This blog post is part of a new monthly Nutrition Advice Column. Feel free to submit your questions to [email protected] or complete the form below. Photo by Alex Haney on Unsplash 

Question: I am interested in Intuitive Eating – will it help me lose weight?

Answer:

The short answer is – maybe.

Some people lose weight. Intuitive Eating principles help people work through emotional eating and get out of the binge/restrict cycle. This sometimes leads to weight loss.

But some people gain weight. Gaining weight can be a natural part of the process of working through Intuitive Eating principles. If someone has a history of frequent restriction, they may be hungry all of the time because the body identifies even intentional restriction as starvation and increases hunger signals.

It takes time to reassure the body that it will be well-nourished. In addition, if someone has been restricting and keeping their weight at a false low, when they start eating a greater range of foods, they naturally gain weight.

Some people’s weight does not change. That’s normal too.

My point is that we do not know what your weight will do as you work through Intuitive Eating and, quite frankly, your body size is not the point.

The purpose of Intuitive Eating is to improve your relationship with food and with your body.

If you are working through Intuitive Eating principles with the goal of weight loss, you are likely looking for a diet. And research shows that diets fail. Maybe you are thinking – no, no, I do not want a diet – I want a long-term sustainable approach to weight loss.

Well, the difficulty is that a long-term sustainable approach means that you must stop focusing on your weight. The reality is that focusing on weight often causes unhelpful behaviors such as restricting, which leads to long term increased hunger signals, bingeing, and hyper-focus on certain foods.

Furthermore, we often do not have control over our weight, making this focus a fruitless and disheartening endeavor. Our body size is caused by many things out of our control such as genetics, our gut microbiota, and our body’s response to dieting.

To be clear, if you want both – to eat intuitively and to lose weight – that makes you human.

Many clients have come to me for Intuitive Eating AND weight loss and I get it – we live in a world that is fatphobic and discriminates against larger bodies. Our culture links weight with health and assigns moral value to our body size (aka diet culture) so it is logical that many people want to lose weight.

Diet culture tells you that your body should be a certain size and should look a certain way. Diet culture is about the never-ending attempt at weight loss no matter your actual weight or health.

Diet culture perpetuates the idea that worth is tied up with body image and not just any body image, but an unattainable, never-good-enough body image. Even people who appear to have reached the desired body (or were handed this body via genetics) are often not happy with their body.

Do not be fooled into thinking appearance equals satisfaction.

It is nearly impossible to be alive and not want to lose weight or wish your body was different in some way. As Christy Harrison points out, diet culture is a “sneaky, shape-shifting thing” and it colors our perspective and intentions in almost every way.

All that to say, it makes sense to me when someone wants to lose weight and also repair their relationship with food through Intuitive Eating. Of course we want that. But we must set it aside.

The truth is that Intuitive Eating has nothing at all to do with body size and if anyone tells you otherwise, they do not understand Intuitive Eating.

It bears repeating that Intuitive Eating has to do with your relationship with food and your body, NOT the numbers on a scale or your BMI (body mass index).

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Intuitive Eating is a psychological approach to understanding your history with food and how dieting and diet culture wrecks your ability to tune in to your body’s needs.

Intuitive Eating is about unlearning diet culture.

When someone comes to me wanting to learn how to eat intuitively, I ask them to set aside their desire for weight loss. Working on weight loss hinders the ability to eat intuitively.

Here are a few ways that working on weight loss interferes with being an intuitive eater:

• Focusing on weight causes you to place external rules around eating and foods rather than listening to your body. This disconnects you from your body and makes it difficult to tune in to hunger and satiety signals and identify cravings.
• Not only do external rules make it harder to know when you are satisfied with your food, the very premise of food rules often has people avoiding foods they like and, in turn, forcing themselves to swallow foods they dislike. This also disrupts the crucial connection between the mind and body that is central to being an intuitive eater.
• Focusing on weight increases dissatisfaction with the body and often makes people feel like they fighting against their own body. As the authors of Intuitive Eating point out, “You really can’t make peace with food when you are at war with your body.”¹ Setting aside weight loss efforts is waving a white flag to let your body know you are on the same side.

In short, focusing on weight loss typically leads to dieting behaviors, and I could say a LOT more about how dieting mucks you up, but suffice to say – dieting is the antithesis to being an intuitive eater.

Not only does focusing on weight loss impair your ability to become an intuitive eater, the inverse is also true. People “who are able to find respect for their bodies have more patience for the Intuitive Eating process. This patience allows them to explore further and move forward more quickly.”¹ In other words, appreciating your body helps you to be an intuitive eater and research backs this up.  

It can be difficult to switch from wanting to lose weight to appreciating your body as it is, but there are actions we can take to help.

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Here are a few practical tips to help you stop focusing on weight loss while you work on Intuitive Eating – you may find you never go back:

• Do not weigh yourself. The biggest problem with weighing yourself regularly is that we often use this to tell ourselves how we should feel about ourselves. Numbers on a scale do not deserve that power. Regardless of that number, you can feel strong, you can feel beautiful, you can feel happy, sad, upset, or elated. But those numbers should not dictate this. In addition, seeing those numbers can lead to dieting behaviors, which is unhelpful when you are trying to unlearn dieting behaviors and thought patterns.
• Curate your social media. Unfollow any accounts that make you feel dissatisfied with your body or that promote dieting, restriction, or body shame. This can be subtle. Sometimes accounts appear to be body positive or promote a healthy lifestyle, but they still make you discontent with your body and make you feel like engaging in dieting behaviors. This is unhelpful. Your social media feed should support your well-being, not undermine it. Actively look for accounts with a variety of body sizes. Challenge yourself to see beauty in a variety of body types and sizes. The media we absorb matters. Here are several of my favorite accounts:
  • Annette Richmond
  • Emily Ho
  • Meg Boggs
• Buy clothing that fits you well. Ill-fitting clothes are like having a nagging auntie sitting on your shoulder constantly telling you that you need to lose weight and that your body is wrong. Not only should your clothing fit you well, you should like them. It takes more work to find clothes that fit this bill because the clothing industry primarily caters to the smallest size people whose bodies never change (aka people that do not exist), but it is worth every minute and penny spent. Please do not wait until you reach your goal weight to do this. You will be shocked by how much easier it is to feel good in your body if you feel good in your clothing. Check out a previous blog post for a list of body-inclusive brands.

One quick side note: You may be thinking – “But what about my health? My doctor wants me to lose weight and it is important that I focus on this even while working on Intuitive Eating.” 

That is a great point, and I am glad you brought this up. There is so much to say about health and weight loss that I could write an entire blog post on this (and perhaps I will), but in short, focusing on weight loss often leads to dieting. Dieting leads to weight cycling (gaining/losing weight repeatedly). 

Research shows that weight cycling drives poorer health outcomes than staying at the higher weight in the first place and Intuitive Eating practices have been linked to improved blood pressure, lipids, and disordered eating.² 

Your health may actually improve if you take a break from focusing on weight loss and instead direct your energy into learning how to be an Intuitive Eater.

In summary, your body may change when you work through Intuitive Eating principles. It may not. But it does not matter – the goal is the journey. And on the journey of Intuitive Eating, we want to re-learn how to delight in food and appreciate our body. If we are lucky, we will have at least 4,000 weeks on this earth where we can do just that.

As a final note, here are a few practical tips if you want to take steps towards becoming a more intuitive eater:

• Read or listen to the Intuitive Eating book. This knowledge is revolutionary.
• Take a deeper dive and work through the Intuitive Eating Workbook.
• Level up and work with a dietitian who is certified in Intuitive Eating as you go through the workbook. Find one in this online directory or feel free to reach out to us at Eat Well Collective – I am certified in Intuitive Eating and I get really jazzed to work with clients on this stuff.
• Check out the Way app – this app is a hands-on guide to Intuitive Eating combined with cognitive behavioral therapy.
• Come to grips with the body that you have. Not your future body or a body from the past. The one that you have right now that helps you exist in the world. For many people, this is the first step in righting their relationship with food and getting off the dieting train. Start with taking a deep breath and then thank your body for something it is currently doing for you. Like breathing. And then call a therapist or check out Body Image with Bri – body grief is hard work and I would not want you to go through it alone.

1. Page 199, Intuitive Eating book

2. Page 17, Intuitive Eating book

I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic. Please do not hesitate to get in touch via email at [email protected]. In addition, feel free to reach out if you have a nutrition question that you would like answered in this advice column. All questions are posted anonymously.

If you would like to work directly with a dietitian at Eat Well Collective, feel free to contact us at here or schedule directly here.