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When you’re an intuitive eater, you give yourself the free choice and access to all foods. You allow yourself to eat the foods you want, whenever you want. But this isn’t just a free-for-all. Intuitive eating is all about eating with attunement. It’s about listening to your physiological hunger and fullness cues instead of external rules, like always finishing your plate or not eating past 7pm.
Some people think that if they give themselves permission, they won’t be able to stop eating or eat healthfully. That when given the choice, they’ll ignore their fullness cues and/or only choose chips, toaster strudels, and cookies all the time rather than nutritious foods.
But the truth is, when you give yourself that unconditional permission to eat any food, you actually end up balancing your intake to include mostly nutritious foods with a small amount of “fun foods”.
Think about having a chocolate sundae for every meal everyday. How soon do you think you’ll crave something completely opposite, like a salad or grilled chicken? This is called habituation. Habituation studies have shown that the more a person is exposed to a particular food the less appealing it becomes. It’s the same as anything else in life, whether it’s a car, relationship or food. The excitement about it slowly dissipates. For example, buying a new car is quite thrilling at first, but 5 years later with the same car certainly doesn’t feel that exciting anymore. It’s the exact reason why leftovers become less appealing, even if it’s your favourite food. It becomes no big deal.
When we start a diet, we begin following food rules like what you can and cannot eat. The foods you cannot eat have no habituation effect so these foods become exciting and daunting. Soon after, we fall into a vicious cycle: food restricting, followed by cravings, broken restraint and the over consumption of “off limit foods”, which triggers feelings of guilt and lack of control over eating those foods. That guilt and uncontrolled eating provides false evidence that more rules are needed to constrain the eating. Back to another diet and your “off limit foods” remain exciting and daunting. See image below:
It’s understandable that if you have not experienced the habituation effect with an off limit food that you will be reluctant to eat it. But once you give yourself permission to eat your off limit foods, you'll discover that when you eat past satisfaction the pleasurable taste of food diminishes and it's not worth overeating your favourite food. The chocolate sundae would no longer be as satisfying.
Making peace with food is about experiencing habituation. But the goal of giving yourself permission to eat the foods you want is to not burn out on foods so that you’ll never want to eat them again. It’s to remove the daunting effect that food can have. There are many ways to make peace with food, but it is helpful to choose the same food and flavour before moving onto another food. For example, if you are changing the flavour of chips you are extending the novelty. It’s almost like trying a whole new food with each flavour even though it’s the same food. It may take several times of eating the same food in order to reach the habituation effect for that food and that's okay! It is also helpful to cut the distractions so that you can check in with yourself during the process. How do you feel before, during and after? Write it down and track your process.
Allowing yourself to have unrestricted food choices and experiencing the habituation effect removes the thrill and urgency to eat off limit foods. It increases your flexibility to eat the foods you want and ultimately helps to improve your relationship with food.
References:
The official Intuitive Eating website: https://www.intuitiveeating.org/
Evelyn Tribole's website: https://www.evelyntribole.com/
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