What is Intuitive Eating? (Part 1 of 2)

You probably have heard of the phrase “Trust your gut”. When you have big decisions to make, you are told to go with this unexplainable feeling inside which is pointing you to one direction over another.

 Have you ever had an experience where you were guided by others to do something when your “gut” was telling you something different? This can be challenging to know what to decide to do with conflicting guidance of yourself and others. These experiences can make you trust yourself less and doubt can creep in with your decision-making skills.

How often are you told to “trust your gut” with food intake? Often, I hear the opposite message from my clients, explaining how they cannot trust their body cues of hunger/fullness when it comes to food. This mentality is opposite of how are bodies are made to operate. If you watch an infant engage with food, the child can regulate when they are full and hungry. The infant does not doubt if this hunger cue is actually true or real and listens to the cue by requesting milk or food. As the child grows up, they begin to be influenced by how other people and society engage with food. This leads to the child having challenges with “trusting their gut” or listening to their own hunger/fullness cues.

Intuitive Eating is an eating framework created by two registered dietitians, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch in order to restore individual’s trust and understanding of their body in regards to food. This framework emphasizes self-compassion, attunement, and body-mind connection to change how individuals approach food and exercise. Instead of feeling embarrassed or ashamed of our bodies, this approach encourages us to embrace and accept our bodies. In order to be able to increase awareness of internal signals for eating, you will also increase awareness of self-care routines. Instead of focusing on restriction and rules, you begin to consider ways to care for yourself and what works best for your body. The mindset shift from fighting and continually trying to change yourself to acceptance is a process.

Intuitive Eating has 10 main principles which provide a guide for the process of changing how you are approaching food and your body (Tribole & Resch). Here is an overview of the first five principles and action steps you can take with each one. These explanations and action steps are starting blocks for each principle.

Here are the 10 main principles of Intuitive Eating:

1. Reject the Diet Mentality

Description: Begin to unravel your past influences with food. Review how diet culture, family, and friends have influenced your view of self and food. Get rid of dieting tools, books, and scales.

Potential Action Steps: Set boundaries on your phone by deleting tracking apps and unfollow fitness/diet profiles on social media. On a piece of paper, list all of the diets you have completed, the benefits and harm each one provided. Define how you view health and beauty based on what diets, family and friends have educated you with over the years. Take the focus off of weight loss intentions and start to work towards accepting your weight at your current state.

2. Honor Your Hunger

Description: Start to increase your awareness of natural hunger cues. Instead of waiting until you are starving, follow the cue at its earliest signal. This process may explore what hunger feels like in the body. Acknowledge how you may ignore cues with being busy, drinking fluid, etc.

Potential Action Steps: Complete an exercise of measuring your heart rate and acknowledging how it communicates the beating of the heart. Just like your heart rate, start to acknowledge cues in your various body parts which signal fullness, hunger, and thirst. At times, you may think that your body is not communicating with you but it usually just takes time to slow down to notice these signals. Start to take note of any barriers which get in the way of listening to your body cues which are part of your self-care rituals.

 3. Make Peace with Food

Description: Instead of restriction, consider providing yourself permission to eat all foods. The constant battle on avoiding foods causes an increased attraction of foods and can make you feel out of control. By providing yourself permission to eat your forbidden foods, this decreases the attraction of these limited foods.

Potential Action Steps: Start by listing all of the foods you are currently restricting. These are foods you are also limiting. Take time to reflect how these restrictions have impacted your functioning after eating these foods. Start to list all the fears which accompany the foods you wrote on the list. Consider starting to eat some of the difficult foods on this list and reflect about your experience with eating these foods again.

 4. Challenge the Food Police

Description: Start to identify the food police, the voice in your head telling you certain foods are bad or good. Uncover the food rules you are following and begin to challenge these views.

Potential Action Steps: Review beliefs and rules that you hold around foods, body, and health. Attempt to reflect on how the past influences these beliefs and thoughts you have about health. Recognize what beliefs stem from the Food Police versus your own beliefs. Consider how to provide facts and truth to these beliefs.

 5. Respect Your Fullness

Description: Recognize how fullness feels in the body. Consider the pace of the meal and how you are approaching foods. Take time to pause and reflect on your fullness cues during the meal.

Potential Action Steps: Consider anything that takes your attention away from fullness while you are eating. Look around at your eating environment and notice what is stealing your attention: TV, phone, location of meal, writing, etc. Decrease these distractions. At meals, take a pause in the middle of eating your meal and check in with your fullness level. Continue to pause and take note of physical cues signaling hunger/fullness in the meal.

These are the first 5 principles of Intuitive Eating. As a Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor, I can help you improve your relationship with food, increase self-compassion, and improve body-mind connection. I’d be happy to work with you to implement these or support you in your journey. Stay tuned for my next blog which will review the rest of the principles!

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Reference: Tribole, E. & Resch, E. 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating, http://www.intuitiveeating.org/10-principles-of-intuitive-eating/