Intuitive Eating has entered mainstream consciousness and is here to stay, without a doubt and rightfully so.
If you’ve never heard of ‘Intuitive Eating’, perhaps you recognize several of these other modern health movements: Health At Every Size, Anti-Diet, or Body Positivity.
I deeply support and resonate with these evidence-based health movements. Intuitive Eating alone has over 125 supporting clinical studies. Overall, these movements are incredibly necessary to fight back and bring awareness to dangerous weight loss programs and dieting behaviors. I myself have struggled with binging and am an advocate for these movements.
But in rejecting the dangerous dieting, have we jumped too quickly into the proverbial ‘Intuitive Eating’ pool?
For example, and this is also why I’m writing this blog post, I keep seeing a sad, but now familiar, pattern unfold:
- Person hears about Intuitive Eating
- Upon first impression, Intuitive Eating sounds like ‘eat whatever you want’
- Person tries Intuitive Eating and binges
- Person says ‘Intuitive Eating’ doesn’t work
- Person gives up
Just last week I talked with someone who said they’d heard about Intuitive Eating. At first, this person was full of hope about the potential benefits of Intuitive Eating, like less emotional eating.
Sadly though, when this person tried the third principle of Intuitive Eating, called Unconditional Eating, this person just went away overboard and binged on ice cream because she’d ‘given herself permission to binge’.
I hope you hear my genuine concern. However, this is not a baseless criticism leveled at Intuitive Eating. In fact, this is not a criticism of Intuitive Eating at all. Again, I think Intuitive Eating is great, and I firmly 100% advocate for Intuitive Eating.
However, we must face the fact that many people have no clue how to start Intuitive Eating.
Here are some of the typical things someone who is new to Intuitive Eating might try out for themselves:
- Just listening for ‘hunger signs’ to know when to eat
- Just heed ‘fullness’ signals to know when to stop eating
- Listen for what you really want to eat and would make you feel satisfied
- Nourish yourself with food that helps you feel good in your body
- Stop trying to diet and restrict food
Now, to the person who is already attuned to their fullness and hunger signals, the above tips will seem practical and worthwhile. Of course, dieting is horrible, so it makes sense to just stop right now and eat intuitively. For some people, the phrase ‘Intuitive Eating’ does make sense upon first impression.
But what about the person who struggles with food? What about the person whose ‘intuition’ around food is simply to binge everything in sight?
What if a person’s inner voice just told them to eat chocolate cake? What if a person is unable to feel their hunger as a natural consequence of years of dieting?
When such a person hears about the promise of Intuitive Eating, and then tries but fails at Intuitive Eating – what then? A person’s dreams of redemption were just crushed. They might never recover their self-esteem.
Perhaps the solution is as simple as helping to set better expectations, before someone jumps into Intuitive Eating and drowns in food.
I’m not saying I have all the right answers here. But I do recommend Awareness Journaling as a good place to start learning Intuitive Eating. And I think there are many other ways to caution people before they willy nilly start ‘eating intuitively’.
An Awareness Journal is not a calorie journal. This is important to understand. Someone may hear ‘journal’ and instinctively flee for their lives because the very word ‘journaling’ triggers to mind hours upon hours of obsessively writing down every single calorie.
However, I feel that keeping a journal is actually the best place to begin for someone who is new to Intuitive Eating.
A journal, with the simple guideline to journal your thoughts, feelings and emotions before you eat can give someone the structure to safely begin Intuitive Eating. Ultimately, of course, a person needs to learn Intuitive Eating, and not how to journal.
But a journal can act as the training wheels someone needs as they get started on their journey to becoming an Intuitive Eater, discovering freedom from binges, and being able to think and find peace within themselves.
Now, do you need to journal to learn Intuitive Eating? No, of course not. Simply knowing that Intuitive Eating is much more than taking away all ‘the rules’ and eating ‘whatever’ you want to eat is perhaps a good enough place to start.
For someone who needs a bit more structure (and who is also willing to work hard to journal before eating) then a journal would be a great place to start the Intuitive Eating journey.
Overall, though, let me be frank: I’m writing this post to express what I believe is a necessary tag-along conversation when discussing Intuitive Eating and the other modern anti-diet health movements.
It’s almost as though we as a culture are waking up to the horrible, truly horrible, nature of the ‘diet and weight loss’ mentality. We desperately want some other version of health that doesn’t involve constant calorie checking. A vision of health that isn’t entirely based on weight loss and looking thin.
But in our increasingly new and urgent quest to go the opposite direction of dieting, have we gone too quickly without talking about the possible consequences? Do we need to slow down?
What do you think? Is Intuitive Eating just fine the way it is? Is Intuitive Eating misleading? Or heck, maybe we need to go even faster and just ditch the confusions altogether! Let me know in the comments!
Jared Levenson is an eating blogger at Eating Enlightenment. His podcast Eating Enlightenment, explores modern mindful food and eating approaches to health, wellness and everything in the middle.
