10 Principles of Intuitive Eating
If you haven’t yet heard of Intuitive Eating, get ready to be blown away. Intuitive Eating is also known as the Anti-Diet, and is a response to toxic diet culture that tells us we need to eat a certain way to be skinny and therefore happy. It helps us confront weight stigma and fatphobia and leave diet culture behavior behind by forgetting all the rules about eating and food that you’ve ever been taught. Intuitive Eating encourages listening to your body and aims to release people from the emotional trauma that constant dieting and disordered eating can cause.
Two well regarded dieticians, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch founded Intuitive Eating and have several great books available with more information. You can find a list of the 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating here on their website, but I’m going to review them below with helpful commentary.
1. Reject the Diet Mentality
This means totally abandoning the idea that there is a perfect diet out there that will help you to lose weight fast and forever, as well as abandoning the idea that weight loss is the ultimate goal. There are countless scientific studies available showing that we have very little control over our weight, and that diets do not produce long lasting weight loss. In fact, most people actually experience a rebound weight gain, and the “yo-yo effect” of dieting has been linked to greater weight gain and more negative health outcomes than being in a higher weight body.
Because dieting is so ingrained in our culture and in many of our minds, it can cause enormous stress and emotional pain that negatively impacts psychological and physical health. It can be a long road to freedom from this kind of harmful thinking, but imagine the end result: happiness with yourself, a healthy relationship with food, and a mental space to focus on the much more important parts of your life other than weight.
2. Honor Your Hunger
The more we restrict ourselves from food, whether it’s by restricting the total amount of food, or certain food groups, or certain “bad foods” (and hint, diet culture tells us that there are good and bad foods, but food is actually neutral), the more likely we are to trigger primal hunger, causing us to binge and overeat. Restricting doesn’t allow us to listen to our body’s natural hunger cues, which often leads to feeling as though we can’t trust ourselves to feed ourselves properly. This principle encourages you to eat when you are hungry and stop eating when you are full, setting the stage for regaining that trust.
3. Make Peace with Food
This may be one of the harder principles to master, because we’ve been taught our whole lives to be at war with food! Diet culture is so strong and insidious that you might not even realize that you’ve been at war. However, when we treat foods as “good” or “bad,” “healthy” or “unhealthy,” “clean” or “cheat foods,” we are putting value labels on food and setting ourselves up to have a mindset of always needing to be watchful and critical of the foods around us. The real deal is that food is food is food is food. Food is neutral. This principle asks us to forget the rules of proper nutrition even, as we’ll come back to nutrition later on when we can consider it without the diet mentality lens.
Principle 3 also asks us to give ourselves total and unconditional permission to eat, which can be pretty scary for folks. When we tell ourselves that we “can’t” or “shouldn’t” have a food, we create a deprivation mindset which again leads to overeating and guilt. It’s a vicious cycle, one that we are much better served by letting go of!
4. Challenging the Food Police
It can be hard to make peace with our food if we are constantly bumping up against the food police, aka those inner voices that work to patrol and control the food we eat, keeping us in line with all of the rules around food and dieting that diet culture has taught us. Examples of these rules include things like, “That food has too many calories” or “I should NEVER eat ___” or “I can only eat this if I work off the calories later.” Making our way to a place of Intuitive Eating involves casting out the harmful Food Police and developing a newer, kinder, more compassionate voice that doesn’t try to maintain these rules.
5. Respect Your Fullness
This principle is a compliment to Principle 2, Honoring Hunger, because both involve listening to your body and being more mindful of its signals of hunger and fullness. When we practice eating mindfully, that is, eating slowly so as to pay attention to each bite of food, how it tastes and how it makes you feel, it is much easier to realize when you’re full. Aiming for a comfortable level of fullness rather than overly full likely equates to your body having enough fuel to sustain itself for a while, and you won’t leave the meal feeling physically sick or mentally guilty for eating too much.
This principle reminds us that it’s also okay to leave food on your plate, which may be different than many people were taught to believe growing up. I don’t know about you, but I heard the “clean your plate because there are starving children in the world who would eat your food if they could” countless times in childhood. However, forcing yourself to eat everything that is in front of you usually causes overeating and feelings of uncomfortable fullness, because you haven’t listened to your body as you’ve been eating. So slow down, pay attention to your body, enjoy your meal, and stop eating once you’ve reached comfortable fullness.
6. Discover the Satisfaction Factor
Principle 6 is one of my favorites, because I truly delight in slowing down and experiencing pleasure in my food. This principle reminds us of the importance of atmosphere and ambiance in our ability to enjoy our eating experiences. Think about the last time you had a really great meal. Was it when you ate quickly on the couch while watching TV or when you were at your desk between meetings? Or was it perhaps on a patio with good friends on a pleasant day?
We often forget how the smells and tastes and presentation of food are all meant to engage all our senses to give us pleasure and satisfaction from eating. And intentionally choosing the space to enjoy your meal and the company to enjoy it with adds to the sensuality of the experience. This pleasure and satisfaction and overall engagement with the eating experience can go a long way towards knowing how much food is “enough” food for that meal, allowing us to reach a place of satisfied fullness.
When setting up meals, try to pick a time and a place when you know you will be relaxed and comfortable. Eat more slowly than you are perhaps used to, savoring the food and maintaining awareness on how it makes your body feel. Let yourself derive pleasure and satisfaction from eating, and it will be all that much easier to find yourself in an Intuitive Eating headspace.
7. Cope With Your Emotions With Kindness
This is a big one. Many of us have learned to cope with painful or uncomfortable emotions by using food, whether that is restricting, overeating, binging, etc. But food can’t solve whatever problems are causing these emotions, even if it seems to provide temporary relief. When we practice mindfulness, we learn to become more aware of what triggers our various emotional reactions and what helps us to feel better. But if we aren’t being mindful, and are instead using food as a crutch, suddenly we have both the original problem causing the emotion and the unpleasantness caused by overeating or binge eating. Moving towards coping with emotions in a healthier way (sometimes with the help of a therapist) increases overall mental wellness and helps us move towards a place of Intuitive Eating, because we become more mindful of WHY we are eating.
8. Respect Your Body
This principle reminds us that because of our genetic differences, all bodies are made differently, and we need to respect those differences. Diet culture tells us that every woman needs to be curvy and a size 2, and that men need to be 6 ft tall and muscular. But the all bodies are made to be different and these shapes are not attainable for everyone! When we can respect our body, rather than trying to change it in unrealistic and unattainable ways, we actually become more comfortable in our own skin. It’s a lovely and often unexpected consequence of letting go of diet culture thinking.
9. Movement – Feel the Difference
Diet culture gives us the false message that exercise is only for burning calories to help lose weight or “offset” the calories from foods we eat. So, it might be a radical shift in thinking to forget these messages and just exercise to move your body! When you shift your focus or goal with exercise to becoming active, moving your body, and feeling more energized/strong/graceful etc., it’s likely you’ll experience more enjoyment and be more motivated to move in the first place. We use mindfulness to learn to be more aware of how different types of movement make us feel and how we can move while still respecting our body’s limitations. Finding what feels good for you is more important than listening to how diet culture tells you to move.
10. Honor Your Health – Gentle Nutrition
Choose foods that honor your health and your taste buds (remember that satisfaction factor) while making you feel well. How you eat over the course of one meal or one day will not change your overall nutritional balance – the body knows how to take care of itself very well, if only we let it. Eating healthy does not equate to eating “perfect” or “clean” but rather is about consistent choices over time.
Intuitive Eating often represents a major shift from the toxicity of diet culture to living more freely. Review the 10 Principles and see what changes you can begin to make in your life. Don’t forget that a therapist and registered dietitian can help you with these changes if you’re getting stuck or finding them particularly difficult to work through. The end goal with Intuitive Eating is to feel better about yourself, your body, and food, releasing you from the toxicity of diet culture, all of which are possible!