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The process of Intuitive Eating, described by Registered Dietitians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch is a practice, which honours both physical AND mental health and includes 10 principles.
These are not rules but guidelines through a journey of self discovery and connection to the needs of your body. These principles encourage eating for satisfaction, engaging in physical activity for enjoyment, respecting your body and honouring your health while also addressing cognitive distortions and emotional eating.
Reject the Diet Mentality
Honour your Hunger
Make Peace with Food
Challenge the Food Police
Discover the Satisfaction Factor
Feel your Fullness
Cope with your Emotions with Kindness
Respect your Body
Movement - Feel the Difference
Honour your Health - Gentle Nutrition
1. Reject the Diet Mentality
The first step you can do to become an intuitive eater is to stop dieting. It’s not working for you, nor anyone else - you are not alone. There is not a single long-term study that shows that weight-loss dieting is sustainable. Study after study, shows that dieting and food restriction for the purpose of weight loss leads to more weight gain (Rothblum, 2018).
Diets not only offer you false hope of losing weight quickly, easily and permanently but also leave you feeling like a failure every time a diet stops working for you.
Dieting will prevent you from becoming an intuitive eater because it forces you to listen to external cues rather than your internal ones that tell you what, when and how much to eat.
This principle is all about learning how to reframe your thoughts. For example instead of asking yourself if you deserve a food, ask yourself questions like are you hungry for it, do you want it, will it be satisfying...etc.
2. Honour Your Hunger
Keep yourself adequately fed by listening to your hunger cues, which is your first biological signal to eat.
Skipping meals or delaying eating only leads to intense cravings and a primal drive to overeat later. When you reach excessive hunger, all your moderate, conscious eating intentions are fleeting and irrelevant.
Honouring your hunger will help you reconnect with your internal signals and recondition your mind and body to trust it will always have access to food. Check out my blog post on The Hunger Fullness Scale to help you with this principle.
3. Make Peace with Food
What happens when we tell a child they can’t do something? All of a sudden they want it even more, right? Then, when they do have it, it’s like they lose interest. The exact same thing happens when we tell ourselves we can’t have a particular food.
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. Give yourself unconditional permission to eat any food you desire. By doing this, your cravings and intense desires to eat those “forbidden” foods will eventually dissipate.
4. Challenge the Food Police
The food police monitor are all the unreasonable diet rules that diet culture has created. They are the ones telling you that you are “good” for eating minimal calories or “bad” because you ate some chips. Say no to these negative, hopeless, and guilt-provoking thoughts and challenge any food rules that you’ve been brainwashed to follow.
Eventually you will be able to eat foods without the food police making you feel “bad” or “unhealthy”. When you truly honour your hunger without the negative thoughts, your hunger and fullness signals will guide you to consume an adequate amount of food, while your satiety will guide you to eat foods that satisfy your cravings and nutritional health.
5. Discover the Satisfaction Factor
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 make peace with food and give yourself permission to eat the foods you want, 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.”
I want to also point out that there is a difference between being full and being satisfied. If you’re wanting apple pie, eating rice cakes with applesauce won’t cut it. It may help you feel full but definitely won’t leave you feeling satisfied, only leaving you feeling more deprived of that food, which will ultimately lead to stronger cravings.
6. Feel Your Fullness
In order to honour your fullness, you need to trust that you will give yourself the foods that you desire. Learn and listen for your body signals that tell you you’re no longer hungry. Practice being more mindful while you eat by being present with your meals (cutting out distractions like watching TV while you eat) and pausing in the middle of eating to ask yourself how the food tastes, and what your current hunger level is.
You can use the Hunger Fullness Scale before, during and after you eat to help you with your appetite awareness and to feel your fullness. This will help you decide when and how much to eat.
7. Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness
Food is often used to comfort, nurture, or to distract you from feelings of acute stress, anxiety, loneliness, boredom, or anger. Recognize that food restriction, both physically and mentally, can not only lead to thinking about food all day, but to triggering loss of control, which can feel like emotional eating.
Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, and anger are emotions we all experience throughout life. Although food can offer a short term distraction, it won’t fix these feelings in the long term. If anything, eating for an emotional hunger may only make you feel worse in the long run. You’ll ultimately have to work to identify the true source of these emotions. Find constructive, kind, and nurturing ways to cope with emotions.
Remember, emotional hunger is very normal but food shouldn’t be your only coping mechanism. Try experimenting with things your body or mind may need (e.g. journaling, make a mental note, phone a friend...etc.).
8. Respect Your Body
Accept that your body and genetic makeup is different from everyone else. Recognize that even if we all ate and exercised the exact same way, we would all still look completely different. Don’t let diet culture fool you into believing you must look a certain way to be “healthy”. Not only is this unrealistic, it can also be extremely harmful. All bodies deserve to be treated equally with respect and dignity.
When you learn to listen to your internal cues, your body will naturally find it’s “set point weight”, which is the weight at which your body genetically wants to be at to function optimally.
Being overly critical or unrealistic of your body size or shape will make it hard to reject the weight-focused diet mentality. Respect your body so that you can feel better about who you are!
9. Movement—Feel the Difference
Shift your reason to exercise away from punishment or the calorie burning effect to how it feels to move your body. Find a type of exercise that you enjoy and recognize how it makes you feel. You will notice that when you move in ways that bring you joy, you will be more motivated to do it again. It doesn’t always have to be intense cardio or heavy lifting every day, explore different ways of movement that make you happy. Even simple forms of movement such as stretching or going for a walk will honour your health.
10. Honour Your Health—Gentle Nutrition
Make food choices that honour your mind, body and soul while also satisfying your taste buds. Ask yourself how the food makes you feel in addition to their taste and satisfaction. This internal awareness causes a shift in how you decide what to eat, going beyond what your taste buds may crave.
This principle is about progress, not perfection. 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 even one day of eating.
Remember that our bodies are ever changing and gentle nutrition is an ongoing process and its meaning may shift throughout your life.
Learning these principles takes practice and time. Do not assume that you will wake up one day an intuitive eater. You may find some principles easy to adapt while others are more challenging. Start with principle 1, then make your way down to 10.
Everyone’s journey to food freedom will be different, but it is possible for everyone!
Further Reading:
The official Intuitive Eating website: https://www.intuitiveeating.org/
Evelyn Tribole's website: https://www.evelyntribole.com/
Intuitive Eating Studies: https://www.evelyntribole.com/resources/studies/
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