As a Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor, Intuitive Eating plays a central role in my approach to helping individuals make peace with food and their body.
What is Intuitive Eating? Intuitive Eating is an evidence-based, weight-neutral, anti-diet model that teaches you how to have a peaceful relationship with food and your body.
Intuitive Eating is based on 10 principles including:
Reject the Diet Mentality
Honor Your Hunger
Make Peace with Food
Challenge the Food Police
Discover the Satisfaction Factor
Feel Your Fullness
Cope with Your Emotions With Kindness
Respect Your Body
Movement: Feel the Difference
Honor Your Health: Gentle Nutrition
In short, Intuitive Eating helps you reject the diet mentality and divest from diet culture; hear and honor your body’s cues (e.g., hunger, fullness, satisfaction); remove morality, guilt, judgment and stress from eating; choose foods that are both pleasurable and nourishing; navigate emotional eating; engage in joyful movement; and respect and appreciate your body.
Why does Intuitive Eating reject the diet mentality? In order to reclaim your ability to eat intuitively, it’s essential to move away from dieting and the diet mentality. Even if you aren’t currently on a diet, it’s quite likely you have a diet mentality due to our pervasive diet and wellness cultures and confusing food environment.
Dieting disconnects you from your body's wisdom, including your own internal cues that tell you what, when, and how much to eat. Focusing on numbers, such as pounds, calories, points or macros, interferes with your ability to listen to your body and leads to disordered eating and exercise behaviors.
When you diet, you eat according to a set of external rules (e.g., calories, points, grams, forbidden foods, time restrictions, etc.) rather than honoring your body’s needs, desires and preferences.
Restricting the type and amount of food you eat and when you’re allowed to eat is not intuitive, sustainable, flexible, pleasurable or empowering. Dieting erodes your ability to trust your body and your instincts, and negatively impacts your physical and psychological wellbeing.
While almost any diet can result in initial short-term weight loss, the most predictable outcome of dieting is weight cycling (yo-yo dieting), which can have a detrimental impact on your health.
There is not one research study to date that demonstrates long-term maintenance of weight loss for any but a small minority. The majority of dieters are, understandably, unable to maintain their weight loss and an estimated two-thirds of dieters regain more weight than they lost.
When dieters “fail” a diet, the natural response is to try another diet. The only winner in this vicious cycle is the $72 billion diet industry—an industry that has a 95 percent failure rate yet thrives on repeat customers.
Rebound weight gain is not due to a lack of willpower, control or self-discipline. When you deprive your body of food, it thinks it’s being subjected to a famine and will wisely do everything it can to survive. This includes triggering numerous compensatory processes, such as slowing your metabolism, increasing your hunger-signaling hormone and decreasing your fullness-signaling hormone.
Not only can dieting lead to weight cycling, it can also lead to food and body preoccupation; body dissatisfaction; intense food cravings; feelings of deprivation; emotional eating; chronic overeating; binge eating; disordered eating; eating disorders; anxiety; depression; low self-esteem; feelings of guilt, shame and helplessness; increased weight stigma and anti-fat bias; elevated blood cholesterol; increased cardiovascular risk; and more adverse conditions.
What is an Intuitive Eater? An Intuitive Eater is guided by internal cues versus external rules.
Being an Intuitive Eater means you trust your inner body wisdom to guide you toward the foods and forms of movement that help your body feel good, without internal judgment or external influence from diet, wellness and weight-loss cultures.
Intuitive Eating includes giving yourself unconditional permission to eat—with attunement. This means making food choices based on messages from your body, such as hunger, fullness, desire and how different foods impact you (e.g., energy, mood, focus, digestion, etc.). It also includes choosing foods based on their satisfaction factor, accessibility and your personal preferences, values and nutritional needs.
With Intuitive Eating, no foods are off-limits (unless medically necessary). There are no good or bad foods, and you are not a good or bad person based on your food choices. All foods are morally and emotionally equivalent regardless of their nutritional value. A carrot is equal to carrot cake; eating one or the other doesn’t make you good or bad.
An Intuitive Eater consumes a healthy balance of foods and has a healthy relationship with food. Nonjudgmental attention is given to your body's nutritional and fuel needs with an eye toward balance, variety, satisfaction and pleasure.
What are the benefits of becoming an Intuitive Eater? First and foremost, Intuitive Eating helps you make peace with food and your body. By doing so, you can shift all the time, energy and headspace you’ve spent warring with food and your body toward more fulfilling, meaningful pursuits.
To date, more than 140 studies have been published demonstrating the numerous benefits associated with Intuitive Eating.
Studies have also found that Intuitive Eating increases:
interoceptive awareness (the ability to perceive bodily sensations, like hunger and fullness)
body positivity, appreciation and acceptance
self-esteem, self-respect and self-compassion
emotional awareness and acceptance
emotional coping skills / psychological hardiness
emotional wellbeing
quality of life
general life satisfaction
How long will it take until I start eating intuitively? Learning to eat intuitively is an ongoing, non-linear process that unfolds differently for each individual. How long this process takes will depend on multiple factors, including how many years you’ve spent dieting, following food rules, and being disconnected from your innate body wisdom.
Changing your relationship with food and your body takes time, patience and practice. It requires a willingness to release the beliefs and behaviors that are no longer serving you as well as the courage to experiment with new ways of being.
Trust that it is possible to return to the Intuitive Eater you came into this world as before cultural messages regarding weight, dieting, good/bad foods, etc. infiltrated your mind and caused you to mistrust yourself and your body.
One might say there really isn’t a final destination with Intuitive Eating. It’s more of an evolving journey of self-discovery that will likely change shape as you experience different life phases. Most people, however, find that eating intuitively becomes more accessible and much easier with time.
Will I lose or gain weight with Intuitive Eating? The most honest, ethical answer I can give you is, I don’t know.
Intuitive Eating is not a weight-management tool; it’s a healing tool. Whether or not you will experience weight loss or weight gain as a result of eating intuitively is not something anyone can predict.
What I do know is that by committing wholeheartedly to this process, you will cultivate a more nourishing, trusting, pleasurable and peaceful relationship with food and your body—and thus experience greater overall wellbeing—regardless of the number on the scale.
Is Intuitive Eating for everyone? Unlike dieting, Intuitive Eating is not based on a black-and-white set of rules. The framework is meant to be flexible and adapted to an individual’s unique needs.
For example, if you have a health condition or take a medication that makes it difficult to sense your hunger, you may benefit from scheduled meal and snack times rather than relying solely on your hunger cues to tell you when to eat.
Intuitive Eating also needs to be approached differently by individuals with eating disorders, including those in early recovery. It’s essential that one’s treatment team provides guidance regarding when it’s the right time to begin integrating the different principles into one’s recovery.
Who developed Intuitive Eating? This model was developed in 1995 by Evelyn Tribole, MS, RDN, and Elyse Resch, MS, RDN, after years spent witnessing their clients struggle with food, body image, weight cycling and diet culture. To learn more, visit intuitiveeating.org.
If you’d like to make peace with food and your body, click here to schedule a complimentary consultation call.
Renee Pletka
San Francisco / Bay Area Intuitive Eating Counselor + Holistic Health Coach : yo-yo dieting, emotional eating, overeating, binge eating, cravings, body image, nutrition. In-person and video sessions.
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