Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach

by Evelyn Tribole

It needs to be kept in consideration, however, that higher-weight people are likely to continue to face discrimination, even after they have become Intuitive Eaters.)

“Sometimes I get angry, because food has lost its magic. Nothing tastes quite as good as it did when it was forbidden. I kept looking for the old thrill that food used to give me until I realized that my excitement in life wasn’t going to come from my eating anymore.

Interoceptive Awareness. Interoceptive awareness is the ability to perceive physical sensations that arise from within your body.

The harder you try restricting the foods you eat, the more your body and mind adapt to surviving the self-imposed famine. As far as your cells are concerned, you are trying to kill them. Your brain finally sends out chemicals that send you to seek large amounts of food for survival. Cravings escalate, until you can’t resist them, and for many people, the pressure to eat escalates to the point of loss-of-control eating. It’s like holding your breath. You have the illusion of willpower to limit your breathing. But at some point, your body can’t take it, because it needs air to survive. When you finally breathe, it’s a profound gasp for dear life, rather than a polite inhalation.

Feeling that you don’t deserve to eat, because you believe that your body doesn’t fit into diet culture’s body hierarchy.

every meal felt as if it were her last. She would eat each meal until she was uncomfortably stuffed, as she was terrified that she would never eat again.

Sluggish metabolism. Each diet teaches the body to adapt better for the next self-imposed famine (another diet). Metabolism slows as the body efficiently utilizes each calorie as if it’s the last.

Yet, if dieting were held to the same standards as prescription drugs, it would fail miserably, and wouldn’t even be approved for use in the first place!

While intense eating may feel out of control, and unnatural, it is a normal response to starving and dieting. Yet so often, post-diet eating is viewed as having “no willpower,” or a character defect.

People in larger bodies are more dramatically affected by: • Inaccessible seating in public spaces and transit • Seatbelts on airplanes that don’t fit • Lack of movement opportunities • Medical care withheld (infertility treatments, organ transplants, hip and knee replacement surgeries)

Health is not a moral imperative or a requirement for being treated with dignity and respect.

Furthermore, with each dieting episode, the risk of gaining weight increased in a dose-dependent manner.

Biologically, your body experiences the dieting process as a form of starvation. Your cells don’t know you are voluntarily restricting your food intake. Your body shifts into primal survival mode—metabolism slows down and food cravings escalate. And with each diet, the body learns and adapts, resulting in rebound weight gain.

It’s not unusual for them to binge or engage in Last Supper eating the moment a forbidden food is eaten. That’s because chronic dieters truly believe they will not eat this food ever again, for tomorrow they start a new food plan, tomorrow they start over with a clean slate. Better eat now; it’s the last chance.

Any desire for weight loss must be put on the back burner, or it will sabotage your process of healing your relationship with food, your mind, and your body.

He discovered that he was not a failure, but that the system of dieting itself created the setup for failure.

All bodies deserve dignity.

It was a vicious cycle—begin a diet and simultaneously begin working out, and then quit both the diet and the exercise.

You will begin to hold self-compassion for your desire to lose weight, as you learn that it has been a result of being conditioned by diet culture to believe in its significance as a measure of your worth.

And so begins the familiar chronic dieter’s plea: just let me lose the weight now, and after I lose the weight, I’ll figure it out.

Putting on a “false food face” in public. You only eat what is “proper” in front of other people—this is also known as performative eating, eating to please the expectations of other.

Chronic dieting teaches the body to retain more fat when you start eating again.

Food restriction stimulates the brain to launch a cascade of cravings to eat more, because the body on a cellular level is trying to survive the self-imposed famine.

Sherry did not realize that she had the right to refuse to be weighed. She finally got the courage after our work together. She made a doctor’s appointment and refused to be weighed, since it was not an essential component of her medical care at the moment.

Also, muscle is made up of mainly water (70 percent). When a hungry body is not given enough calories, the body cannibalizes itself for an energy source. The prime directive of the body is that it must have energy, at any cost—it’s part of the survival mechanism. The protein in muscles is converted to valuable energy for the body. When a muscle cell is destroyed, water is released and eventually excreted. The whittled-away muscle contributes to lowering your metabolism. Muscles are metabolically active tissue—generally the more muscle we have, the higher our metabolic rate. That’s one of the reasons men burn more calories than women—they have more muscle mass.

I deserve to enjoy eating without guilt.

Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates. Otherwise you can trigger a primal drive to overeat.

The men were obsessed with food. They had heightened food cravings and talked of food and collecting recipes.

Fasting or restricting is particularly counterproductive to appetite. It simply turns on the neurochemical switches that induce us to eat.

Neuropeptide Y (NPY) is a chemical produced by the brain that triggers our drive to eat carbohydrates, the body’s primary and preferred source of energy.

Food deprivation or undereating intake drives NPY into action, causing the body to seek more carbohydrates. When the next meal or eating opportunity rolls around, it can easily turn into a high-carbohydrate binge—not because you lack willpower or are out of control; it’s your biology (rather NPY) screaming, “Feed me.”

The brain also makes more NPY when carbohydrates are being burned as fuel and under times of stress. Eating carbohydrates turns off NPY through its effect on serotonin, another brain chemical. As we eat more carbohydrates, it helps to increase the production of serotonin, which in turn shuts off the production of NPY and puts a halt to the desire for carbohydrates.

If carbohydrates are inadequate in the diet, the body has to turn to creative fueling mechanisms to supply vital energy to the body. Protein mainly from muscle will get taken apart and converted to energy, primarily in the form of glucose.

Similarly, protein is needed to maintain and build muscles, hormones, enzymes, and cells in the body. When carbohydrates and energy are lacking, protein is shifted from its primary role to provide fuel.

Only a very small component (5 percent) of the stored fat can be converted to a carbohydrate fuel.

Similarly, for this individual, it can be increasingly difficult to know what comfortable satiety feels like.

What if you don’t feel hunger anymore, or never really knew what the gentle sensation of hunger feels like? Can you get it back? Yes.

Take care not to get overly hungry or ravenous. If this is difficult for you to gauge, a general guideline is to go no longer than five waking hours without eating.

The body may do some of its energy fine-tuning over a period of days, rather than from hour to hour. We find this is especially true if you still have a tendency to eat diet types of food, such as low-calorie frozen dinners or salads without dressing. You may feel full, but the lack of energy catches up with you.

When you rigidly limit the amount of food you are allowed to eat, it usually sets you up to crave larger quantities of that very food. In fact, being restricted from anything in life sets it up to be extra special, regardless of age. (Oh, maybe not in the beginning, when you are in the initial stages of diet euphoria, but the craving builds with each “dieting day.”

The mere perception that food might become banned can trigger overeating.

How could you possibly feel good about yourself if you truly believe that it’s possible to eliminate certain foods, only to find yourself bingeing and failing on yet another diet?

When you truly free your food choices, without any hidden agenda of restricting them in the future, you eliminate the urgency to overeat.

Legalizing food is the critical step in changing your relationship with food. It frees you to respond to inner eating signals that have been smothered by negative thoughts and feelings of guilt about eating.

The only way that you will come to believe that you will be able to stop eating is to go through the food experience, to actually eat. That’s why we are fond of the word “process.” This is not about knowledge of food, but rather rebuilding experiences with eating. You cannot have an experience through knowledge; rather, you need to go through it, bite by bite.

Pay attention to the foods that are appealing to you, and make a list of them. Put a check by the foods you actually do eat, then circle remaining foods that you’ve been restricting. Give yourself permission to eat one forbidden food from your list, then go to the market and buy this food, or order it at a restaurant. Check in with yourself to see if the food tastes as good as you imagined. If you find that you really like it, continue to give yourself permission to buy or order it. Make sure that you keep enough of the food in your kitchen so that you know that it will be there if you want it. Or if that seems too scary, go to a restaurant and order the particular food as often as you like.

The purpose behind having unconditional permission to eat is not to “get sick of” or burn out on a particular food—it’s partly to experience habituation, in which the heightened novelty of eating a particular food wanes.

There are three that can be primarily destructive: the Food Police, the Nutrition Informant, and the Diet Rebel. But we also can develop powerful allies; these voices are: the Food Anthropologist, the Nurturer, and the Nutrition Ally.

There are no rigid rules in this process. Diets are rigid—Intuitive Eating is fluid and adapts to the many changes in your life. Go with the flow without trying to control it.

When you think in terms of how good or bad your eating is or how large or small your body is, you can end up judging your self-worth based on these thoughts. If you begin to feel that you’re a bad person, you’re likely to create self-punishing behaviors.