Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach

by Evelyn Tribole

Parents who monitored and restricted their daughters’ eating had daughters who: (a) reported significantly more emotional eating and (b) were less inclined to eat for physical reasons of hunger and satiety. The association was different for the male college students. Parents who recollected restriction of their son’s food intake did not report higher emotional eating. This might be due to the difference of social pressure for women to conform to the thin ideal. The researchers concluded that controlling feeding practices by parents has potentially long-term consequences and may contribute to the development of emotional eating.

When people encourage others to be critical of their bodies, they learn to eat in a disconnected manner in an attempt to regulate their appearance instead of listening to their bodies. Additionally, pressure to lose weight from family members, friends, healthcare providers, and culture (in lieu of body acceptance) contributes to focusing on appearance-related eating. Many people are surprised to learn that body compliments can be a form of judging a person by their appearance, such as “You look great—how much weight did you lose?” or “I wish I had a body like yours.”

The constant yo-yo dieting, or gaining and losing weight from dieting, is known as weight cycling. Weight cycling itself is an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease, inflammation, high blood pressure, and insulin resistance, yet it is seldom controlled for in many large studies that associate weight with health issues (Bacon and Amphamor 2011). Two large studies showed that weight cycling accounts for all the excess mortality that had been linked to body size.

The Unconscious Eater is often engaged in paired eating—which is eating and doing another activity at the same time, such as watching television and eating, or reading and eating, or the growing favorite, using the cell phone and eating—be it playing games, checking social media, or surfing the internet.

The Emotional Unconscious Eater uses food as the predominant way to cope with emotions, especially uncomfortable emotions such as stress, anger, and loneliness. While Emotional Unconscious Eaters view their eating as the problem, it’s often a symptom of a deeper issue. Eating behaviors of the Emotional Unconscious Eater can range from grabbing a candy bar in stressful times to chronic compulsive binges of vast quantities of food.

Using food to cope with emotions comes in degrees of intensity. For some, food is simply a means of distraction from boring activities or a filler for empty times. For others, it can be the only comfort they have to get through a painful life.

Counting macros is not a lifestyle. Counting points is not a lifestyle. Nice try, diet culture, we’re on to you!

A thirty-two-year study of more than three thousand men and women, the Framingham Heart Study, has shown that regardless of initial weight, people whose weight repeatedly goes up and down—known as weight cycling or yo-yo dieting—have a higher overall death rate and twice the normal risk of dying of heart disease. These results were independent of cardiovascular risk factors and held true regardless of a person’s weight.

Yo-yo dieters who continually regain the lost weight tend to regain weight in the abdominal area. This type of fat storage increases the risk of heart disease.

In the world of dieting, personal boundaries are crossed at many levels. For example, you are told what to eat, how much of it to eat, and when to eat it. These decisions should all be personal choices, with respect for individual autonomy and body signals. While food guidance may come from elsewhere, you should ultimately be responsible for the when, what, and how much of eating.

Many of our clients will recount that when they “allowed” themselves to eat certain forbidden foods, they still overate and felt out of control. 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, or with a little voice saying, “You really shouldn’t eat that.” The moment that food touched the tongue, feelings of guilt and remorse flooded in. And with these feelings came a conviction to limit these foods in the future and counter this indulgence by “eating right” tomorrow. Although physically eating the food, they were emotionally depriving themselves in the future. And, so, the cycle perpetuates. Pseudo-permission does not work—it’s only an illusion. Your mouth may be chewing, but your mind is saying, “I shouldn’t.” Your mind is still on a diet.

Several studies have shown that the regulation of food intake has its foundation in early eating experiences. If as a child your parents took control over most of your eating without respecting your preferences or hunger levels, you easily got the message that you couldn’t be trusted with food.

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.

Food thoughts and judgments run rampant through our minds, but how often do we take a moment to examine them? We’re not born with these thoughts. We hear the ideas behind them as we grow up, take them in, and sometimes then adopt them as “well-known” rules, which must not be defied.

One easy way to call your inner Food Anthropologist into action is to keep a food journal. Sometimes simply noting the time of day and what you ate can give you some interesting clues about what drives your eating. Or note your thoughts before and after you eat. Do they affect how you feel? Does your feeling state affect how you behave or eat? If so, how? Consider this as one big experiment, not a tool for judgment.

Dichotomous or binary thinking can be dangerous and is often based on the premise of achieving perfection. It gives you only two alternatives, one of which is usually neither attainable nor maintainable. The other then tends to be the black hole into which you inevitably fall after failing to get to the first. You set your sights so high, constantly chasing an ideal that you can grasp only moments at a time. When the standard for being okay is this lofty, you’re destined to feel lousy most of the time.

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.

When you think in this way, you believe that one behavior will absolutely, irrevocably result in a second behavior. This is considered magical thinking, because in reality, you can’t and don’t control life in this way. It leads you to believe that you “must” act in a certain way or else something “awful” will happen.

The most obvious way to heal cup-is-half-empty thinking is to consciously catch each of your negative statements and replace the words with more positive ones.

We tend to be a society of linear thinkers. We want to get to the goal without appreciating the means. We’re success-oriented and rarely stop long enough to just be and check out the scenery along the way.

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.

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.

For the most part, adopt the motto “If you don’t love it, don’t eat it, and if you love it, savor it.” Order something else, find something different in the refrigerator, or eat the parts of the meal that you like, and leave the rest.

In studies of hedonics to food cues (hedonics is the branch of psychology dealing with pleasurable and unpleasurable feelings), researchers find that as you’re eating a particular food, a decrease of desire for that food emerges. Researchers call this concept sensory-specific satiety (Epstein 2009).

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.

Knowing what you like to eat and believing that you have the right to enjoy food are key factors in a lifetime of enjoyable eating without dieting. If it takes you some time to accomplish all of this, be patient. After all, it’s taken you many years to lose your ability to truly enjoy eating.

The irony of eating while distracted is that you end up missing out on the eating experience, which often means that eating needs to be repeated. This is akin to having a phone conversation with a friend while you are checking email. You might respond to the conversation at the right times, but something is missing, there is a disconnect—and usually the person on the other line can tell you are not 100 percent there. In the case of distracted eating—it is your body that knows.

The mind can only place its awareness on one thing at time. While you certainly may juggle a zillion activities, your mind places its awareness on only one. That’s why, for example, so many people accidently lock their keys in their car. Their minds are somewhere else, such as getting into the office on time, or unloading the groceries. We find that to get the most out of eating, it needs to be a conscious activity, whenever possible.

Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, and anger are emotions we all experience throughout life. Each has its own trigger, and each has its own appeasement. Food won’t fix any of these feelings. It may comfort for the short term, distract from the pain, or even numb you. But food won’t solve the problem. You’ll ultimately have to deal with the source of the emotion.

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.

There is nothing wrong with occasionally wanting to distract yourself from feelings. Experiencing your feelings twenty-four hours a day can be tedious and overwhelming. But if you find that you’re using food as a way to distract yourself from your feelings on a regular basis, this might be a cue to seek some help, in order to deal with them in a more beneficial way.

If you find that you’re doing quite a bit of eating when you’re not biologically hungry, then there’s a good chance that you are using food to cope. You may not have deep-seated emotional reasons to eat, but just getting through life’s hassles with some of its irksome tasks and boredom might trigger you to seek food to make it all easier, or you just might not want to feel the sadness that emerges when you need to stop eating because you’ve reached comfortable fullness.

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. For these reasons, seeking help to find ways to reduce stress can improve your overall health. These biological problems are compounded if you cope with stress by eating. Studies show that people who have been dieting are especially vulnerable to overeating during stressful times. Stress becomes one more reason to “blow” the diet. Furthermore, dieting itself can be a source of stress.

Repeatedly, we seem to be sold the message: If they can do it, you can do it; just try harder. With such standards, it’s no wonder that people are at war with their bodies. For all genders, fat is considered the enemy.

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.

For decades, major clothing stores and fashion designers generally catered to one type: the white, thin customer. 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.

When you participate in conversations disparaging your own body, or the bodies of others, it perpetuates weight stigma. Studies show that refraining from this type of discussion is helpful in reducing body dissatisfaction, dieting, and eating disorder symptoms.

Several studies have documented that people in larger bodies do not necessarily eat more than their smaller counterparts. Humans are supposed to come in a diverse range of sizes, not just one body. Yes, there are compulsive eaters. Yes, there are those who are not active. You cannot assume that someone with a large body overeats and does not move. Conversely, you cannot assume someone in a thin body is healthy and engages in physical activity.

According to the National Institutes of Health, many people in this country who are at the weight they are born to be continue to try to lose weight—and it may be in part from chasing an unrealistic body size, healthcare demands, public health policy, and ongoing weight stigma.

People who eat higher amounts of fruits and vegetables have lower risks of many chronic diseases, especially cancer. In almost every study looking at plant food and people (more than two hundred studies to date), plant food is associated with lowering the risk of cancer.