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Question: Is Intuitive Eating really about just eating whatever you want?
Answer:
There is a lot of nuance to unpack here, but first of all – hear me loud and clear: you can eat whatever you want. You are in charge of your body, and I am not here to tell you what to eat – no dietitian should. A dietitian can tell you how foods react in your body, how they may impact your labs, and then help you sort out what works for you and what does not in service of your goals. I constantly run into the misconception that dietitians are here to police your food and tell you what to eat.
I am not. I will not. You can eat what you want.
But like most things, there is more to the story when it comes to Intuitive Eating.
We have all seen the pictures on social media –someone eats a donut and adds #Intuitive Eating. It is not entirely wrong. But the reality is that someone could be eating a kale salad or a burger or nothing at all and it might be Intuitive Eating.
Intuitive Eating is about the mind-body connection, eating foods you enjoy, and paying attention to what your body needs and wants so that you can nourish it and thrive.
If you are an intuitive eater, you will eat whatever you want. But eating whatever you want does not make you an intuitive eater.
We will unpack that in just a minute.
But first, let’s back up a little.
When we ask if it is okay to eat whatever we want, it often implies that there are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods. It also can imply that your instincts are not to be trusted – that you need to be restricted or directed in some way.
This begs the question: Why are we so weird about our food in the first place –why do we consider some foods “good” and other foods “bad”?
Let’s dig into this a little…
Humans have a long history of being weird about food.
One of the earliest recorded dieting books dates back to the 1500’s. Luigi Cornaro, an Italian, recommended eating only 12 oz of food and 14 oz of wine per day (per day!!!) along with a host of food restrictions. He said it made him feel better. He was drinking more wine than food. Ummm….yea he was likely malnourished and buzzed.
Another diet called Fletcherism was popular in the early 1900’s. This consisted of chewing food 32 times until it became liquid and then spitting it out. What delightful dinner parties these people must have had.
But it is not just about weird diets. Humans have long associated morality and virtue with certain foods and restrictions. According to Christy Harrison in her book ‘Anti-Diet’, the word ‘diet’ originated with Hippocrates in Ancient Greece and from the beginning it has been tied up with “…ideas about morality, restriction, the renunciation of pleasure, and the superiority of certain races.”1 From day one, diets have been fraught.
The association of morality with food was present in a variety of ways over the centuries and culminated in the work of Sylvester Graham in the early 1800’s. Yes, this guy is the father of Graham crackers. I love Graham crackers and so does my three-year-old, but this guy’s soapbox was not nearly so palatable.
His work was based on the early Christian idea that “…regarded the body as the enemy of the soul.” He promoted a vegetarian diet as a means to improve morality and focused on “right living” as the crux of health. While some of his ideas about improving hygiene have been beneficial, as a Reverend, he tied up Christian morality a little too tightly with food choices.
Then in the 1900’s during the first World War all of these ideas were heightened. Food restrictions became a moral imperative due to food shortages and “fatness [was seen as] evidence of moral failure”.2 The current field of nutrition was born in this era and has been entrenched in ideas of good vs bad foods and fatphobia ever since.3 In addition to the moralizing of food, thinness has been associated with virtue for centuries and has been used to justify the subjugation of black bodies and female bodies.
The last time you pondered starting a new diet to lose a few pounds, I bet you did not know that you were hearkening back to the days of refining your soul through food and oppressing anyone who was not thin, white, able-bodied, or male.
Dieting has a dark past. It also has a dark future.
People in larger bodies continue to be discriminated against in healthcare, education, social settings, and employment (aka all of life). In addition, pharmaceutical companies, supplement companies, and the wellness industry capitalize on and cash in on people’s desire to shrink their bodies. They make billions of dollars preying on our self-directed fatphobia. It seems common enough to rage against the pharmaceutical industry – I just wish those same people would bring a similar fervor against the unregulated supplement industry.
I digress. The moral of the story is that we are weird about our food because we have almost always been weird about our food. Our fear of fatness and desire for rightness runs deep. This history matters because it shows that our current food guilt and body shame are not personal failings – they are inherited cultural baggage. Understanding this can help us recognize that the voice in our head labeling foods as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is not our intuitive wisdom speaking; it is centuries of diet culture.
But this does not have to be the ongoing story for YOU. The next time you are tempted to steer clear of a food because it is ‘bad’ or eat a food only because it is ‘good’ – ask yourself if you really believe you are saving your soul with the bite you are about to take. If not, then put the fork down and go eat whatever it is that you actually want. And if you do not know what you actually want to eat, come see me – we will sort it out together. Working through Intuitive Eating principles is a great place to start.
And now…back to the original question about being an intuitive eater. As I said earlier…
If you are an intuitive eater, you will eat whatever you want. But eating whatever you want does not make you an intuitive eater.
Let’s unpack that.
If you are eating whatever you want, but not able to tune in to what your body needs OR if you regularly ignore what your body asks for, then you are not an intuitive eater.
The goal with Intuitive Eating is to help you tune in to your body to understand what it needs at any given moment – whether it is sugar (aka carbohydrate), protein, fat, or fiber. And yes, your body does need ALL of these things.
Intuitive Eating is about eating foods you enjoy and paying attention to how your body feels so that you can nourish it with foods that help you thrive. Sometimes this means having protein and fiber. Sometimes this means avoiding a food such as dairy if you are lactose intolerant because of how it makes you feel. Sometimes this means having the pumpkin pie. Thriving with food includes a range of foods including enjoyment of social eating.
If you are feeling ostracized in social settings because of your food choices, there is more to explore here. Food is inherently social and we miss out on many social and health benefits when we make food solely about personal choice. A well-known study known as the Roseto effect revealed that strong interpersonal relationships and community likely confer health benefits even for a high-risk group that does exercise regularly or follow traditional nutrition advice.
In other words, our health is about more than just the foods we eat. Our social lives are a crucial part of our physical health, not just our mental and emotional health. Eating food with other people is a powerful connector.
In addition, this idea of ‘eating whatever I want’ is often misinterpreted. On the surface, yes, eat whatever you want. In fact, research shows that when people eat whatever they want, they actually eat a wider variety of nutrients.
BUT, if you are craving just one food or one type of food all the time OR telling yourself that you only want a certain food all of the time, then there is something else going on that we can work through.
People’s minds often turn to sweet treats when I talk about food cravings – and many people I work with crave sweets and feel out of control around them. This is common when someone is restricting them in some way. Our body’s ability to crave simple carbs has kept us alive for a long time.
However, I have also worked with people who mostly eat raw fruits and vegetables or have narrowed their diet down to just a few foods that are considered ‘healthy’. While eating these foods is not inherently a problem, just as eating sweets also is not – when someone is restricting themselves to certain foods because of a fear of other foods – this is also NOT Intuitive Eating.
The point is that craving specific foods ALL THE TIME or only allowing yourself to have certain foods even if they are all so-called healthy foods, is often a sign of restriction and unnecessary food rules.
Restriction and food rules are typically a result of dieting or our cultural obsession with good/bad foods. Many people who have spent time dieting, feel that their bodies are wrong, or are ultra-concerned with the foods they eat, end up disconnected from their body and even fighting against their body.
This disconnection and conflict make it hard to know what to eat without the food rules because not only do we no longer sense what our body needs, we now feel a constant craving for the foods we restrict. I see this disconnection in a number of areas in client’s lives – sometimes they do not respond to cues for peeing or sleep or thirst. Sometimes they have lost some of those cues altogether.
To return to our natural state of Intuitive Eating, a capability we are born with, we must reconnect with our body.
Intuitive Eating is about attunement.
The first thing I work on to help a client reconnect with their body’s food cravings is to work on attunement. Or the more technical term – interoceptive awareness. Interoceptive awareness is the “ability to perceive physical sensations that arise from within your body”.4 I use the word attunement because it is a more common term, but just know that the Intuitive Eating book refers to this as interoceptive awareness. This includes feeling the need to pee, noticing hunger or when you get full, and feeling emotions. Our bodies are important conduits of information – not just for our basic needs, but our emotional needs as well.
How do we work on attunement?
There are many approaches you can take. All of the principles of Intuitive Eating help with interoceptive awareness either through increasing our attunement or by removing barriers to our ability to sense what our bodies need.5 This means you can literally start anywhere within the Intuitive Eating Principles.
I typically identify sticking points for my clients and we start there.
Here are a few of my favorite and less-fraught places to start:
- Implement self-care: I like to start with self-care because it often feels less scary to people and we see benefits quickly. I am not talking about the buzz word ‘self-care’ that implies a treat, such as a pedicure (although do not get me wrong, I love a good pedicure). I am talking about the basics of what you need to feel good in your body – physically, emotionally, spiritually. This can involve time spent with friends, fresh air, stress management, drinking enough water, and adequate sleep.
Starting with giving your body its basic needs is a great way to get your body and mind reconnected. Sometimes our body stops sending us signals because we do not respond to what it needs. Recognizing and caring for our basic needs helps the body to restart those signals. Identifying signals is the first step in attunement.
- Listen for your heartbeat. You can begin this exercise by tracking your heart rate by putting your finger on your pulse. After tracking this for a minute, rest your hands on your legs and sit quietly. Count your heart rate by sensing it rather than with your pulse.
If you can sense your heart beat without touching your pulse, then you are already fairly advanced at sensing your body’s cues. If this is difficult for you, then know you are not alone. It is hard for most people. Setting aside time every day to practice listening for your heart beat can increase your attunement with your body.
- Breath meditation: Meditation is a great way to reconnect the mind and body. But meditating can be anxiety-inducing. The first time I tried to meditate, I ended up hyperventilating. This is why I find breath meditation to be one of the simplest ways to start if you have little experience.
Get comfortable, close your eyes, and listen to your breath. Fill your mind with the rhythmic flow of your breath. When your mind wanders, bring it back to your breath. When you are ready, start to lengthen your breaths to at least a five count. Most of us breath too shallowly. It’s a byproduct of our fast-paced world. Start with a minute and work your way up to five minutes. A daily practice can increase your ability to tune into many of your body’s senses.
- Remove distractions when you eat. So many of us are scrolling, watching tv, driving, or working when we eat. Or even a combination of these at once. Yikes! As a result, we often do not pay attention to the food we eat and sometimes have very little memory of having eaten at all. When you take away distractions and actually pay attention to food – the taste, the texture, the smell – we sometimes discover surprising things.
Some people are eating foods they do not like, but have not stopped long enough to notice. Intuitive Eating helps you pay attention to not just what your body wants and needs, but also whether or not you are enjoying the food you are eating and if you are satisfied by it.
Intuitive Eating is about connecting the mind and the body so that we can not only hear our body again, but so that we can learn to trust what it is telling us.*
When we hear and trust our body, it will let us know if we need to bump up the protein with breakfast to balance our blood sugar. It will let us know if we had too much fiber in that afternoon smoothie or if we are craving a seasonal treat because life is short and pumpkin is tasty.
Sometimes breaking the cycle of restriction does mean having the food often – think cereal morning, noon and night. And maybe as a snack too. Eating a food often helps calm down the craving for it. But I can guarantee you will not stay there. If you are stuck at constantly craving cereal then you are likely still placing rules or restrictions around it in some way.
If you are truly and unabashedly allowing yourself to have cereal, one day you will find yourself thinking – oh wow, I do not really want cereal right now, at this moment I need a little protein and maybe even some fiber. You will likely still enjoy cereal, but it will not be the only thing you want to eat. You may even surprise yourself one day and find that the cereal went stale because you forgot about it.
But let’s say you are stuck. You have finally allowed yourself to have all of the foods you have been craving, but you feel unhappy with how it is going. Please do not wrestle through this alone. Find a dietitian who is certified in Intuitive Eating (see link below for the directory) to help you walk through this. Our relationships with food and our bodies are nuanced and there may be a number of reasons why you are stuck.
In summary, intuitive eaters are in tune with their bodies and then eat whatever they want accordingly. Intuitive Eating gives you the freedom not just to eat whatever you want, but also to want what your body wants. Human’s unfortunate history with dieting and associating morality with food choices and body size gets in the way of attunement, but with a little work, we can return to our natural state of eating intuitively.
As a final note, here are a few practical tips if you want to take steps towards becoming a more intuitive eater – this list is from a previous blog post that addresses the common question of ‘Will I lose weight if I become an 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.
*It’s important to note that trauma and dissociation from the body can significantly impact your ability to develop attunement. If you have experienced trauma, or if the idea of ‘listening to your body’ feels impossible or triggering, please seek the help of a trauma-informed therapist.
1 – page 21 in Anti-Diet book
2 – pages 36-37 in Anti-Diet book
3 – page 37 in Anti-Diet book
4 – page 3 in Intuitive Eating book
5 – page 4 in 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.
Author bio: Kathleen Hahn, MS, RD, LD is a registered and licensed dietitian. She received her Master’s degree in social justice issues in the food system at