About Intuitive Eating

When this happens, messages about hunger and satietly can get lost. It’s as if the wifi (or phone lines) went down – making it hard to send and receive messages.

Intuitive Eating is a movement to reconnect people with their bodies. Rather than focus on external rules like dieting or calorie counting, you focus on listening to messages your body is sending you about what it needs.

The founders of the Intuitive Eating movement, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, developed 10 principles to consider…

10 principles of Intuitive Eating

1. Reject the Diet Mentality
   Stop thinking a “diet” will help you lose weight. Your body has all the information it needs for healthy weight loss – it’s just a matter of tuning into it!
2. Honor Your Hunger
   Give your body the fuel it needs, meaning adequate energy and carbohydrates. (When you eat too little, your body can feel like it’s in an emergency and this causes overeating!) Tribole and Resch note that “Learning to honor this first biological signal sets the stage for rebuilding trust in yourself and in food.”
3. Make Peace with Food
   You have permission to eat any food you want. The idea is that feeling deprived can lead to cravings, and possibly bingeing. There’s no guilt – if you’re craving a specific food then simply enjoy it and move on!

4. Challenge the Food Police
   There is no being “good” or “bad” because of what you eat or don’t eat! This is external messaging from diet culture, not information you’re getting from your body about what it needs!
5. Discover the Satisfaction Factor
   Pleasure is a part of healthy living! Tribole and Resch wrote, “In our compulsion to comply with diet culture, we often overlook one of the most basic gifts of existence—the pleasure and satisfaction that can be found in the eating experience.” They continue, “By providing this experience for yourself, you will find that it takes just the right amount of food for you to decide you’ve had “enough.”
6. Feel Your Fullness
   Your body will send signals that it is no longer hungry. Pause during meals and attune to your body’s messages. Ask yourself what your current hunger level is and how the food tastes.

7. Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness First, know that it’s not uncommon to manage emotions with food – it’s actually pretty resourceful! It only becomes an issue when this habit interferes with your health and well-being.
   Food won’t be able to fix anxiety, anger, loneliness, or boredom – it offers short-term comfort or distraction. (And, over time, numbing the pain might make it harder to address what is causing these feelings.) Be kind to your brain when it reaches for something it knows can make you feel better quickly while you train it to respond to your body’s cues instead.
8. Respect Your Body Tribole and Resch suggest that you “Accept your genetic blueprint.” Honor your body’s shape and strength, and reject the diet mentality that suggests some bodies don’t deserve respect.

9. Movement—Feel the Difference
   Simply enjoy moving your body, rather than focus on calorie-burning! Different kinds of movement like dancing, walking, and working out can make you feel energized, improve your mood and attention, and result in better health.
10. Honor Your Health—Gentle Nutrition
    You don’t have to eat perfectly to be healthy. Just remember that food choices that honor your health and taste buds can make you feel really good! Tribole and Resch offer a reminder that you can’t “become unhealthy, 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.”

Conclusion

Intuitive eating is one way to respond to how our current culture and food systems have interfered with your body’s messages to you. There are foods that have been designed to trick your body into thinking they’re nutritious or that promote overeating.  Sometimes, we’re so busy or stressed that it’s hard to have a moment to tune in. Small changes over time, like pausing and asking yourself, “do I truly want to be eating this right now?” can be a way to start eating intuitively