Intuitive Eating: Clarifying Misconceptions & Inspiring Hope
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When I first learned about intuitive eating nearly 10 years ago it blew my mind. It helped me understand why I was feeling so ineffective and unfulfilled professionally and laid the groundwork for me to find my way to where I am today. And my story isn’t unique. For many dietitians who were trained in a traditional, weight-centric, medical model but then quickly realized in practice that everything we had learned about weight and weight as it relates to health was essentially garbage, intuitive eating offered much needed validation that we weren’t terrible dietitians. We were just misguided and intuitive eating afforded us the opportunity to correct course.
It also helped me recognize a lot of my own disordered beliefs and behaviors around food—which I had just come to view as normal—and set me on my own healing journey. But, that’s a different story for a different day.
In the time since discovering intuitive eating, I’ve written more blogs and social media posts than I could count about the topic, been interviewed for major news outlets numerous times, offered professional development workshops for colleagues seeking to deepen their understanding, as well as for the general public, and of course, counseled and supported hundreds of clients seeking to heal their relationship with food and re-connect with their intuitive eater.
What I’ve learned in that time is that intuitive eating is nuanced. Much more so than I appreciated early on in my learning. And, much more so than social media would ever suggest. Yes, it consists of 10 seemingly straightforward principles. But, those principles can be so easily misconstrued and overly simplified, to the point of being totally inconsistent with the true spirit of intuitive eating.
So here I’ll explain some of the common misconceptions about intuitive eating, explore some of that nuance, and share some of the ways in which intuitive eating just might be able to help you.
“I see so many people trying to approach intuitive eating in the same way they have every diet they’ve been on. They read the 10 principles and then turn them into a set of rules—a do this, don’t do that guide to intuitive eating. Which is about as helpful as every diet. And that is, not very. ”
Clarifying Common Intuitive Eating Misconceptions
Intuitive eating consists of 10 principles, which is not synonymous with rules.
I see so many people trying to approach intuitive eating in the same way they have every diet they’ve been on. They read the 10 principles and then turn them into a set of rules—a do this, don’t do that guide to intuitive eating. Which is about as helpful as every diet. And that is, not very.
If you’ve been using rules to manage eating for a long time, then it makes sense you might want to approach intuitive eating the same way. The problem is, rules are used as a way to externally control our food intake, reinforcing the belief that we cannot trust ourselves to make our own decisions. Whereas intuitive eating is an intrinsically driven process all about rebuilding trust to make autonomous food decisions. Food or eating rules and intuitive eating cannot co-exist.
Honor Your Hunger + Feel You Fullness ≠ Only Eat When Hungry + Stop When Full
Eating in response to appetite cues, i.e., hunger and fullness, is what many people think of first when they think about intuitive eating. These principles are often misinterpreted to mean only eat when you are hungry and stop as soon as you feel full, which is a great example of how we often try to turn intuitive eating into a set of rules!
While yes, intuitive eating helps us reconnect with and learn how to eat in response to appetite cues, it does not mean that eating when not hungry or eating past comfortable fullness are not allowed. In fact, there might be times when that is the most supportive or desirable decision for us. For example, maybe you don’t feel hunger in this moment, but you are about to step into a 3-hour class or meeting and know that you will be very hungry at the end if you don’t nourish yourself in advance. In this case, eating when you are not hungry might be a very wise decision. Or maybe you are enjoying a special meal. You know you are full and if you continue eating you might be fuller than is comfortable. But the food is so good and a little discomfort feels worth the pleasure you are getting from the food. This is also a perfectly OK and acceptable decision.
Moreover, if you are recovering from an eating disorder, or have been engaging in chronic dieting, your appetite cues may not be reliable indicators of your nourishment needs quite yet. As I discussed in a recent Instagram reel, this can sometimes lead to describing what are really disordered behaviors as intuitive and that’s not supportive of healing.
There are many other things that can impact appetite cues, too—medications, chronic health conditions, stress and anxiety, and more. So, while intuitive eating can help us learn how to eat in response to appetite cues, it does not limit us to only eating in response to appetite cues and can also help us to recognize, that in some circumstances, appetite cues may not be the most reliable way to ensure our nourishment needs are met.
Intuitive eating is not a weight loss plan, but it doesn’t mean you can’t desire to lose weight.
There’s often a lot of confusion around the role of intuitive eating and weight loss. On the one hand, we have the diet industry co-opting intuitive eating as an effective weight loss intervention. On the other hand, we have body positive influencers suggesting that you can’t practice intuitive eating and also want to lose weight. Neither is true.
No, intuitive eating is not a weight loss intervention. The authors are very explicit about that. So any person or program who saying they use intuitive eating and promise weight loss is lying.
However, intuitive eating does not say that you aren’t allowed to desire weight loss. Many, if not most, of the people I work with on intuitive eating come to me wanting to both heal their relationship with food and also exist in a smaller body. While I would never promise that intuitive eating will lead to weight loss, I can and do validate and empathize with the desire for weight loss.
Letting go of that desire is not a prerequisite for learning and practicing intuitive eating. However, to really learn to practice intuitive eating, we do need to let go of restrictive, dieting behaviors. That means we need to let go of the pursuit of weight loss.
So many people ask the question, “can I just lose the weight first, then practice intuitive eating after?” I so get the appeal of this. And the answer is, yes you can. But, chances are very, very high that you will regain the weight you lost because intuitive eating will not endorse the behaviors you practiced to achieve that weight loss.
One of the beautiful things that intuitive eating can offer is learning how to relate to our bodies differently, in addition to learning how to relate to food differently. It creates space for that desire for your body to be smaller or different to still exist without totally interfering with your ability to live a full and meaningful life.
“Letting go of that desire is not a prerequisite for learning and practicing intuitive eating. However, to really learn to practice intuitive eating, we do need to let go of restrictive, dieting behaviors. That means we need to let go of the pursuit of weight loss.”
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How Intuitive Eating Can Help You Heal
Understand the experiences and associated belief systems that impact your relationship with food.
Unlike the way many of us have been taught to think about and make food decisions, intuitive eating helps us move away from the good/bad, right/wrong, healthy/unhealthy dichotomy. It also helps us recognize how those black-and-white belief systems have only led to more guilt, shame, confusion, and chaos surrounding food.
Beyond that, intuitive eating helps us to recognize just how complex our relationship with food really is, how our lived experiences play an important role in shaping that relationship, and how, with that understanding, we can begin to forge a more supportive relationship with food moving forward.
Despite what diet culture teaches us—that fixing our relationship with food is simply about discipline, willpower, and control—intuitive eating offers a much more compassionate and nuanced understanding of why our relationship with food is what it is.
Connect with your innate inner wisdom about how to nourish and care for your body.
Your relationship with food hasn’t always been this complicated. You aren’t born distrusting your body. You were actually born with a highly sophisticated internal regulatory system designed specifically to regulate your food intake. That regulatory system still exists within you. Intuitive eating helps you reconnect with that system, to learn how to listen to, honor, and trust it again.
But intuitive eating isn’t just about instinct. It’s also about integrating thoughts, feelings, intellect into your decision making with food. That includes listening and responding to appetite cues, but also your sensory desires and preferences, and thinking through the implications of certain decisions to decide what will best meet your needs in a given moment.
Through this process you learn how to sense into and integrate all the information you are getting from your body to make intrinsically driven and supportive food decisions.
Find more satisfaction with food and in other areas of life, too.
The concept and importance of satisfaction is woven throughout the entirety of intuitive eating and is woefully absent from basically everything diet culture sells us.
It means to eat in a way that tastes good and feels good, that “hits the spot” and allows us to walk away from an eating experience feeling better than when we started. Satisfaction comes from the food itself, the environment in which we eat, and the feelings we have during and surrounding eating experiences. Thus, eating food we generally like, in an environment that is calm, without a side dish of guilt is generally a more satisfying eating experience than eating certain foods because we feel like we “should,” or in environments that are tense or overstimulating, or when we are overcome with stress, anxiety, or guilt.
Feeling satisfied from our eating experiences is important because it helps us move on from the eating experience once it’s done, rather than continuing to obsess over or feel preoccupied by food afterward. It’s that constant preoccupation that can so often lead to eating in ways that don’t feel good for us.
Finding satisfaction with food and eating in turn helps us find more peace and ease with food. More peace and ease with food means more time and more energy—physical and mental—to devote to other areas of our lives. More time and energy to devote elsewhere often means finding greater satisfaction elsewhere, too.
Intuitive eating is a powerful framework that holds the potential to completely transform your relationship with food and often has a ripple effect that extends far beyond how you feel about what’s on your plate. However, I don’t mean to imply that intuitive eating is a panacea. Of course, it won’t solve all of life’s problems and it’s not a cure all. But, it can be an incredibly clarifying experience that may shed light on unmet needs that dieting has been masking and create the space to finally figure out how to get those needs met, too.
Ready to start your intuitive eating journey? Or perhaps you are seeking a refresher? Either way, we’d love to have you join us for our 6-week Intuitive Eating Support Group and Book Club. It offers community, connection, and conversation on all things intuitive eating, in the company of others who “get it” and are on a similar healing journey, and is facilitated by a Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor (me!). Click HERE to learn more and register. Feel free to contact us with any questions.