Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach

by Evelyn Tribole

You tell yourself that all your happiness hinges on your eating and your body. If that is your premise, then you’re bound to feel all the more unhappy than you are at the moment.

Fat is not a feeling, but it is a form of body shaming, rooted in diet culture and weight stigma. I am appreciating all the things my body can do.

Even if something tastes and feels great on your tongue and in your mouth, if it makes your stomach feel queasy or too full, it will diminish the satisfying experience.

A further critical key to finding satisfaction in your eating is to take a time-out after you’ve had a few bites of your food. Is the taste and texture consistent with your desire? Is the food satisfying enough to eat? If you continue to eat a food just because it’s there, despite the fact that it’s unappealing, you’ll only end up feeling unsatisfied when you’re finished and find yourself on the prowl for something else that will satisfy you.

Try your own hedonic experiment. Rate the taste pleasure you get from the first few bites of a food from ten to one—ten being the most pleasurable and one being the least pleasurable. Then stop halfway through the food and check your taste buds. Finally, rate the food when you’re down to the last bite. You’re likely to find that the numbers diminish along with the food.

Having an ingrained habit of eating to completion. Out of sheer habit you finish an entire plate of food, or a whole hamburger, or a whole bag of chips, regardless of how hungry or full you are. This is a reliance on external cues. You stop eating when the food is gone, regardless of the size of the initial portion.

The problem is the inability to recognize comfortable satiety or the sadness that arises when realizing you’re full and need to stop eating.

If, however, you do not eat from biological hunger, how could you expect to stop from biological fullness (or to even know what it feels like)?

—Dieters, however, have been shown to eat less when they know someone is “watching” them. The same can be true for non-dieters, when they dine with a “model” eater. In one study, when the model eater refrained from eating, so too did the non-dieter.

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

What many folks have labeled as emotional eating is merely a psychological and biological consequence of food restriction.

Food is love, food is comfort, food is reward, food is a reliable friend. And, sometimes, food becomes your only friend in moments of pain and loneliness.

She talked about feeling very frustrated when she would stop eating after finding the threshold bite and truly not wanting any more food. She knew that she’d had enough, didn’t want to feel uncomfortable by eating more, yet felt unhappy that she wouldn’t be able to continue to have the taste sensations that the food provided.

turning to food as a coping mechanism becomes a red flag to let you know that something isn’t right in your life. Once you truly appreciate this, you’ll realize that this is an early-warning system. Recognize how lucky you are to have this mechanism to alert you that something is off-kilter in your life!

As long as you are at war with your body, it will be difficult to be at peace with yourself and food.

They feared that if they accepted their current body size, it would mean complacency, giving up on changing their relationship with food, and simply accepting the weight stigma that comes with their current body size, without a fight.

When you are caught in the I-hate-my-body mindset, it’s all too easy to keep delaying good things for yourself, waiting until you have a body that you think is more deserving.

Shifting your focus to appreciating the body you have, rather than wishing for a different body, will help you fill this emptiness with meaningful and satisfying life experiences.

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.

Many of our clients discover in hindsight that had they lived in a world where they could have accepted their bodies when they were younger, they would have never gone on that first diet, with all of its negative ramifications. They could have been happy then and would continue to be happy now.

If you do not feed your body enough carbohydrates, it will dismantle its muscle protein to create vital energy.

When a diet fails, exercise often stops because it was only done as an adjunct to dieting.

How can you make movement a non-negotiable priority? This is not intended as a rigid guideline, rather a new way of thinking of exercise so that it won’t slip through the cracks.

it is a privilege to have enough time for physical activity.

psychosocial risk factors are a stronger risk for heart disease than inflammation markers in the blood. Furthermore, social isolation was found to be more lethal than smoking fifteen cigarettes a day

the effect of positive emotional experiences can have a greater impact on health than which foods people actually eat.

“Nutritionism,” a concept created by Dr. Gyorgy Scrinis, describes how the overly reductive focus on nutrients in food undermines how we think about food, how we view the experiences of our own bodies, and how we understand the relationship between food and our bodies (2008).

Having a healthy relationship with food means you are not morally superior or inferior based on your eating choices. It means that both foods have emotional equivalency. Eating selection is not a reflection of your character.

Achieving “authentic health” is a process of dynamic integration of your inner world and the external world of health guidelines, which include exercise and nutrition.

We need fat in our diet for a number of reasons, including making neurotransmitter receptors, to promote satiety, and to help absorb fat-soluble nutrients, such as vitamins A, E, and D.

in the United States, a child is 242 times more likely to have an eating disorder than type 2 diabetes!*

Carrie needed to accept that starving her body was the antithesis of respecting her body.

Discard the notion that you must finish everything on your plate because you fear wasting food.