Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach

by Evelyn Tribole

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. Attunement with your body’s satiety cues is an important part of this process.

Intuitive Eating is truly about trusting that you will be able to access all of the information you need, by using all aspects of your brain—your reptilian instincts, your limbic connection with your emotions, and your rational thoughts.

The results showed that parental monitoring and restriction of food intake had a significant impact on their college student’s emotional eating and Intuitive Eating Scale scores.

Dieting had made her more preoccupied with food. Dieting had made food the enemy. Dieting had made her feel guilty when she wasn’t eating diet types of foods

Maybe you don’t diet but eat vigilantly or eat “clean” in the name of health and fitness. This seems to be the socially accepted term for “dieting” in recent years. But for many, it’s the same food issue—with the same symptoms. Avoiding carbohydrates, a trend that has circled back into fashion like a revolving door, at all costs, and subsisting on almost exclusively low-carbohydrate foods is essentially dieting, and often results in being underfed.

We see this all the time, the hangover from dieting: avoiding certain foods at all costs, feeling out of control the moment a “sinful” food is eaten, feeling guilty when self-imposed food rules are broken (such as “Thou shall not eat past 6 p.m.”), and so on.

The Careful Clean Eater can spend most of their waking hours planning out the next meal or snack, often worrying about what to eat. While the Careful Clean Eater is not officially on a diet, their mind is—chastising themselves for every “unhealthy” fatty or sugary food eaten.

A Careful Clean Eater, upon closer inspection, resembles an evangelist, wanting to convert anyone who will listen to their way of eating. It’s their identity and source of pride. They may not diet, but they scrutinize every food situation, including the food choices of the people around them.

Professional Dieters know a lot about portions of foods, calories, and “dieting tricks,” yet the reason they are always on another diet is that the original one never worked. Today, the Professional Dieter is also well versed in counting macros.

While dieting may have been futile, it offered excitement and hope—the exhilaration of quick weight loss and the excitement of watching the scale inch downward. The hope—that this diet will be it.