Intuitive Eating — What Is It And Where To Start
The power of words was really solidified for me once I began studying nutrition communications. Words affect our relationships with food. Words create our relationships with food — and the relationship to food of people around us who hear our words (and vice versa). When I first read Intuitive Eating in grad school, it was like nothing I’d heard before. It put healing, powerful words into the nutrition world (and beyond) and these words are still positively affecting us today.
The book Intuitive Eating, by Elyse Resch and Evelyn Tribole, was originally published 1995. A new edition is coming out in 2020 and you can pre-order it now. Intuitive Eating is a series of principles that combine to help a person be able to listen to their own body cues for when to eat, what to eat, and when to stop.
I see a lot of mentions of Intuitive Eating today that focus on one single aspect — respecting fullness. While this is one principle of IE, it’s by no means the whole thing. The ten principles of IE don’t function alone, but instead come together to help create a set of tools to create and maintain a peaceful relationship with food and eating experiences.
I also see quite a few Insta posts that say stuff like, “Just eat the cookie”, and while in general I’d rather see those types of posts than posts that encourage calorie or macro tracking, what the “just eat it” posts are missing is the compassion for just how complex our relationships with food are. Most people can’t “just eat the XYZ” without a deep dive into their childhood, relationship to diet culture, etc. Intuitive Eating addresses this from the ground up.
Here’s an overview of the 10 principles of Intuitive Eating.
1. Reject diet mentality — Start with the simplest, right? (DEFINITELY JOKING.) We live immersed in diet culture, from commercials to bill boards to office conversations and social media. By beginning to recognize where diet culture sneaks in and tries to affect your thoughts and actions, you can distance yourself from it and consistently reject it. It’s imperative that this is done, because otherwise your food choices will be affected by diet culture rather than what you really want/what makes you feel best.
Where to start: This is an ongoing practice. One thing you can try today is labeling your thoughts as either 1) self-care, 2) body cue, 3) judgement from diet culture. Labeling is the first step, then you can file them and address them as needed. This way diet culture tinged thoughts don’t get accidentally interpreted as being self care.
2. Honor your hunger — Hunger is a GOOD thing. It helps us stay alive because it reminds us to eat. Eating enough (both in quantity and frequency) is vital to being able to listen to your body’s other cues. For instance, if you’re hungry and depriving yourself of food, it might be tough to gauge what your energy level or mood truly are.
Where to start: Reminding yourself that hunger isn’t something that you need to fight in your body is a good start. Using the IE hunger scale and beginning to assign your levels of hunger via a numerical scale can also help you interpret and respond in ways that make you feel best.
3. Make peace with food — There are lots of factors that affect our relationships with food, and making peace with food often requires taking a look at these, honoring the ones that serve us and letting go of the ones that do not. This includes looking at foods that you may have kept out of the house because of fear around over-eating them. Habituation is the process of giving unlimited exposure to something to equalize it with everything else. For instance, if you tell yourself that you can’t be trusted with ice cream so you never keep it in the house, this automatically elevates ice cream above other foods that you have unlimited access to. The process of habituation is included in making peace with food — creating an ongoing excess of previously limited foods until they don’t feel special anymore. But, it’s not something that you have to jump right into.
Where to start: Think about some of the foods that you limit and think about why. What are the restrictions around these foods and how does that affect how you feel about them and how you eat them?
4. Challenge the food police — If there are people in your life who label foods good or bad or who otherwise put restrictions and rules on your eating, these would be food police. Your thoughts can also be food police.
Where to start: Start with your internal dialogue. When you hear yourself labeling foods or placing restrictions on foods, challenge yourself to think about why and how to change this dialogue.
5. Respect your fullness — Just like hunger, fullness provides us with cues that take practice to hear. Respecting your fullness entails practicing hearing it and knowing at what point in the fullness spectrum you feel best and how to hear these cues.
Where to start: Using the IE hunger scale and beginning to assign your levels of fullness via a numerical scale can also help you interpret and respond in ways that make you feel best.
6. Discover the satisfaction factor — This is the experience of eating. It’s not just about choosing what sounds good to you without the food police chiming in, it includes eating without distraction in a setting that brings you joy/peace.
Where to start: Think about what meals you eat with distraction (TV, phone, computer, work, etc.) and where you can try one meal without any distraction. If that’s too big of an initial jump, think about what meal you might try five minutes without distraction at the beginning of the meal and add on from there.
7. Honor your feelings without using food — Finding ways to comfort, nurture, distract, and resolve your issues without using food takes time. Similar to the other principles, it’s not expected that you’ll create a new relationship with food and yourself overnight.
Where to start: Make a list of non-food related ways to find comfort, joy, distraction. Have options for people and resources you can reach out to/refer to when you need help resolving an issue. Keep this list handy and refer to it often.
8. Respect your body — The authors of IE call this accepting your “here and now body”. If you are spending internal resources on beating your body up, it’s tough to do any of the other IE principles. Think about it — if you don’t think the body you have right this moment deserves to be fed or to feel satisfied or to experience joy and pleasure, then how can you ensure it’s getting enough, protected from the food police, etc.?
Where to start: Make a list of 10 things you are good at that have nothing to do with your body/appearance. It can be things like being a great friend/listener, being really organized, planning awesome road trips, etc. Refer to this list often. Include these things in your inner dialogue. Find a self-care mantra you love. One of my favorites is “I will find comfort in discomfort.”
9. Exercise — feel the difference. Finding movement that you enjoy — or at least doesn’t feel like punishment — is important to health and feeling good. But, many of us are taught to partner the purpose of exercise with weight loss, which is actually not a typically sustainably motivating factor.
Where to start: Call it movement and experiment! If you already know ways to move your body that feel good and that you enjoy (or don’t hate), then you’re off to a good start. If you don’t, consider that walking, dancing around your living room, and walking local shelter dogs are all movement.
10. Honor your health. The authors of IE use the term “gentle nutrition” and it’s an important distinction. It’s not a prescriptive or harsh one-size-fits-you-or-else plan. It’s a process of gently incorporating foods that make you feel the best. It’s also a reminder that our overall nutrition is the sum of what we choose over time, not what we had for one meal or even ate for a month.
Where to start: Think about gently adjusting meals to include carbohydrates, protein, fat, and some veggies.
