What is Intuitive Eating? Pt. 1

I am a non-diet dietitian focusing on intuitive eating, body liberation, and finding freedom from diet culture. This entails stepping away from chronic dieting while looking at the behavioral and cultural aspects surrounding dieting, food rules, and weight loss.

So what is a non-diet approach and intuitive eating? They both entail moving away from diet culture rules, looking at our individual stigmas, and saying good-bye to dieting. By learning to eat from an intuitive eating mindset we make space for the more important things in life while learning our own bodies cues from a space of exploration and curiosity.

The concept of intuitive eating is not a new one. It’s based on a book written in the 90s by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. It is a book that was gifted to me during school, but didn’t truly take effect until recent years. In all honesty, I loved the concept but wasn’t in a place where I felt committed to trusting my body to tell me what it needed because I was still trapped in disordered eating. I now have a better grasp on intuiting eating, and understand that it isn’t meant to be a 30-day challenge but a life journey wrapped in compassion and nourishment.

Intuitive Eating is a non-diet approach that breaks free of chronic dieting to heal your relationship with food. The purpose is not to lose weight, but to re-learn what we naturally knew how to do as babies. When we are born, we innately know when to eat and when to stop. We grow up listening to internal cues of hunger and fullness, while fully experiencing food as pleasure and a way to connect with others. Throughout the years, that intuition gets sidelined by social stigmas, fat phobia, food rules, and the cultural strive to be “thin” and therefore “healthy”.

We INTERNALIZE all these EXTERNAL rules which subsequently causes us to associate “good” foods with having a “good food day” and “bad” foods with shame and guilt.

Intuitive eating is NOT a diet. It does not require any tracking, counting, or restricting, nor does it promise or promote weight loss. Intuitive eating was meant to encourage individuals to re-learn their internal body cues to help them navigate the space of nourishment while stepping away from the diet mentality and weight focus. By learning to eat based on bodies cues instead of foods rules, it begins the process of teaching the body that a variety of foods will be available whenever they are wanted.

Learning to step away from chronic dieting and diet culture can be a little scary and feel awkward at first, which is totally normal. It can often feel like driving on the wrong side of the road without a seatbelt where all the signs are telling you, you are going the wrong way. Understandable right? If you have been dieting or restricting for years and all of a sudden are told you have total freedom to eat whatever your body craves, that can sound incredibly scary!

The beauty of it is, the more you learn to turn inward, to trust that intuitive inner child, the more those outside voices won’t matter anymore. Your body will learn to trust that it will get the type of nourishment it needs when it is hungry and that a variety of foods will always be available.

Let me be clear, this is not the hunger and fullness diet. This is a way of living with a focus on letting go of food obsession, honoring hunger cues, and giving yourself full permission to eat without guilt or shame. That part right there is often the scariest for people who have chronic dieted in the past or have a history of disordered eating. Our brains want to tell us that having full permission to eat anything will result in uncontrolled eating and therefore unwanted weight gain. This is where that diet mentality rears its ugly head. Learning to nourish and feed your body may cause weight gain, loss, or no change at all.

When we have lived in the diet mentality for so long, we often are afraid of those “binges” because they FEEL out of control, like we are insatiable. In actuality, those binges are the biological result of restriction.

When we physically or even just mentally restrict, our bodies go into survival mode to protect us. When we are then presented with the ability to eat, our bodies want to fill as much as possible because it now doesn’t trust that the type of food it needs will always be there for the eating. By learning to re-train our brains to understand that all foods ARE available and MAKING the foods available, by learning to honor our hunger and let go of food rules, we are able to find a space much closer to homeostasis for our bodies. Around that set point is where our bodies naturally want to go and where they thrive. By changing our relationship to food, we have the ability to change our relationship to our bodies as well. That guilt and shame spiral can often attach itself to many aspects of our lives if we let it. By letting go of any weight change expectations, we open ourselves up to the opportunity to stop being at war with our bodies. If the body is above it’s set point, its possible that learning to eat more intuitively may cause weight to decrease, if it is below it’s set point, weight may increase. The purpose is not to focus on weight but to re-establish the relationship with food so our bodies can find a thriving shape without the use of disordered eating or restricting. Doesn’t that sound nice? Finding pleasure in food without the guilt coming after?

What would it look like if you took the pressure off being a certain size and instead focused on learning to nourish your body from a compassionate space?

What if instead of getting caught up in the next restrictive fad diet (because let’s be honest the marketing is so good that we truly believe this will be the magical secret to weight loss and health every time) you decide to defiantly say no?

What if it were possible to take the morality away from food so that it could be an enjoyable experience again without the unnecessary shame spiral constantly knocking at your confidence?

That’s what stepping away from diet culture, saying no to dieting, and saying yes to intuitive eating looks like. It’s taking power back from an industry that has us buying in before we are old enough to make a conscious decision of it.

The truth is, I didn’t believe intuitive eating was really for me. I thought it was for other individuals who had a better relationship with food than I did. I thought it was for people who simply forgot to eat or didn’t really enjoy eating. Intuitive eating definitely wasn’t for someone who really loves food, has a history of an ED, as well as a perfectionistic mentality. But you know what? Intuitive eating is leading me down a path I prayed for, for years.

Intuitive Eating offers freedom from obsession, restriction, external validation through food, uncontrolled eating without understanding, so many things. It helps reconnect back to the body in a liberating way. It isn’t a perfect process but a journey that requires living in the grey and letting go of doing it “perfectly” (as much as humanly possible).

Interested in Learning more about Intuitive Eating and stepping away from Chronic Dieting?

I work with clients in-person in the Cincinnati, OH area as well as virtually throughout the US to help end dieting, reframe relationships with food, and help to end disordered eating for good. To learn more about my coaching head here for more information so that we can set-up a free initial consultation!

-A Life Nourished