Intuitive eating and anti-diet culture
What if the problem with weight isn't failing to stick to a diet, but rather being inundated by a diet industry that profits off our unhealthy relationship to food? What if, instead of seeing food as an adversary or obstacle to staying healthy, we instead sought to redefine healthy eating as whatever gives us pleasure and satisfies our hunger?
Diet culture’s focus on weight loss - fitting into an external cultural ideal of thinness - is not reasonable for most people. It sets people up to pursue diets that are bound to fail because we are demonizing certain food groups and/or following restrictive eating rules. In fact, a majority of diets lead to only temporary weight loss at best, and at worst can even be predictors of weight gain. It’s why every January, many of us set the goal to start the year off right by eating better, the good intention leading us to one diet or another. Then, inevitably, we fall off said diet and right back into the same old (if not far worse) habits.
But intuitive eating, or anti-diet culture, is all about rediscovering the internal wisdom that we're all born with. In the anti-diet world of intuitive eating, you check in with your own body to figure out what your personal needs are to nourish your body, as opposed to leaning on outside rules that decide what goes into your body or how you move it.
The goal of intuitive eating is to have a satisfying, enjoyable relationship with food and a respectful, dignifying, loving relationship with your body. There are no “good” or “bad” foods.
It's a self-care, compassionate framework based on 10 guidelines to help you get to a place of trusting your body again.
What intuitive eating is — and isn't
The 10 principles of intuitive eating, as laid out by Elyse Resch and Evelyn Tribole, co-authors of the Intuitive Eating book, suggest that you:
Reject the Diet Mentality, including wholesale permission to "get angry at diet culture that promotes weight loss and the lies that have led you to feel as if you were a failure."
Honor Your Hunger by validating the need to "keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates. Otherwise you can trigger a primal drive to overeat."
Make Peace with Food, which means you "give yourself unconditional permission to eat."
Challenge the Food Police by saying "no to thoughts in your head that declare you're 'good' for eating minimal calories or 'bad' because you ate a piece of chocolate cake" because those are "the unreasonable rules that diet culture has created."
Discover the Satisfaction Factor through sensorial enjoyment of "the pleasure and satisfaction that can be found in the eating experience."
Feel Your Fullness, in which you "trust that you will give yourself the foods that you desire" and "listen for the body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry."
Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness, by first understanding that food restriction can "trigger loss of control, which can feel like emotional eating," but also that "eating for an emotional hunger may only make you feel worse in the long run."
Respect Your Body, including acceptance of "your genetic blueprint" to not only "feel better about who you are" but also to affirm the fact that "all bodies deserve dignity."
Movement where you Feel the Difference through a focus on "how it feels to move your body, rather than the calorie-burning effect of exercise."
Honor Your Health with Gentle Nutrition, making "food choices that honor your health and taste buds while making you feel good. Remember that you don’t have to eat perfectly to be healthy."
To combat diet culture, the intuitive eating mindset encourages radical acceptance and respect for your unique blueprint of your body. These 10 tenets of intuitive eating are living principles meant to be practiced at your pace over a lifetime, if and when each one feels right for you.
It's important to start from a place of self-compassion for the fact that you're up against a multi-billion dollar industry with a lot more money and time than you have. But think about how you've felt when you've been on diets, or when you fell off of them. How much better would it be to feel satisfied by food, to find pleasure in eating, to stop feeling so bad about yourself?"
What looks like a healthy relationship with food for one person will look different for somebody else… So there may be people who are going to naturally need more foods generally labeled as less nutritious, for example, but that are actually important for nourishing their body and giving it the energy it needs. So instead of following rules for eating intended for the entire general public, check in individually with what your body needs. Suggesting rules can confuse your ability to listen to your own body, which gets in the way of understanding your health
Restricting your food intake to exclusively foods deemed "healthy" can actually be indicative of an overall toxic, unhealthy relationship to food with negative physical and mental health impacts in the long run. Moreover, forcing yourself to abide by such restrictive food rules is often a recipe for disordered eating, like the binge eating that commonly follows "falling off" a diet. We want whatever we don't have. That's just human nature. When you feel deprived of either a particular food or amount of whatever it is you want, we are driven by our unmet needs.
Each time you tell yourself you "can't" or "shouldn't" or are "bad" for eating something, you give that food more power over your behavior by triggering an instinctual response to self-deprivation. That power is only amplified by the states of semi-starvation that many calorie-cutting diets instruct you to put your body in.
With intuitive eating, you learn to be led by what pleases your body, your palate, how your body feels when you've eaten enough food. People tend to want rules, but the stricter the rule, the bigger the rebellion from deprivation.
Intuitive eating is a radical shift in how we relate to food and define health that only you can map for yourself. Embarking on a journey with so few instructions is scary. But it's also full of potential for self-discovery.
Jessica Kishpaugh is a Holistic Nutritionist & Emotional Eating Coach, Owner of LoYo Wellness in Wyckoff in Bergen County, NJ and Founder of The LoYo Method coaching program that focuses on helping busy women heal their relationship with food through the power of food psychology and behavior habit changes. Jessica specializes in nutrition psychology, emotional eating, binge eating, overeating, stress reduction and mindfulness.
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