Intuitive Eating: Making Peace with Food
ROXANNE AHMADPOUR, N.D.
Think back to the early days of your childhood. Reflect on your attitudes and behavior around food, before the conditioning of media and diet culture set in. Most likely, you ate when you were hungry, and stopped when you were full. You likely indulged cravings and enjoyed food. Without being consciously aware of it, you trusted your body’s signals and followed, without question. You were practicing Intuitive Eating! Sadly, diet culture is a pervasive, multi-billion dollar industry, and research shows that by age 5, girls begin to modify eating behaviors from the belief they need to control their food intake. We were born with inner wisdom that guides our behaviors around food. Because of various harmful messages we have all received over the years, we slowly started to second-guess ourselves, perhaps even shame ourselves, and the issue of eating became complicated, and even harmful.
Intuitive Eating is an evidence based, mind-body practice developed by nutritionists Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch as a response to the growing body of evidence that chronic dieting leads to more harm than good. Research overwhelmingly shows that dieting does not work for weight loss, or overall health. The process of dieting creates a harmful dynamic between individuals and food, and leads to cycles of weight gain and loss, obsession, fear, guilt, and shame, all of which is unhealthy physically, mentally, and emotionally.
Intuitive Eating includes principles of mindful eating, such as being aware of your thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations as you relate to food and eat food, without judgment or shame. It also includes satisfaction as a focal point in eating, physical activity/movement for the sake of feeling good, rejecting the diet mentality, using nutrition information without judgment, and respecting your body, regardless of how you feel about its shape or size. There are no “good” foods, or “bad” foods. When you can remove this type of black and white, all or nothing labeling of foods, you can approach diet choices from a more integrated place.
Intuitive eating honors both physical and mental health as integral parts of overall wellness. It stems from the belief that within our body and mind are all of the tools we need to make peace with food and our body, enjoy food, enjoy being in our body, and feel satisfaction and even pleasure from food and movement. This is in stark contrast to conventional diet and health culture, which is all about forcing and punishing the body through diet and exercise, rather than developing an attuned relationship with it and listening to it.
A common misperception is that intuitive eating means you can eat what you want, how much you want, whenever you want. But, that is denying the main premise of the practice, which is all about being in tune with your body’s hunger, fullness, and satisfaction cues. Eating in this way would mean you would be ignoring those cues, and rather eating from a place of disconnection from your body, perhaps as a coping mechanism for emotion, habit, or boredom.
We can take these concepts a step further and examine the influence of emotions and beliefs on how we digest our food. The beginning phase of digestion is called the “cephalic phase”, or “cerebral phase”. This means digestion starts in your brain! Digestion begins when your senses attune to food through sight, smell, thought, taste, and sound, which triggers the autonomic nervous system to begin the digestive process. Saliva is secreted, the stomach begins to secrete acid and hormones, and the pancreas produces digestive enzymes. This process is mediated entirely by the vagus nerve. Attitudes, beliefs, and feelings about food impact this process. So imagine if you are nervous about eating, fear food, shame yourself for food choices or eating habits, or are forcing yourself to eat bland tasteless foods over and over again because it is “safe” or “clean”. This can directly impair the cephalic phase of digestion, leading to less digestive system function, and potentially more symptoms from indigestion including gas, bloating, pain, fullness, and discomfort.
The following is a list of the 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating:
Adapted from https://www.intuitiveeating.org/10-principles-of-intuitive-eating/
1. Reject the diet mentality
By understanding that research shows that the overall impact of dieting is more harmful than helpful, we can begin to dismantle all of the layers of beliefs we have accumulated over the years from the incredibly powerful forces of media and culture.
2. Honor your hunger
Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates. Otherwise you can trigger a primal drive to overeat. Once you reach the moment of excessive hunger, all intentions of moderate, conscious eating are fleeting and irrelevant. Learning to honor this first biological signal sets the stage for rebuilding trust in yourself and in food.
3. Make peace with food
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 overeating and overwhelming guilt.
4. Challenge the food police
Scream a loud no to thoughts in your head that declare you’re “good” for eating minimal calories or “bad” because you ate a piece of chocolate cake. The food police monitor the unreasonable rules that diet culture has created. The police station is housed deep in your psyche, and its loudspeaker shouts negative barbs, hopeless phrases, and guilt-provoking indictments. Chasing the food police away is a critical step in returning to Intuitive Eating.
5. Discover the satisfaction factor
The Japanese have the wisdom to keep pleasure as one of their goals of healthy living. 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. 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 just the right amount of food for you to decide you’ve had “enough.”
6. Feel your fullness
In order to honor your fullness, you need to trust that you will give yourself the foods that you desire. 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 eating and ask yourself how the food tastes, and what your current hunger level is.
7. Cope with your emotions with kindness
First, recognize that food restriction, both physically and mentally, can, in and of itself, trigger loss of control, which can feel like emotional eating. Find kind ways to comfort, nurture, distract, and resolve your issues. 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. If anything, eating for an emotional hunger may only make you feel worse in the long run. You’ll ultimately have to deal with the source of the emotion.
8. Respect your body
Accept your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect to realistically squeeze into a size six, it is equally futile (and uncomfortable) to have a similar expectation about body size. But mostly, 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 size or shape. All bodies deserve dignity.
9. Movement -- feel the difference
Forget militant exercise. Just get active and feel the difference. Shift your focus to how it feels to move your body, rather than the calorie-burning effect of exercise. If you focus on how you feel from working out, such as energized, it can make the difference between rolling out of bed for a brisk morning walk or hitting the snooze alarm.
10. Honor your health -- gentle nutrition
Make food choices that honor your health and taste buds while making you feel good. Remember that you don’t have to eat perfectly to be healthy. You will not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency or 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.
To learn more about Intuitive Eating, and to find a nutritionist or counselor to help guide you through this process, here are some helpful resources:
1. Read the book! Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program that Works, by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch.
2. https://www.intuitiveeating.org/
4. Our very own nutritionist extraordinaire Kristy Regan of Vital Food Therapeutics practices principles of Mindful and Intuitive Eating with her clients. For more information and to book a consultation with her, visit her website Vitalfoodtherapeutics.com
5. I (Dr. Roxanne) incorporate mindfulness based counseling and Intuitive Eating into my work with patients. Call Mark to schedule a new patient appointment if you’d like to work with me.
Hive Mind Medicine blog posts are for educational purposes only and are not intended as medical advice. Please consult with your health care practitioner for personalized guidance.