What is Intuitive Eating, Really?
I remember when I picked up the book Intuitive Eating for the first time. It blew my mind.
The idea that weight was not inextricably linked to health, that pursuing intentional weight loss was correlated to future weight gain, that dieting was a primary predictor of eating disorder development, and that meticulously measuring and tracking every morsel of food that crossed one’s lips was disordered eating was all brand-new information to me.
So much of my training to become a dietitian centered around how to help people control their food more. The notion that, a key to building a healthier relationship with food was actually to control less was kind of mind-boggling.
But it made sense, too.
At this point in my career I had been dietitianing for 3ish years. It was becoming painfully clear that meal plans and macro goals were not super effective for helping people navigate their challenges with food. At least not in the long term. And, weight loss was not nearly as simple and straightforward as I imagined, or was trained to believe, it would be.
I was feeling pretty defeated by it all. I didn’t feel like an effective dietitian.
Let’s be honest, I wasn’t an effective dietitian. And I wasn’t finding any joy in my chosen career.
Then I read the book Intuitive Eating and it changed everything.
At first, when I started to transition my practice and approach working with folks through a more weight inclusive, Intuitive Eating aligned lens, I was worried people wouldn’t be interested in working with me. That they wouldn’t trust me as their dietitian if I wasn’t centering weight loss as our primary goal and the metric by which we measured “progress.”
But what I found is that people were more often relieved to learn that I wasn’t going to give them another version of the same basic thing they had done over and over again. We weren’t going to track calories,
…or count points,
…or set step goals,
…or develop portion control hacks,
…or create food rules,
…or do any of the rigid, restrictive things diet culture had convinced them (and me!) was necessary for controlling food.
Instead, we were going to work on permission, and flexibility, and appetite cue awareness, and rebuilding body trust.
The goal was not a number on the scale, but rather to free themselves from the shackles of diet culture. To reclaim their autonomy to be their own authority on their food decisions. And to learn how to nourish themselves in a way that supports whole health and wellbeing.
Intuitive Eating offered me the skills to help folks do that.
What actually is Intuitive Eating?
Intuitive Eating is a self-care framework for nourishment developed (in the 90s!) by two non-diet dietitians, Evelyn Tribole & Elyse Resch.
It’s designed to help individuals:
Reconnect with their body’s natural cues around hunger, fullness, and satisfaction and understand what might make those cues harder to access.
Relearn what they actually like to eat and how to feed themselves in ways that feel and taste good.
Rebuild trust in their body and confidence in being their own authority over their food choices.
Honor their individuality. Intuitive Eating isn’t one-size-fits-all—it’s about learning what works for each person and their unique circumstances.
Challenge the beliefs that keep them stuck in feelings of guilt or shame, or cycles of restrictive and rebound eating. (Thank you diet culture!)
Intuitive Eating approaches nourishing ourselves from a place of non-judgment, curiosity, and openness to learn.
Intuitive Eating is often oversimplified to mean, eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’re full. And, yes, that’s part of it…kind of. But, there’s nuance with there that is often lost in common discourse about Intuitive Eating. (More on that below!)
The truth is, Intuitive Eating is so much more robust than that.
It consists of 10 principles, which address the what and the when of eating. But unlike a prescriptive diet, Intuitive Eating helps us learn how to make these determinations from an autonomous, internally directed place, not from some external set of rules that presumes your body too unruly to trust.
Beyond that, the principles of Intuitive Eating also address the why and the how of eating.
That is why years of dieting and disordered eating can lead to a relationship with food fraught with fear and self-doubt. And, why trying to control our eating can make us feel more out of control with food than ever.
Also how to eat in a way that prioritizes both pleasure and health, that is free from guilt and shame, and that is grounded in body trust.
These are the 10 principles of Intuitive Eating
1. Reject the Diet Mentality
The diet mentality comes from persistent and pervasive cultural messaging about how bodies “should” be and how we “should” be eating, moving, and living our life to make (or keep) our bodies that way. It is rooted in the belief that body size is within our direct control and that we owe it to ourselves and the world around us to make and keep our bodies small.
This shows up in the form of food moralizing (e.g., describing foods as good or bad), restricting what, when, and/or how much we allow ourselves to eat, maintaining strict food and exercise rules and feeling badly when we violate those, and more.
This Intuitive Eating principles helps us to see how these deeply engrained belief systems and thought patterns around food are not serving us and only keep us stuck in a place of feeling bad…about food, our bodies, and ourselves. It encourages us to criticize the systems of oppression that make us feel this way instead of criticizing ourselves.
2. Honor Your Hunger
So many of our struggles with food can stem from not honoring our hunger. This principle explores biological hunger—which is our biological need for fuel. When biological hunger is ignored or otherwise not attended to, which diets train us to do, it can trigger a primal survival response. That is eating in a way that can feel chaotic, out of control, and excessive.
Learning to recognize, trust, and respond to our biological fuel needs is essential to healing our relationship to food.
Then, we can start addressing the other forms of hunger can impact how we nourish ourselves—like taste hunger and emotional hunger.
3. Make Peace with Food
This is the principle that explores the concept of unconditional permission to eat which may sound…scary, or impossible, or just like a really bad idea.
But let me be clear first that this doesn’t mean eating with abandon, that you shouldn’t care about nutrition, or that you have to eat everything. It just means that you get to be the authority on your decisions.
We know that foods rules and restriction only serve to reinforce unhelpful patterns of eating. It doesn’t prevent them. By making peace with forbidden foods you will also defuse their power.
4. Challenge the Food Police
You know when you are feeling really excited to eat something delicious that then annoying voice pops up to tell you how “bad” that food is for you and how “you really shouldn’t be eating that” and ruins the whole experience?
Or maybe you can’t even get excited about eating food that you know tastes so good because that voice is so intrusive.
We describe that voice as your inner critic, which is real good at making you feel real bad about yourself because of your food decisions. Or even your food desires.
This principle helps you challenge those unhelpful thought patterns and belief systems and create some distance between yourself and this inner bully so that you can start to rediscover a little more joy and peace in your eating experiences.
5. Discover the Satisfaction Factor
Satisfaction: The pleasure you experience when a need or desire is fulfilled. For instance, the pleasant feeling of contentment you experience following the most delightful meal.
It is different from fullness in that satisfaction is something we experience on a more psychological level. This is why you can feel physically full, even stuffed, and still be left wanting.
Self-criticism is not compatible with satisfaction. Which is why satisfaction is so hard to find when we are still making food decisions driven by diet culture.
Learning to practice permission and challenge the food police creates space to discover greater satisfaction in our food experience. This principle offers guidance on how to begin.
6. Feel Your Fullness
I know that this is where many people want to begin their Intuitive Eating practice. Heck, many people think that this is literally 50% of what Intuitive Eating is! And here we are, principle number 6, and just starting to address it.
Except that, we’ve really been addressing it all along. Because all the principles that come before really are laying the groundwork for being able to do this. I know stopping at fullness is what many people are looking to Intuitive Eating for help with. And, without a strong foundation, it’s going to be near impossible to do this without relying on rules.
This principle explores what fullness is, why is can feel elusive, and how to rebuild your awareness of and responsiveness to this cue.
7. Cope with Emotions with Kindness
For the record, the goal of this principle is not to never eat emotionally. Because emotional eating is a normal human experience. Instead, the goal is to learn when emotional eating is helpful versus when it is not, how to be kinder to ourselves when food is how we are coping even if we know it’s not helping the way we want, and to build out other tools, skills, and resources to help us navigate difficult emotions.
Kindness and compassion are key to cultivating a healthy relationship to food and body. This work is about being nicer to ourselves as much as it is building more supportive eating behaviors.
8. Respect Your Body
This principle is all about body image. Specifically, it’s about cultivating body respect and body acceptance even if body positivity feels out of reach.
You can practice Intuitive Eating and still desire for your body to be different. But, when we can view our bodies as worthy and deserving of kindness, care, and respect we may also find there’s space for our body loathing to soften.
9. Movement—Feel the Difference
You might be asking yourself, “Movement? What’s movement got to do with food?” And the answer is, kind of a lot, actually.
In a world where we’ve been trained to believe we need to “burn to earn” the right to feed ourselves or use exercise as a form of penance for “bad” eating behavior, healing our relationship to movement is part of healing our relationship to food.
This principle is all about learning how to relate to movement in a more neutral, health supportive, and flexible way. Where movement may be a tool to care for your body, but is not a way to control it or to measure worth or inform your food decisions.
10. Honor Your Health with Gentle Nutrition
And finally, we address the “but what about health?” question is nearly always on the minds of those curious about and those critical of Intuitive Eating.
This principle is all about figuring out how to eat in a way that both tastes good and feels good. It guides folks toward finding the balance between eating for health and eating for pleasure and explores who we can use nutrition information in a way that is supportive rather than rigid and restrictive.
It’s true that how we nourish ourselves can impact health. Not all foods are created nutritionally equal. But all foods are morally equivalent, which is to say they are morally neutral.
Here’s what Intuitive Eating is not
(In case it’s not clear yet!)
Intuitive Eating is not the hunger and fullness diet.
Yes, part of Intuitive Eating includes learning how to recognize and respond to your hunger and fullness cues. But this does not mean you can only eat when you are hungry and must stop as soon as you are full.
Increasing awareness of appetite cues is intended to help you make informed decisions about when, what, and how much to eat. It is not intended as a directive. And there will likely be other relevant factors (like what you have access to in the moment, etc.) that will impact these decisions, too.
Intuitive Eating does not mean eat whatever, whenever.
Yes, Intuitive Eating includes giving yourself unconditional permission to eat what and when you want. As mentioned before, that doesn’t mean Intuitive Eating is endorsing eating with abandon. After all, the whole point in engaging with this process is to learn how to nourish yourself in a way that tastes good, feels good, and meets your unique needs.
Eating with abandon is kind of the opposite side of the same diet culture coin. Instead of highly controlling your food intake, you approach food with little thought or intention. It’s even part of the dieting cycle discussed in the book, which Intuitive Eating helps us move away from.
Intuitive Eating is not anti-nutrition.
This always makes me laugh a little because Intuitive Eating was literally created by 2 registered dietitians. The role of a registered dietitian is to help people learn to support their health through food and nutrition. These dietitians just realized long ago that the ways in which we typically go about doing that aren’t very effective.
Food rules, calorie and macro prescriptions, detailed tracking and counting is often more a set-up for developing disordered eating than it is supporting good nutrition.
As I mentioned before, Intuitive Eating doesn’t pretend all foods are created nutritionally equivalent. But, assigned moral value based on nutritional value isn’t particularly helpful either. It just leads to a lot of guilt and shame but doesn’t improve eating behavior.
Instead, Intuitive Eating helps us learn how to use this information in a more neutral and self-determined way.
Building an Intuitive Eating Practice
Building an Intuitive Eating practice is frustratingly not linear. It takes time to untangle ourselves from diet culture’s rules and society’s unrealistic and unhelpful expectations.
It can feel annoying, even infuriating, to understand the principles on an intellectual level and still see yourself not implementing them. So please be kind and patient with yourself.
Intuitive Eating is a practice and building it takes time. And, well, practice!
The principles are also not a check list that you cross off, never to be revisited again. Instead, they exist on a continuum and your confidence in your ability to practice each principle may be more or less strong depending on where you are in building your practice.
Life changes. You will constantly be having new experiences that will provide new opportunities for strengthening your Intuitive Eating practice. And, your practice will evolve over time. That’s kind of the point. Your Intuitive Eating practice is something that can grow, shift, and change with you. Diets are never compatible with that which is, in part, why the results don’t last.
If you’re looking for support with starting or strengthening your Intuitive Eating practice, and would like to do it with the support of other folks, just like you, who are ready for a different way of relating to food and their bodies, I invite you to check out Break Free a 10-week coaching container for Intuitive Eating.