The Pros and Cons of Intuitive Eating for Latinas
Written by Isabel Vasquez RD, LDN
By now, you’ve probably heard of intuitive eating, especially if you’re reading this blog post.
In case you need a refresher, intuitive eating is a non-diet, weight-inclusive approach to nutrition that focuses on connecting with your body’s cues to guide your eating rather than harsh rules and restrictions typical of diets.
If you want to learn more, we recommend starting off with our intuitive eating explainer blog post.
Intuitive eating is a revolutionary approach to nutrition that has helped countless people heal from disordered relationships with food, their bodies, and exercise. Yet, that doesn’t mean it’s without flaws.
Especially for Latinas, there are unique drawbacks of intuitive eating that shouldn’t be overlooked. Read on to learn the biggest benefits and drawbacks of intuitive eating for Latinas.
The Benefits of Intuitive Eating for Latinas
Fosters a healthy relationship with food, movement, and your body
Intuitive eating is one of the best ways to improve your relationship with not just food, but also with physical activity and your body.
It’s made up of 10 principles that address all of these areas to an extent.
Of course, the biggest focus of intuitive eating is food, but there’s certainly room for working on physical activity and your body image. Both of these areas have a devoted intuitive eating principle—”Respect Your Body” and “Movement—Feel the Difference”.
Studies have found that intuitive eating leads to a healthier body image, better self esteem, and less disordered eating.
This typically happens through reflecting on your relationship with food, movement, and your body, and finding eating and exercise patterns that bring you joy and help you feel good in your body.
It’s a nuanced journey that is best supported by working with a registered dietitian trained in intuitive eating.
For 1:1 support with intuitive eating and more, click here to learn more about working with our team of Latina registered dietitians.
Evidence-based health benefits
Intuitive eating isn’t just a means of improving your relationship with food, movement, and your body. It’s also an effective way of supporting physical, emotional, and mental health.
Besides the benefits we shared above, studies have shown that intuitive eating has a number of benefits on physical and mental health, including:
Improved cholesterol levels
Better blood pressure
Less depression and anxiety
Healthier blood sugars
More life satisfaction
Helps break pattern of weight cycling
When you’re stuck in a diet cycle, you may also deal with weight cycling—big shifts up and down in weight. This is not only a frustrating experience, but it’s associated with poor health outcomes.
A 2020 study in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health found that weight cycling was associated with worse cholesterol levels and more insulin resistance, which are indicators of cardiometabolic health.
Furthermore, a 2018 study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism found that weight cycling was associated with greater mortality risk.
Research shows that intuitive eating is beneficial for promoting weight stability, which may support cardiometabolic health. This is helpful because Latines face higher rates of diabetes than non-Hispanic white people, per the CDC.
Promotes an ‘all foods fit’ mentality
Lots of Latines develop a fear of eating their cultural foods because of all the misinformation around the health impacts of Latine cultural foods.
Latines may have heard from doctors, dietitians, or social media that their cultural foods (like white rice and tortillas) are “unhealthy”. They may also have internalized the idea that our cultural foods are just fried food and carbs.
In reality, our cultural foods are full of nutrition. You can read more about that in our blog post on the nutritional value of Latine cultural foods and you can find posts on a bunch of specific Latine cultural foods in our gentle nutrition blog category.
At the core of intuitive eating is an “all foods fit” mentality, meaning that you don’t restrict any food (unless you're allergic or have a medical reason you need to avoid a certain food).
Therefore, it’s a great approach for re-embracing your cultural foods and any other foods you may have cut out.
Supports interoception
One of the most beautiful parts of intuitive eating is the connection it helps you foster with yourself. It’s rooted in interoception—a connection to your body’s internal cues.
Rather than focusing on external rules and restrictions around food and movement, you make decisions based on your body’s unique needs and preferences.
To some people’s surprise, that doesn’t mean that you just eat chocolate cake all day everyday. Most people’s bodies do enjoy nutritional variety, and any initial obsessions with previously off limit foods typically wane as they give themselves unconditional permission to eat them.
Related: What is the Binge Restrict Cycle?
The especially beautiful part is that this interoception often fosters a connection with yourself beyond just food and movement choices. Many of our clients find that they’re also more connected with their own needs and able to tune in to themselves in life in general.
The Drawbacks of Intuitive Eating for Latinas
It’s often oversimplified
Unfortunately, as with anything that gains ground on social media, intuitive eating is often watered down and oversimplified. This gives people a false idea of what intuitive eating really is.
Some people think that it just means you’ll eat cake all day. Some social media posts talk about it as if it’s just a matter of letting yourself eat donuts instead of restricting them.
Really, intuitive eating is a nuanced journey that takes months if not years. It’s an ongoing commitment to yourself, your body, and your relationship to food and movement.
People also don’t realize that there is plenty of room to discuss nutrition in intuitive eating. You can work on intuitive eating while managing a health condition like diabetes or high cholesterol.
Lack of diversity in the intuitive eating space
Another major downside of intuitive eating is that there isn’t much diversity or representation of diverse voices in this space.
It was created by two white RDs and lots of people promoting intuitive eating on social media are thin, white women. This may leave BIPOC folks feeling like intuitive eating isn’t for them.
That’s why here at Your Latina Nutrition we have a team of Latina dietitians ready to support you in supporting your health with intuitive eating.
Overlooks ancestral practices
For Latinas, ancestral healing practices can play a big role in how we take care of our health. Things like herbal teas or spiritual practices that date back centuries if not more can hold a lot of cultural relevance and power for us.
These practices aren’t really addressed in intuitive eating. In some cases, they may even run counter to what gets promoted in intuitive eating.
When working on intuitive eating and breaking free from diet culture, we often do a lot of myth-busting around purported quick fixes or non-evidence-based supplements promoted on social media as cure-alls. A lot of this has to do with the lack of research to support these wellness “hacks”.
Lots of our ancestral practices don’t have research to support them, but that doesn’t mean that these traditional healing practices don’t hold value. This is a nuanced topic that gets left out of a lot of intuitive eating conversations.
Unique challenges setting boundaries for Latines
When you’re working on intuitive eating, you often find that you need to work on setting boundaries around food and body comments. This can bring up unique challenges for Latines.
Our family dynamics tend to prioritize respect for elders and familismo (unconditional loyalty to your family), making it hard to set boundaries with family members.
Yet, our families can be some of the worst culprits of harmful food and body comments. Oftentimes, they constantly probing us to eat more while giving us nicknames centered around our body size like “gordita” or “flaca”.
We’re also often taught to respect authority, specifically doctors, so setting boundaries or questioning doctors isn’t something culturally common for Latines. However, it can be helpful to do so when working on intuitive eating, especially around weight talk.
Requires a certain level of privilege
We can’t talk about the drawbacks of intuitive eating without talking about the privilege it requires.
Being able to nourish your body consistently with a variety of foods requires a lot of privilege. You have to have money, time, and access to foods that are nutritious and align with your preferences.
So, for folks facing food insecurity or poverty, or living in food deserts or food swamps, intuitive eating isn’t a practical approach. First, it’s important to get connected with resources for food assistance and financial support.
Final Thoughts
There are pros and cons to pretty much everything, and intuitive eating is no exception. It’s an amazing approach for connecting with your internal cues, finding weight stability, and making peace with food and your body.
However, it doesn’t account for ancestral healing practices and isn’t suitable for people with food insecurity. Plus, it’s often oversimplified on social media, giving people a false impression of what it really is.
For education on how to ADD nutrition to your favorite Latine cultural dishes, make peace with food, and focus on your health without dieting, join our nutrition library for just $27/month.
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Overcoming 3 Common Fears for New Intuitive Eaters
