Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach

by Evelyn Tribole

Practical “hunger”—planning ahead. While it’s important to eat primarily based on your biological hunger, it’s also important to be practical and not rigid.

Just thinking about going on a diet can create a sense of panic and send you on a trail of eating every food that you think won’t be allowed. As

Restrained eaters, in essence, are chronic dieters who are preoccupied with dieting and weight control. To stay in control with their food, restrained eaters set up rules that dictate how they should eat, rather than listening to their bodies.

key to abolishing the pattern of restraint and subsequent rebound overeating is to give yourself unconditional permission to eat. This means: • Throwing out the preconceived notion that certain foods are “good” and others are “bad.” No one food has the power to make you healthy or not. • Eating what you really want. Yes, what you want. • Eating without obligatory penance. (“Okay, I can have the cheesecake now, but tomorrow I diet.”) These kinds

peach. It also means that your food choices do not reflect your character or morality.

To Annie’s surprise (and delight), she discovered that once she completed a particular food-freeing phase, she found that she stopped craving that food, hardly ever thought of it, and sometimes she never wanted it again! Removing deprivation from Annie’s eating diminished the alluring quality of foods, and instead put them in a rational perspective.

But for most people, these foods were never really unconditionally allowed; rather, they were only given pseudo-permission. These forbidden foods were actually being eaten with a sense of temporarily breaking the rules,

Yes, make peace with food, and eat what pleases your palate. Yes, give yourself the freedom to eat unconditionally, and eat as much as you need to satisfy your body. But eating whenever you feel like it, without regard to hunger and fullness, might not be a very satisfying experience and might also cause physical discomfort.

you happen to live in a family that is weight-focused with an array of eating issues, you might have had your first experience with the voice of the Food Police when you were very young. You might have been told to stop eating so much or been restricted from eating certain foods. It doesn’t take long before you internalize those negative messages and create your own powerful Food Police. If,

Identifying the inner voices is useful for challenging the Food Police. But this powerfully negative voice requires more ammunition.

Banish the absolutes and replace them with permissive, flexible statements. Carefully listen for the “absolute” words that you use. Get rid of the musts, oughts, shoulds, need to’s, supposed to’s, and have to’s.

Switch to process thinking. The solution for linear thinking is process thinking, which focuses on continual change and learning, rather than just the end result. If you start thinking in terms of what you can learn along the way and accept that there will be ups and downs, you will go forward.

cause undesirable behavior. Become self-aware. Pay attention to the food talk that inevitably arises when you approach any eating situation. Listen for the different voices that can serve as either your support or your saboteur.

For the most part, adopt the motto “If you don’t love it, don’t eat it, and if you love it, savor it.”

Relatedly, it does not take many bites of food to reach “taste satisfaction.” Sensory-specific satiety is defined as a decrease in the subjective liking for a food that is eaten. This decline occurs within minutes of eating a particular food, which is highly influenced by the sensory aspects of food, such as flavor, texture, or aroma. We also see that in our clients.

This initial step away from the blind autopilot eating mode is conscious-awareness eating. It’s a phase where you neutrally observe your eating as if under a microscope. (Your Food Anthropologist voice will be very helpful here.) We

Snacks or meals with a little fiber, complex carbohydrates, some protein, and some fat will help increase satiety.

Food can be used to cope with feelings in myriad ways. Using food in this way is not a component of biological hunger, but of emotional hunger.

Eating comfort foods can be part of a healthy relationship with food, if you do it while staying present and without guilt.

it’s eating to sedate yourself. It keeps you from experiencing any feeling for extended periods of time.

becomes impossible to sense your intuitive signals of hunger and satiety, and it deprives you of the satisfying experience that food can bring to your life.

Chronic stress also raises cortisol, which is a steroid hormone produced by the adrenal gland and secreted into the bloodstream. Prolonged higher levels of cortisol alter its effectiveness to regulate inflammatory and immune responses.

Frequently, clients who are highly successful in every aspect of their lives, except in their eating, discount their accomplishments. They feel as if their food problems indicate they are truly failures in life.

When Molly asked herself what she was feeling, she discovered frustration, exhaustion, and an unfocused mind. She realized that she was trying to feed both her fatigue and her frustration. But what she really needed was rest—no amount of food would replace sleep.

Body vigilance begets body worry, which begets food worry, which fuels the cycle of dieting. As long as you are at war with your body, it will be difficult to be at peace with yourself and food.

Most of our clients are adept at being overly critical or hating their bodies. And putting an end to body worry and self-loathing is no easy task. Most of us have trouble accepting a compliment, let alone accepting our bodies.

points, which will ease you into the idea of body-respect: You don’t have to like every part of your body to respect it. In fact, you don’t have to immediately accept where your body is now to respect it. Respecting your body means treating it with dignity, while holding the intention of meeting its basic needs.

The majority of American women (67 percent) wear sizes 16 and up, yet the majority of clothes available for purchase only go up to size 14, which is completely discriminatory for those who don’t fit the clothing company’s idea of “ideal” size.

Respect body diversity, especially yours. We come in all shapes and sizes, yet we somehow expect that we should all be “one size fits all,” as long as it’s thin. As long as we feed into this cultural stigma, it will be a long time before societal norms will change into a healthy acceptance of body diversity.

Be realistic. If maintaining or obtaining your weight requires living on rice cakes and water, while exercising for hours, that’s a glaring red flag that your goal is not realistic.

Consider the price you have paid (energy, time, emotional investment) chasing one diet after another to seek your fantasy body. By saying farewell to the fantasy, you open the door to being at peace not only with your body, but with other facets of your life. This is much easier to do for people who are in culturally

Decouple Exercise from Weight Loss

Ironically, nutrition stories that blow the whistle on misleading food product ads unintentionally create more fear of food. The message to the consumer is that you can’t trust the food companies, or the food label—you’ve been duped. If you are worried about what’s in your food, how can you begin to enjoy it?

The cause of 80 to 90 percent of ulcers is a bacterium called H. pylori. But up until that discovery in 1982, food was thought to be a contributing cause, resulting in a diet prescription of bland eating.

The point in this example is to remove the power of the widely perceived belief that eating a particular food will automatically make you unhealthy and unfit—that food is either good or bad. There seems to be a prevalent fear that “I’m one bite away from ________”

You decide if and what of the external world you’d like to integrate, ultimately, to achieve “authentic health.” The

misdiagnosed). The external world can also include philosophical preferences, such as a desire to eat locally grown foods with a low carbon footprint. If you are truly inner-attuned, you can integrate an external value while paying attention to hunger, fullness, satisfaction, and so forth.

Or perhaps you’ve been so afraid that you couldn’t eat just moderate amounts of some foods that you shun them altogether. But where has that gotten you?

Second, balance is intended to be achieved over a period of time—it does not have to be at each and every meal. Your body does not punch a time clock. Most

Most patients in the throes of an eating disorder have lost touch with their innate signals of hunger, fullness, and taste preference.

For anyone with an eating disorder, Intuitive Eating can be presented as a model of eating that will give them full trust in their body’s eating wisdom.

The body and brain must heal physically, and the mind must heal emotionally.

Recognition that the eating disorder is not about weight stigma or food, but rather a symptom of something deeper. Once you begin to accept this, eating will move into the realm of self-care, rather than a staunch attempt at defending the eating disorder’s existence.

One of our clients aptly suggested that Intuitive Eating is about waiting and learning to be patient. She finds herself waiting to eat until she is hungry. Then she describes waiting during a time-out in the midst of her meal to see if she is full. When

We are not shaming you for your desire to lose weight (it’s understandable, given the omnipresent diet culture)—we simply hope that you will embrace a fulfilling life in your here-and-now body, rather than putting it off while you chase weight loss.