Intuitive Eating Quotes

“If you don’t love it, don’t eat it, and if you love it, savor it.”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works

“Make food choices that honor your health and taste buds while making you feel good. Remember that you don’t have to eat a perfect diet to be healthy. You will not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency, or gain weight from one snack, one meal, or one day of eating. It’s what you eat consistently over time that matters. Progress, not perfection, is what counts.”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works

“Having a healthy relationship with food means you are not morally superior or inferior based on your eating choices.”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works

“Honestly, unless you killed the chef or the farmer, there should be no guilt about your eating choices.”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach

“Accept your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect realistically to squeeze into a size six, it is equally futile (and uncomfortable) to have a similar expectation about body size. Respect your body, so you can feel better about who you are. It’s hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly critical of your body shape.”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works

“The Japanese have the wisdom to keep pleasure as one of their goals of healthy living. In our fury to be thin and healthy, we often overlook one of the most basic gifts of existence—the pleasure and satisfaction that can be found in the eating experience. When you eat what you really want, in an environment that is inviting, the pleasure you derive will be a powerful force in helping you feel satisfied and content. By providing this experience for yourself, you will find that it takes much less food to decide you’ve had “enough.”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works

“Listen for the body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry. Observe the signs that show that you’re comfortably full. Pause in the middle of a meal or snack and ask yourself how the food tastes, and what your current fullness level is.”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works

“Throw out the diet books and magazine articles that offer you the false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently. Get angry at the lies that have led you to feel as if you were a failure every time a new diet stopped working and you gained back all of the weight. If you allow even one small hope to linger that a new and better diet might be lurking around the corner, it will prevent you from being free to rediscover Intuitive Eating.”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works

“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.”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works

“Call a truce, stop the food fight! Give yourself unconditional permission to eat. If you tell yourself that you can’t or shouldn’t have a particular food, it can lead to intense feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings and often, bingeing. When you finally “give in” to your forbidden foods, eating will be experienced with such intensity, it usually results in Last Supper overeating and overwhelming guilt.”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works

“Dieting may cause stress or make the dieter more vulnerable to its effects. Independent of body weight itself, dieting is correlated with feelings of failure, lowered self-esteem, and social anxiety.”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works

“Find ways to comfort, nurture, distract, and resolve your emotional issues without using food. 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 into a food hangover. But food won’t solve the problem. If anything, eating for an emotional hunger will only make you feel worse in the long run. You’ll ultimately have to deal with the source of the emotion, as well as the discomfort of overeating.”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works

“Just because someone makes an inappropriate comment does not make it true!”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works

“Dichotomous or black-and-white 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 or maintainable. The other then tends to be the black hole in 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. And we know that when you feel lousy, you’re bound to end up going off the deep end in your eating behavior.”
― Evelyn Tribole & Elyse Resch, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works

“Children deprived of food in an attempt to be thin become preoccupied with food, afraid they won’t get enough to eat, and are prone to overeat when they get the chance.”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works

“In fact, groundbreaking work by therapist and dietitian Ellyn Satter has shown that if you get the parents of overweight kids to back off and let them eat without parental pressure, the kids will eventually eat less. Why? The child begins to hear and understand his own inner signals of hunger and satiety. The child also knows that he or she will have access to food. According to Satter, “Children deprived of food in an attempt to be thin become preoccupied with food, afraid they won’t get enough to eat, and are prone to overeat when they get the chance.” We have found this to be true for adult dieters as well. Only for adults, the Intuitive Eating process has been buried for a long time, often years and years. Instead of having a parent loosen up the pressure, this loosening of pressure has to come from within and against society’s myth of dieting and distorted body worship.”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works

“We define healthy eating as having a healthy balance of foods and having a healthy relationship with food.”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works

“You have forgotten what you really like to eat and instead eat what you think you “should” eat.”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works

“And, please keep in mind that these ten principles are simply guidelines and not new rules that can be turned into a new diet. 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.”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach

“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.”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach

“Diet culture is a system of beliefs that: • Worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue, which means you can spend your whole life thinking you’re irreparably broken just because you don’t look like the impossibly thin “ideal.” • Promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status, which means you feel compelled to spend a massive amount of time, energy, and money trying to shrink your body, even though the research is very clear that almost no one can sustain intentional weight loss for more than a few years. • Demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others, which means you’re forced to be hyper-vigilant about your eating, ashamed of making certain food choices, and distracted from your pleasure, your purpose, and your power. • Oppresses people who don’t match up with its supposed picture of “health,” which disproportionately harms women, femmes, trans folks, people in larger bodies, people of color, and people with disabilities, damaging both their mental and physical health.”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach

“One of the strongest predictors of weight gain is dieting, regardless of the actual body weight of the dieter (O’Hara and Taylor 2018). This is a profound irony, given the medicalization of the pursuit of weight loss. 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!”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach

“They identified four hallmarks of body appreciation: Possessing a favorable opinion of the body despite size and perceived imperfections. Being aware of and attentive to the body’s needs. Engaging in healthy behaviors to take care of the body. Protecting the body by rejecting unrealistic media body ideals.”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach

“When women emphasize the functionality of their bodies over appearance, they are more inclined to eat according to their body’s biological cues.”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach

“However, when high emotional awareness was coupled with more self-silencing, participants had more disordered eating and less Intuitive Eating. The researchers believe that when women have clarity about their thoughts and feelings, but silence their voices, hunger signals may become confused, which may decrease trust of internal signals of hunger and satiation. The most intuitive and least disordered eaters in the study displayed high emotional awareness and low self-silencing.”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach

“Expression of thoughts, feelings, or needs appears to be a critical aspect of healthy eating behaviors.”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach

“Intuitive Eating was associated with the following benefits (Ricciardelli 2016): • Greater body appreciation and satisfaction • Positive emotional functioning • Greater life satisfaction • Unconditional self-regard and optimism • Psychological hardiness • Greater motivation to exercise, when focus is on enjoyment rather than guilt or appearance Furthermore, IE was inversely related to: disordered eating, dieting, poor interoceptive awareness, and internalization of the thin ideal.”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach

“The way an individual values and responds to these body sensations is known as interoceptive responsiveness.”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach

“The principles of Intuitive Eating work either by enhancing interoceptive awareness, or by removing the obstacles to perceiving and responding to the felt sensations in the body. The obstacles are usually from the mind in the form of rules, beliefs, and thoughts.”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach

“Interoceptive awareness is the ability to perceive physical sensations that arise from within your body. It’s a direct experience, a felt sense that happens in the present moment—it’s not the past or future, it happens right now. It includes basic states like feeling a distended bladder, hunger and satiety cues, and the felt sense of every emotional feeling. Every emotion has a unique physical sensation in the body. When you perceive bodily sensations, it gives rise to powerful information to help get your psychological and biological needs met.”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach