Overcoming 3 Common Fears for New Intuitive Eaters
Written by Isabel Vasquez RD, LDN
Intuitive eating—a non-diet, weight-inclusive approach to nutrition—has gained popularity in recent years. If you’ve heard about intuitive eating and are interested in starting your own food freedom journey, you may have some mixed emotions.
On the one hand, you may be filled with excitement about ditching diets for good, but on the other hand, you may be fearful of what’s to come.
Since dieting is touted all over the media as a cure-all for health, confidence, and well-being, it makes sense you’d have fears about no longer controlling your food intake.
Related: Take the Your Latina Nutrition Food Freedom Quiz!
In this article, learn how to overcome three common fears about embarking on your intuitive eating journey: that you’ll gain weight forever, that you’ll ruin your health, and that you’ll only eat “junk food”.
Intuitive eating fear #1: I will gain weight forever
First, let’s address the inherent anti-fat bias in this statement.
Fear of weight gain is pretty common given the power of diet culture. However, diet culture is inherently oppressive, promoting weight bias that makes people think fat = bad.
This goes without saying, but everyone deserves respect. Weight bias is rooted in false, harmful stereotypes about fatness. It makes sense we’d fear weight gain because of society’s rhetoric around it; however, this isn’t something we should fear forever.
We can confront our weight bias (you may start by taking Harvard’s Implicit Bias Test) and engage in meaningful reflection and action to adopt a weight-inclusive and even fat-positive framework.
That being said, most people who embark on an intuitive eating journey do not gain weight forever.
Sure, you will likely gain weight if you’ve been suppressing your weight through food restriction and over-exercise. However, if you’re eating a variety of foods without restriction and are relatively active, your body will typically gravitate towards its set point weight range.
Since intuitive eating is a weight-neutral framework, you typically won’t be monitoring your weight throughout the process anyway.
The goal is to connect with your body’s unique cues and how you feel rather than what your weight is. The weight you will shed is the weight of food rules, unrealistic beauty ideals, and avoidance of your cultural foods.
Intuitive eating fear #2: I will ruin my health
Intuitive eating is a framework that focuses on health-promoting behaviors rather than weight. Research, including a 2018 article in SAGE Open, demonstrates that a weight-neutral framework promotes health regardless of weight change. It also challenges the idea that a higher weight means poorer health.
That being said, there’s room to practice gentle nutrition in intuitive eating, as well as intuitive movement. These are each included within the intuitive eating framework.
In your intuitive eating journey, you’ll also focus on improving your relationships with food, movement, and your body. If these relationships are fraught, it will likely cause stress and poorer mental health, which impact physical health.
We have a deeply ingrained association of weight and health thanks to diet culture and BMI (the roots of which are problematic to say the least). But when we can approach weight open-mindedly and inclusively, recognizing that weight isn’t the end-all, be-all when it comes to health, we can find more joy, empowerment, and genuine health.
Intuitive eating fear #3: I will never stop eating my forbidden foods
If you’ve been avoiding certain foods or food groups due to diet culture-induced fears, one of the most exciting but also one of the scariest parts of intuitive eating might be re-incorporating all foods. You may fear that if you begin eating chocolate cake again, all you’ll eat is chocolate cake and you’ll never get enough.
Now, don’t get me wrong, chocolate cake is amazing. However, eating just chocolate cake all day everyday isn’t going to be very satisfying.
When you first start your intuitive eating journey, it may be the case that you can’t get enough chocolate cake (or whatever foods you love but have been restricting). But your body naturally wants nutritional variety–carbs, protein, fats, fruits, veggies.
We even see this represented in our cultural dishes. We eat complete meals packed with white rice, beans, meat, veggies, eggs, and fats in addition to desserts like chocolate cake.
Once you begin to truly grant yourself unconditional permission to eat, you will experience habituation. This is defined as a “decrease in responsiveness upon repeated exposure to a stimulus.”
When it comes to food, habituation looks like allowing yourself to eat all foods, even ones you’ve previously labeled as “bad”, without guilt, and then noticing these foods have less power over you.
You become less preoccupied with the food and less likely to binge on it. It can simply be another food you enjoy and allow yourself to eat in amounts that feel good for you.
Related: Why Do I Feel Guilty After Eating?
Final Thoughts
Ditching diets can bring up a lot of emotions, both fun and unpleasant. When you’re able to confront the deeply ingrained diet culture beliefs and face these fears, you can find peace with food and your body once and for all.
For meal inspiration plus education on how to ADD nutrition to your favorite Latine cultural dishes and focus on your health without dieting, check out our nutrition library.
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