Intuitive Eating is a self-care framework, designed to help you heal your relationship with food. It can help you learn to listen to your body’s internal cues so you can provide better care for yourself.
People who describe themselves as Intuitive Eaters typically have better body image than dieters. They also experience less disordered eating behaviours and have higher satisfaction with life.
Today’s post will explain the origins of Intuitive Eating and briefly cover each of it’s principles.
What is The History and Science of Intuitive Eating?
Intuitive Eating was created in 1995 by two registered dietitians, Elyse Resch and Evelyn Tribole. The 4th Edition is the most recent iteration and it reflects up-to-date research on weight-inclusive care and Intuitive Eating.
When Intuitive Eating was first created, the authors dubbed it “research-informed”. This was because the concept was new, so there wasn’t any research on it yet. Instead, they used the latest research on interoceptive awareness, eating behaviours, body image, and psychology, to inform their framework. Today, there are over 130 studies on intuitive eating. Most of them are observational, but there have been a few clinical trials to date, and more are underway.
Intuitive Eating has a validated assessment tool which can be used to identify what areas of your food relationship may benefit from this approach. It is also HAES aligned and is considered a weight-inclusive approach to health.
Research shows that Intuitive Eating may increase HDL cholesterol and decrease triglyceride levels. It is also correlated with less disordered eating and positive body image and positive emotional functioning in women.
The 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating
There are 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating that create a framework for healing your relationship with food. The principles are dynamic and interconnected, meaning they work together and build off one another. They were designed to help you listen to your body’s cues and address the barriers that disrupt the ability to tune inward.
You can work through the principles in any order you like, although it’s best to leave Principle 10 towards the end of your journey. This prevents turning Intuitive Eating into another diet. You may find that certain principles resonate more than the others. These principles may be a good place for you to start or spend more time engaging with.
Principle 1: Reject the Diet Mentality
This principle helps you to identify diet culture and understand the harms dieting can cause. Taking some time to reflect on the ways that dieting has interfered with your life can be a good place to start. Has it caused you to lose trust in your body’s cues, such as the sensations of hunger or feelings of fullness? Have you missed out on social events? Do you experience a lot of guilt and shame around eating because of diets and diet culture?
When you are ready to commit to healing your relationship with food, letting go of dieting tools can be a powerful step. This could include getting rid of your scale, deleting tracking apps from your phone, or throwing out diet books and magazines.
Principle 2: Honour Your Hunger
Diet culture often tells us that we shouldn’t trust our bodies to tell us when to eat. This doesn’t make sense. You aren’t expected to ignore the urge to go pee. Well, why should we be ignoring our hunger cues? Hunger is a normal and necessary biological signal.
For many people, years of dieting can blunt the body’s hunger cues. Meaning they don’t really know what hunger feels like anymore. When you don’t experience hunger cues (or ignore them) and delay eating, you may experience low energy levels and irritability. This may even lead to an episode of binge eating later in the day or evening.
With practice, you can re-learn what hunger feels like to you. One way to do this is to keep yourself regularly fed. This helps prevent getting overly hungry and builds trust with your body. In time, you’ll experience more stable, sustained energy, fewer mood swings and may find that strong urges to eat at night subside.
Principle 3: Make Peace with Food
This principle is about learning to give yourself unconditional permission to eat all foods. This is an important step, as it helps to end the restrict-binge cycle of dieting that originates with restriction and deprivation. Whether you are physically restricting food intake (like on a diet) or putting conditions on your food intake and choices (eg. I can eat “X” if I work out extra tomorrow), you are depriving yourself.
Have you ever decided to start a diet on Monday and then ate everything on your no-no list the weekend prior? Or ate an entire box of cookies, regardless of your hunger level because you have decided that cookies are “bad”? These patterns of eating stem from actual and perceived deprivation.
If no food is off limits (with the exception of an allergy, of course), you can take pause and ask yourself: What do I really want? What do I need? This allows your inner cues to guide your decisions, instead of external rules or the restrict/binge cycle.
Principle 4: Challenge the Food Police
In this principle you explore the food rules you have learned over the years and the origins of negative self-talk that result. When you challenge these negative thoughts and learn to reframe them, you start to decouple morality with food choice. Instead, you can connect with how food makes you feel.
Here’s couple examples. Diet culture says butter in your coffee is healthy, but adding butter to enhance the flavour of your vegetables is not. Kind of ridiculous, right? There’s no shortage of Instagram influencers telling us that we should avoid ultra-processed foods at all cost. Except for the all-natural, plant-based protein powder they are selling. These are examples of placing a higher moral value on certain foods, but not others. This leads to feeling guilt or shame after eating a food that is considered “bad”.
There are no “good” foods or “bad” foods. No “clean” foods or “dirty” foods. Yes, some foods may be more nutritionally dense than others, but all foods provide energy and nutrients. All foods can fit into a pattern of eating that feels good for you in your body.
Principle 5: Discover the Satisfaction Factor
In this principle you get to learn what foods are truly satisfying to you. Years of dieting can have us eating foods that we don’t actually enjoy (another form of deprivation). Sometimes we can forget what we really like to eat. When we have satisfaction with our eating, it is easier feel our fullness. We’re also less likely to feel deprived, so we aren’t setting ourselves up for the binge/restrict cycle.
Ask yourself what flavours, textures, and temperatures you prefer in your meals and snacks. This can help you discover what is satisfying to you. Satisfaction is also increased when we eat without distraction, engage in mindful eating practices, and enjoy balanced meals. This means including a source of fat, protein, and carbohydrate on your plate.
Principle 6: Feel Your Fullness
As with hunger cues, we can learn to ignore fullness cues as well. This principle teaches you how to reconnect with your fullness. It may look like unlearning habits, such as finishing everything on your plate, regardless of your feelings of fullness. Or, it could be practicing some of the other principles and learning how they relate to fullness.
Success with this principle means that you eat regularly and do not ignore hunger cues. You give yourself unconditional permission to eat all foods and regularly include foods you enjoy. Otherwise, you set yourself up for deprivation and it can be difficult to stop eating when you feel full.
Principle: Cope with Your Emotions Using Kindness
When we eat for reasons other than physical hunger, we call it emotional eating. Often, this is viewed as “wrong” or “bad”, but it is important to acknowledge that emotional eating is a normal human experience. For some, emotional eating may be their only tool in dealing with difficult emotions. And that’s okay.
Learning additional coping strategies is what this principle is about. It also helps you to practice being kind to yourself when those episodes of emotional eating do occur. We know that guilt and shame are not helpful, and feeling this way in response to emotional eating can perpetuate the cycle. When working on this principle, it can be helpful for some to include a therapist as part of their care team.
Principle 8: Respect Your Body
This principle teaches you to respect your body and end the critical self-talk and body bashing. It is not a requirement to love your body in order to take care of it.
Working on reframing the negative thoughts you may have about your body can help you come to a place of neutrality. In time comes acceptance. Taking the focus off your appearance and shifting it to what your body can do will help to cultivate body acceptance. For example, expressing gratitude for the arms that can hug a friend or appreciation for the body that created a tiny human.
Other ways to care and respect your body are to buy clothes that feel comfortable on you – in your here-and-now body. You can also engage in supportive self-care, such as regular nourishment, movement that feels good for you, regularly attending healthcare appointments, and setting boundaries.
Principle 9: Movement – Feel the Difference
This principle helps you find ways of moving that you enjoy. Or at the very least, helps you to reframe movement as an act of self-care. If you have approached exercise and movement from a place of punishment or as a tool for keeping your body small, it makes sense that you may not enjoy it.
Learning to decouple movement from the sole purpose of changing your body size and shape helps to focus on how movement makes you feel, as well as the many health benefits it provides. Simple strategies, like reducing sitting time, or adding gentle movement such as yoga or walking, can be a good place to start.
Principle 10: Honour Your Health – Gentle Nutrition
When you no longer see food as “good” or “bad” and have given yourself unconditional permission to eat all foods, you may be ready to start gentle nutrition.
This principle focuses on including foods that feel good for your body. It highlights the importance of variety of food choice and balance of nutrients. You can also consider health goals or conditions that need to be managed when making choices about food. This principle is where we consider external information, such as health guidelines for eating, alongside our internal body cues and health goals.
Is Intuitive Eating Right for Me?
If you would describe your relationship with food as neutral or peaceful you may already be an intuitive eater. You can also consider how much time or mental energy is given to food each day. Do you think about food a lot? Scrutinize your food choices? If food thoughts occupy a lot of head space, perhaps you may benefit from an Intuitive Eating approach.
The principles of Intuitive Eating may help you, if you:
- have a lot of food rules
- stress about the right or wrong thing to eat
- experience guilt or shame after eating certain foods
- are always dieting
- don’t really trust your body to tell you what or how to eat
Intuitive Eating for Perimenopause
For those going through the perimenopause transition, Intuitive Eating can help you heal from years of dieting, cope with potential body changes, and develop a broader, more holistic approach to health. There are some unique attunement disruptors (all the things that make it challenging to focus on your internal body cues) for folks in this stage of life. Hot flashes, for example, can be challenging and make it difficult to tune in to internal body cues.
Gentle nutrition looks at ways to add foods that support the unique health challenges that are associated with menopause. This may include getting enough calcium and vitamin D through food and/or supplementation to protect bones. Or it may be choosing to add foods that support heart health and potentially lower LDL cholesterol. Another is experimenting with how much caffeine you consume and it’s effect on hot flashes.
If you are interested in learning more about Intuitive Eating, I offer a free 5-Day Intuitive Eating mini course. It includes a few hands-on activities to get you thinking about how diet culture has affected you, begin to tune into your hunger and fullness cues, and start to think about what foods truly satisfy you.
Looking for more one-to-one support? Book a free discovery call to learn more about how I can help.
