrictions won’t get us to tune into the natural cues that our body has to maintain balance.
Happy eating,
Barb
