What is Intuitive Eating?
Written by Isabel Vasquez, RD, LDN
In the last few months, you may have seen the words “intuitive eating” floating around the internet and social media. #intuitiveeating may occasionally pop up on your social media feed, or you may have even seen it discussed on the news.
This approach to eating is gaining ground and for good reason–people are over diets! In this blog, we’ll break down what intuitive eating is, its benefits, and how you can start practicing it.
So, what is intuitive eating?
Created in 1995 by two registered dietitians, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, intuitive eating is a non-diet, weight-inclusive approach to nutrition. It focuses on listening to your body’s unique needs and cues when nourishing yourself.
No foods are off limits (unless there are medical reasons you cannot eat certain foods, such as food allergies), so you break free of the harsh food rules typical of most diets. By allowing yourself to eat all foods and listening to your body, you build a mutual trust with it.
Intuitive eating also involves recognizing the factors that impact your eating patterns so you can shift from letting your relationship with food be guided by external influences to letting it be guided by your own self.
That may sound like a lot, but it’s really about connecting back with your own body to guide your eating.
No more diet meal plans to stick to.
No more calorie counting.
No more elimination of food groups (no, not even carbs! We need them!).
Intuitive eaters begin asking themselves questions like, “What am I in the mood for right now?”, “Do I feel satisfied?”, “How can I honor my body right now?”--tuning into their present selves and listening to what would be best for them in that moment.
It involves a certain level of mindfulness and recognizing your needs and/or desires in the present moment.
The Ten Principles Of Intuitive Eating
Intuitive eating is made up of ten principles, which 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
These are not meant to be 100% checked off in order. Intuitive eating is about leaning into the gray area. It’s not a diet where you check off each rule and you’re done.
It can be a long-term process. You won’t totally embrace this anti-diet approach or come to love your body overnight. It takes time.
Therefore, you’ll want to be patient with yourself as you make your way through the principles, if you decide this is an approach you’re interested in trying.
Benefits of Intuitive Eating
Adopting an intuitive eating approach absolutely does not mean you are giving up on yourself. In fact, it means you are giving your all to yourself.
It means you are honoring and respecting your body’s unique, individual needs that no diet could ever predict.
Health Benefits
Research shows there are a number of proven benefits of intuitive eating, including:
Improved cholesterol levels
Lower rates of emotional and disordered eating
Improved blood pressure
Decreased depression and anxiety
Increased self esteem
Improved body image
Increased satisfaction with life
Even knowing the benefits, it’s important to acknowledge that beginning this approach to eating is not always easy, especially with all the factors that may have impacted your eating pattern up until now.
Breaking Up With Diet Culture
Let’s face it, we live in a society plagued by diet culture.
We’ve often been told to control what we eat and have been hounded with meal plans and dietary restrictions that we were promised would help us be healthy and happy. We’ve been told to ignore our bodies’ hunger, that the diet knows best, and that our bodies are betraying us.
But what they don’t tell us is that the research shows that these diets don’t work. Studies, including a 2007 study in American Psychologist, show that ⅓-⅔ of dieters regain the weight they lost and more from dieting. While diets may initially lead to weight loss, that doesn’t remain true in the long-term.
The hard truth is that many of us have internalized fatphobia that leaves us feeling lesser than if we don’t have the thin, Eurocentric body we’ve been taught is desirable.
As Latinas, we are not only trying to live up to society’s ideals, but also our families’. We may be fed (no pun intended) different body ideals from society and our families, making it even harder to live up to these often unrealistic expectations.
We are conditioned to fear getting bigger, and so we may fear that if we don’t have rules around food, our bodies will change in ways that go against conventional standards of beauty.
Through the intuitive eating process, you begin reflecting on why you are afraid to let go of the rigidity of traditional diets. This intuitive approach to eating often expands to other areas of your life, and can be a really transformational process.
Embracing Your Cultural Foods Without Guilt
As a Latina, I get the importance of staying connected to our Latin culture. And I think it’s important to acknowledge that as Latinas, food is often a big part of what connects us to our families.
Growing up, my Dominican grandmother lived with me and mom. She spent lots of time in the kitchen cooking delicious Dominican food - white rice, beans, mangu, pollo guisado, platanos, queso frito, salchichon, and all that good stuff that helped me connect to my grandmother’s home country.
Those foods now mean so much more to me than just the nutrition facts that comprise them.
As a child, I hadn’t yet felt the full effects of diet culture, which sadly, may have caused us to demonize a lot of our cultural foods as we’ve grown up. But we don’t need to live afraid of the foods that connect us to our family, our culture, and ultimately, ourselves.
Food is energy, yes, but it is much more than that.
It can be a source of pleasure, represent our culture, and help us connect with others. Intuitive eating allows you to incorporate all foods in a way that is unique to you, recognizing all the different functions it can serve.
Drawbacks of Intuitive Eating
While intuitive eating can be really awesome, there are some criticisms of it that are worth acknowledging. This approach can be a great one, but it is not for everyone.
Food Insecurity
When you go through the ten principles of intuitive eating, you may realize that it requires a lot of privilege. Having access to all types of foods and allowing yourself to have them all available food requires a lot of money, time, and access. Yet this does wonders for someone’s relationship with food.
For folks living in poverty, in food swamps or food deserts, or who are otherwise unable to access a wide range of food, this is nearly impossible. Research has shown that living with food insecurity is associated with higher rates of eating disorders and disordered eating.
In these cases, intuitive eating is not the solution. Placing blame on the individual is not the answer. Systemic changes are necessary to increase access to food and abolish poverty in this country.
Eating Disorders
For those with unprocessed trauma or an active eating disorder, it can be tough to fully embrace intuitive eating because it requires a deep connection to your body’s cues.
Building a connection with your body is certainly a part of recovering from these mental health challenges, but if you’re in the thick of it, you may need some more healing before you feel safe to connect with your body in that way.
For those with eating disorders, a meal plan is typically necessary to establish an appropriate eating pattern before intuitive eating can be practiced. Honoring your hunger and fullness may not be doable yet because these cues can be very skewed by the eating disorder.
That being said, other aspects of intuitive eating can be embraced like building respect for your body and ditching the diet mentality.
Hunger-Fullness Diet
Unfortunately, diet culture has co-opted intuitive eating and made it into the hunger-fullness diet. There are more and more people out there claiming to promote “intuitive eating” but they are really promoting a diet based on only eating when you’re hungry and always stopping when you just reached fullness. In reality, we don’t eat like that. We are not robots. And to be clear, that is not what intuitive eating is meant to be.
Intuitive eating is meant to be about connecting with your body’s cues but also about building a better relationship with your body, accepting it no matter your weight, realizing weight is not synonymous with health, and finding movement that feels good for you. There are so many nuances to it that can’t be captured via a social media post or even this blog.
So be on the lookout for people claiming to promote intuitive eating who really are just promoting a new diet.
How can you get started with intuitive eating?
If you’re ready to start practicing intuitive eating, there are a few ways to get started. Here are some ideas:
Read the Intuitive Eating book (maybe grab the workbook while you’re at it)
Start to notice what hunger feels like for you–tap into your body’s cues
Buy the food you’ve been afraid of and let yourself enjoy it
Join the Chula Club group coaching membership
Final Thoughts
When you’ve been used to dieting, intuitive eating can feel like a breath of fresh air, a terrifying new endeavor, or both! It is a big mindset shift and learning process, but it comes with a myriad of benefits for physical and mental health.
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Food Habituation: The Case for Eating Whatever You Want
