How do you start intuitive eating?
We live in an ever-changing world of dieting and nutritional advice: from keto to veganism to low-carb diets and juice cleanses. With so much different advice out there, how do we know what’s best for us and our bodies? Enter: intuitive eating. This anti-diet philosophy suggests that we drop dieting and food restriction altogether in the name of our natural-food intuition.
Intuitive eating has gained quite a bit of popularity over the last few years, and its potential benefits include improved mental health and mindfulness, healthier food choices and decreased cravings. But what is intuitive eating, exactly? And how do you get started? Intuitive eating involves several different principles that help you learn about your individual body and your relationship to food.
What is intuitive eating?
The term “intuitive eating” was coined in 1995 by Evelyn Tirbole and Elyse Resch in their book, “Intuitive Eating.” Essentially, intuitive eating aims to free us from dietary restrictions and return us to a more natural and instinctive way of interacting with food. It’s the opposite of traditional diets. Rather than imposing guidelines on what to eat and how much to eat, it empowers us to get in touch with our bodies and make those decisions based on physical, not emotional, cues.
Most simply, intuitive eating means eating when you’re hungry and stopping when you’re full. It also means listening to your body’s natural cravings, rather than refusing certain foods. And it teaches us a few other principles, such as alternative-coping mechanisms for emotional distress and introducing enjoyable movement into our daily routines, to improve mental and physical health.
What are the benefits of intuitive eating?
Improve mental health
One of the most important benefits of intuitive eating is improved psychological health. Studies show that intuitive eating leads to improved self-esteem, body image, and quality of life and a decrease in depression and anxiety.
Increase mindfulness
Because intuitive eating asks us to pay close attention to our food choices and meal patterns, it naturally increases our mindfulness. While many of us may currently eat mindlessly throughout the day, intuitive eating helps us understand what we eat and how our body feels when we eat specific foods or certain amounts of food. This naturally puts us more in tune with our body and mind.
Decrease cravings
Intuitive eating invites us to be more mindful and identify the emotional and physiological cues associated with hunger and cravings. Sometimes food cravings are physiological and refer to specific nutritional needs. Other times, food cravings are associated with a particular emotional state. Through intuitive eating, we can learn to identify these moments with more clarity. Intuitive eating also invites us to honor our cravings for certain foods when we have them, which may prevent binging later on. When we avoid foods, our brains may crave them more often. But when we honor a craving, we feel satisfied and may not feel the need to indulge in that craving again.
Healthier food choices
Intuitive eating may lead to healthier food choices. When you learn to listen to what your body wants, you may naturally begin to eat healthier foods. Some research suggests that intuitive eating may lead to improved health indicators including lower blood pressure and lower cholesterol.
Principles of intuitive eating
Reject diet culture
Conventional diet culture tends to tell us to restrict certain foods or eat a certain number of calories to lose weight. And while these methods often work in the short term, many restrictive diets result in a reversal of weight loss and weight gain over time. Moreover, dieting may lead to a decreased sense of self-esteem. Intuitive eating is the anti-diet: Rather than prescribing to strict rules, it eliminates all food rules in order to allow you to reconnect with what your body needs and wants.
Honor hunger cues
One of the most important aspects of intuitive eating is to honor your body’s natural hunger cues. To eat intuitively is to eat when you’re hungry. This might mean that you eat more at certain meals than other meals and more on some days than others, depending on your body’s needs. This is different from many diets, which tell you to eat at certain times of day or to eat only certain amounts of food.
No forbidden foods
In intuitive eating, there are no forbidden foods or restrictive rules associated with dieting and nutritional advice. Instead, intuitive eating suggests that we make peace with food and re-learn how to trust ourselves and our bodies when it comes to our food choices. While diets might ask us to eliminate foods like pasta or ice cream, intuitive eating allows access to all foods and implores us to question why we might label foods as “good” or “bad” in the first place.
The idea is that, through incorporating previously forbidden foods back into our diets, we can address the shame, binging behaviors, and other issues associated with restrictive diets. Allowing ourselves to eat all foods may make them less desirable so that we can focus on what we actually want and need.
Honor fullness cues
This principle invites you to identify your own fullness and satiety. Intuitive eating experts acknowledge that it may take some time to relearn your fullness cues, but that it helps to be mindful and pay close attention to your body as you consume a meal and consume meals over time. Check in with yourself throughout your meals and ask yourself how you feel. If you’re unsure whether you’re full, wait several minutes and then keep eating if you still feel hungry.
Eat for satisfaction
This principle of intuitive eating suggests that we learn to choose foods for their various levels of satisfaction, including sensory satisfactions such as taste, texture, flavor and aroma in addition to their nutritional benefits or calorie count. This brings some joy back to the experience of eating and makes a meal more enjoyable and satisfying overall.
Honor your feelings without food
This intuitive eating principle aims to address emotional eating and the ways in which we may use food to cope with emotional distress. Many children grow up with food as a reward for good behavior and many adults use food as an emotional coping mechanism as a result. Intuitive eating aims to disrupt this habit by teaching us how to better identify and handle our emotions with alternative methods. This helps many people learn to manage emotional distress in healthier and more productive ways.
Respect your body
Intuitive eating suggests that we honor and respect our bodies as they are, rather than aiming to change our bodies through dieting. Through intuitive eating, we learn to interact with our bodies differently and address our bodies with kindness and respect. The idea is that this can improve your mental health and take you out of the habit of focusing on perceived flaws.
Introduce movement
The authors of intuitive eating prefer to use the word “movement” over “exercise.” While exercise is often associated with shrinking or changing our bodies, movement is a more gentle term that invites us to move our bodies in ways that feel good. If we move our bodies for enjoyment, rather than weight loss, we might feel more motivated to move throughout the day. The goal is to discover different types of movement that make you feel good, both physically and mentally, rather than exercising with the goal of losing weight. For example, you could try purchasing a yoga mat and take a few online yoga or dance classes that appeal to you.
Katy Severson is a writer for BestReviews. BestReviews is a product review company with a singular mission: to help simplify your purchasing decisions and save you time and money.
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