Intuitive Eating Before and After: What Results to Expect
Written by Isabel Vasquez RD, LDN
If you’ve been dieting for a while, then you’re used to before and after photos. They often serve as marketing tactics for diet companies to sell you their product. They say, look! These people lost a bunch of weight through our product and they look so much better. You can do it, too!
You’ve probably also seen friends or family post before and after photos on social media, flaunting their bodies after their latest diet or workout program.
But when you see these before and after photos, do you end up comparing yourself to the person pictured or feeling down about your body? If so, you’re not alone. Before and after photos can cause harm, often unintentionally.
With intuitive eating, the before and after transformations go beyond physical appearance.
In this blog, learn before and after transformations that often result from intuitive eating and whether you can lose weight with intuitive eating.
What Is Intuitive Eating?
Growing in popularity, intuitive eating is a non-diet approach to health and nutrition that’s guided by your internal cues rather than external rules and restrictions typical of diets.
It helps you develop a better relationship with food, movement, and your body while also promoting your overall health—physical, emotional, and mental.
Rather than centering weight, it centers interoception—a connection to what’s going on inside of your body.
The Ten Principles of Intuitive Eating
Intuitive eating is made up of 10 principles. They are:
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 With Gentle Nutrition
Why Before And After Photos Aren’t A Part Of Intuitive Eating
The before and after transformations you’ll see from intuitive eating aren’t based on your appearance. Your body may change from intuitive eating (which we’ll address soon) but that isn’t the focus of intuitive eating.
The real focus of intuitive eating is overall well-being. Here are three reasons why before and after photos are not a part of intuitive eating.
They Imply Your “Before” Body Was Less Worthy
One of the worst things about before and after photos is that they imply your “after” body is better than your “before” body. They make it seem as if your body was less worthy before, that it wasn’t worth celebrating, or that it wasn’t attractive.
This is especially problematic since diets don’t work in the long term. Most intentional weight loss attempts result in weight regain. A meta-analysis from 2019 (CW: stigmatizing weight language) found that within five years, dieters regained more than 80% of the weight they lost from dieting.
Plus, a 2007 study in American Psychologist found that ⅓-⅔ of dieters regain even more weight than they initially lost from dieting.
So, when you almost inevitably regain some or all of the weight you lost, it can leave you feeling extra bad about your body.
Oftentimes, you receive praise or congratulations when you share before and after photos. It feels great!
Yet, when you regain weight, everyone’s silent. It can feel really isolating and trigger negative thoughts about your body.
They Center Your Appearance Rather Than Internal Awareness
Part of being on an intuitive eating journey is turning your focus inward. You begin to connect with your internal cues and what makes you feel good. Rather than focusing on the number on the scale, you focus on health-promoting behaviors that serve you.
Ultimately, before and after photos reinforce the problematic idea that your appearance is the most important thing about you.
Usually, intentional weight loss requires ignoring or overriding your internal cues just to see that number on the scale go down. Intuitive eating, on the other hand, is about letting those internal cues guide your eating and exercise.
They Promote Body Comparison
We all know the saying, “Comparison is the thief of joy”, and body comparison is no different.
Sometimes, before and after photos are accompanied by labels or comments on the number of pounds lost. These numbers can trigger comparison, especially for those with an eating disorder or in eating disorder recovery, which can trigger or exacerbate body dissatisfaction.
The person posting the photo is probably not doing it to hurt anyone, but that may be the result anyway. You may have even posted these kinds of photos yourself at some point, and that’s okay.
We all live in a society steeped in diet culture and almost no one comes out unscathed. However, it’s helpful to consider how these posts may harm others and how they may not even really serve you anyway.
Rather than comparing your body to others or seeking external validation about weight loss, it’s helpful to practice gratitude for your body and slowly start accepting your body just how it is. This is obviously easier said than done. It’s a journey and it takes time.
Can You Lose Weight With Intuitive Eating?
Since intuitive eating doesn’t center on controlling your weight, three things can happen to your weight when you eat intuitively:
Your weight could stay the same
You could gain weight
You could lose weight
There are no guarantees about what will happen to your weight with intuitive eating. That’s part of what can make it scary and confusing if you’re used to dieting.
With intuitive eating, weight gain doesn’t signal failure. It is approached neutrally. You are not better or worse for gaining or losing weight.
The point of intuitive eating is not your weight outcome. However, many people find that their weight eventually stabilizes with intuitive eating, an experience supported by a 2014 research review in Public Health Nutrition.
This experience is very different from dieting. Being stuck in a cycle of dieting often leads to weight cycling, where you have big shifts in your weight, up and down. Even though some people diet because they think it’s healthy, weight cycling is associated with adverse health outcomes.
Eating intuitively helps your body to stabilize because it feels secure and safe. It has what it needs; there is no more scarcity. Rather than trying to suppress extreme hunger after restriction, you learn to honor your body’s cues.
(Of course, if food insecurity is present, intuitive eating can be challenging because the scarcity is an environmental factor and not self-inflicted.)
In general, your body gravitates toward its natural, set point weight range when you’re eating nutritional variety guided by internal cues and you’re relatively active without trying to control your weight.
Before and After Intuitive Eating: The Actual Transformations
Even though before and after weight loss photos aren’t a part of intuitive eating, it doesn’t mean that there are no before and after transformations; they’re just different and more sustainable ones.
Your Health—Mental, Emotional, Social, And Physical
You may think that you need to control your weight to promote your health, but that isn’t necessarily the case. To learn more about the science behind weight and health, read our blog “Does Weight Equal Health?”
You can also use intuitive eating to manage chronic health conditions like diabetes or high cholesterol.
Intuitive eating, a weight-neutral approach, is associated with a number of research-backed health benefits, including:
Lower rates of disordered eating and emotional eating
While many people start dieting in hopes of achieving these results, few find lasting improvements in their health. With intuitive eating, you can improve your overall health in the long term.
Before intuitive eating, you may have sacrificed eating socially because you couldn’t stray from the diet’s rules. But with intuitive eating, you can go out to eat without guilt or stress over “making up” for the meal. This is one example of how intuitive eating can lead to a better social life.
Not having to stress over every morsel of food you put in your mouth inevitably helps with your mental health. Plus, dieting is a risk factor for eating disorders. Removing the pressure to conform to narrow beauty ideals can improve your mental and emotional health, too.
Intuitive eating also invites you to develop a stronger connection to yourself. On your intuitive eating journey, you confront parts of yourself you may not have before. You reflect on why you’ve been dieting and how your upbringing shaped your views of your body.
All of this is approached with self-compassion, promoting your emotional and mental health.
Your Relationship To Food and Your Body
We spoke with one of our clients about her before and after transformation through intuitive eating. Turns out, her relationship with food has improved immensely.
This is no surprise to those of you who have gone through your own intuitive eating journey, but if you’re new to intuitive eating, you may not understand what that even means. So, our client shared her reflections with us.
Before intuitive eating, she says, “I was afraid of food. The relationship I had with food was so toxic, it literally made me sick. I downloaded every app available to help me with the unhealthy journey I was on with food. Nothing helped. Nothing yielded lasting results.”
However, now that she’s been practicing intuitive eating for a few months, her relationship with food has evolved immensely, and she’s still learning and growing. Her “after” is not a mere photo, but a meaningful, internal type of growth that she is proud of.
She shares, “For the past few months, I’m at peace with food. I’m okay with my relationship with food. It is way healthier than it’s been, and I look forward to what’s ahead. It’s been an amazing transformation.”
She no longer labels certain foods as good or bad and she doesn’t restrict food anymore. She listens to and respects her body in a way that just doesn’t happen with dieting.
Your Relationship To Movement
Finally, intuitive eating improves your relationship with movement. Before intuitive eating, many people find themselves cycling between exercise inertia and strict gym regimens.
Before intuitive eating, you may sign up for the latest fat-busting workout program that promises to get you your dream bod. Yet, there’s probably little room for joy or fun. It’s all about achieving a hypothetical body in the future.
After practicing intuitive eating, you start to reflect on your relationship with movement. You work towards joyful or intuitive movement. You consider what it is about movement that you like. You ask yourself, “Why do I want to be active? What do I get out of moving my body?”
Maybe you want to promote your health. Maybe you like socializing at workout classes. Maybe you like experiencing nature by going on hikes or outdoor bike rides.
Connecting to these internal motivators that spark joy is vital to having a better relationship with movement, and it’s often hard to do so while dieting.
Many people find that they’re able to engage in more sustainable forms of movement after intuitive eating because they’re doing something they actually like! And they’re focusing on the benefits in the here and now that make them feel good rather than potential body changes a few months down the line.
Final Thoughts
While many people share before and after photos online, these photos can be harmful to the person posting them and to people seeing them. They breed comparison and imply that the “before” body was somehow less worthy than the “after” one.
Practicing intuitive eating won’t yield the before and after photos you see online, but that doesn’t mean your transformation won’t be remarkable. Intuitive eating results in a better relationship with food, your body, and movement while promoting your overall health.
If you’re wondering how to start intuitive eating, we offer a 3-part registered dietitian-led masterclass on intuitive eating to help you improve your relationship with food and movement, and your body image.
If you liked this post, you may also like:
