What is Intuitive Eating?
Hi! As you know, I’m Desa & I’m a registered dietitian practicing nutrition and wellness through an Intuitive Eating lens. If you’ve been around my instagram, my blog, my website - you’ve heard me talk about intuitive eating. But like, what is it?
In our current food climate, people hear intuitive eating & think it can mean a wide, wide variety of things. Some misrepresented ideas I’ve noticed:
Eating what you want to
Eating when you want to
Eating as much as you want to
Eating as little as you want to
Not eating when you don’t want to
Eating 1 meal a day if that’s what you’re hungry for
Eating 7 meals a day if that’s what you’re hungry for
Eating all day long
Eating natural, whole foods
Eating without any ability to stop
Giving into your cravings
Only eating “junk food”
Allowing yourself to have all of the “bad foods”
Allowing yourself to have previously restricted foods
Being out of control around food
Gaining weight
Getting fat
Eating unhealthy and in turn being unhealthy
Not honoring health
Not making nutrition & food decisions to support your health
To that I say - yes & no. Intuitive Eating is complex and is best understood when working 1:1 with a dietitian that practices an intuitive eating approach or an intuitive eating counselor. If you are looking for full-circle nutrition recommendations, especially considering a medical condition, in combination with intuitive eating, a dietitian is needed.
Intuitive Eating (IE) is a book. It’s an eating framework developed by dietitians Evelyn Tribole, MS, RDN, CEDRD-S & Elyse Resch, MS, RDN, CEDRD-S, Fiaedp, FADA, FAND to change the way you think about food, your body and mental health. The IE framework is designed to foster and nourish the relationship between physical health (food and your body) and metal health (your thoughts, feelings, emotions, relationships, socialization etc.). IE guides you into stress-free eating built on 10 principles. They are not 10 steps. You do not accomplish principle 1, move on to master principle 2 and keep moving through the steps until you’ve mastered all 10. Intuitive Eating is not linear. Instead it is a continuous process. You’ll definitely want to work on a few principles before others, but you will find that you go move through the principles as a process. I’m going to give you an overview of all 10 principles to give you a good idea of what IE really is but remember, we’re only scratching the surface and there’s much, much, much more to uncover.
10 Principles
1. Reject the diet mentality
This is where you accept diet culture as a scam stealing your time, resources, and joy & THROW IT OUT. Accept that there are no healthy, sustainable, fast weight loss fixes and reject that there should be. Decline to live in a constant cycle of thinking the next diet will be magical.
2. Honor your hunger
Feed your body. Really, feed it. Accept your energy needs, your carb needs, your fat needs, your protein needs, your vitamin and mineral needs and honor them. Here, you learn to identify your hunger cues and honor them to prevent under eating, over eating, and food fear.
3. Make peace with food
Here you work to let go of fear surrounding foods by giving yourself “unconditional permission to eat.” You allow yourself to eat the foods you desire, honor your cravings, and do so guilt-free, judgement-free. You let go of all “forbidden foods” - any off limits food you tell yourself you can’t have.
4. Challenge the food police
Identify your food rules - anything that tells you “I can’t,” “I shouldn’t,” “I have to,” etc, and let them go. Stop giving foods moral values - there are no “good” or “bad” foods. Stop using derivatives of good and bad to describe foods such as - fatty, lean, healthy, unhealthy, junk, clean, dirty, etc. Give up any term that implies inferiority or superiority for eating a particular food. Categorizing foods as such supports your food rules and the food police.
5. Discover the satisfaction factor
Allow yourself to enjoy your food and be satisfied by the foods you eat. It’s ok to enjoy food- it’s supposed to be enjoyed and provide satiety. Allowing yourself to enjoy food for its nourishment, flavor, texture, and the experience it provides.
6. Feel your fullness
In this principle, you learn to trust your body and your true fullness cues. This means eating until you are comfortably full and being able to sit with feeling overly full at times too - without guilt, shame, judgement, or compensatory behaviors. Practicing this principle also explores eating mindfully.
7. Cope with your emotions with kindness
It can be easy to cope with emotions by using food, or a lack of food, to numb out. In addition, food restriction can lead to over eating later due to simple primal hunger but can be, often incorrectly, viewed as emotional eating or binging. This principle focuses on working through identifying your root emotions and establishing healthy coping mechanisms to support each emotion effectively without taking your emotions out on food.
8. Respect your body
Respecting your body is accepting and respecting that you are an individual person. You look different from other people for a reason. You weren’t supposed to look like anyone else exactly. Just as we look at dogs and see, accept, and love the differences found in all breeds, we should do the same for our own bodies and others bodies.
9. Movement - feel the difference
Exercise and move to honor your body - not punish it, burn calories, or manipulate it. Working on this principle generally happens after getting your footing in the prior principles because 1. Its counter productive and sometimes harmful to exercise a malnourished body and 2. Its very easy to transfer coping with food to coping with physical activity. Intuitive movement focuses on how you feel from an exercise and what your intentions and thoughts are surrounding the exercise. Moving intuitively helps you identify activity you enjoy doing, positively impacts your life, and makes exercise in day to day life a long-term habit rather than a chore.
10. Honor your health - gentle nutrition
This is another principle that comes after laying some ground work with principles 1-8. First, to truly honor your health, you have to give up yo-yo dieting, food fears, body shame, and guilt. You have to begin coping with your emotions and stressors in healthy and productive ways rather than turning to food, exercise, or engagement in other compensatory behaviors to manipulate your body. After this, you can really begin to approach eating foods that honor your specific health needs from a place that isn’t going to trigger you back into unhealthy behavior patterns. Here is where you can work with your dietitian to focus on managing health concerns and diagnoses with nutrition and exercise.
All information in this blog is based on and provided by Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program that works by Evelyn Tribole, MS, RDN, CEDRD-S & Elyse Resch, MS, RDN, CEDRD-S, Fiaedp, FADA, FAND