Warning: This article discusses eating disorders, unhealthy eating habits, and restrictive eating practices.
When registered dietitians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch sat down to write a book that opposed diets and promoted intuitive eating in the 1990s, it felt daring – almost revolutionary.
In Australia, beauty and fashion trends at the time were dominated by a skinny obsession, highlighting the heroin-chic look and an intense focus on weight loss and fad diets.
Their book, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach, released in 1995, encouraged readers to ditch this mindset and tune into their bodies’ natural hunger and fullness cues.
“I knew I had to write something that was going to challenge the whole diet concept,” Ms Resch says.
Thirty years on, the intuitive eating movement’s gained a big following online, with celebs like Demi Lovato and Gwyneth Paltrow on board, as well as advocates for body acceptance and anti-diet influencers.
Describes in one of almost 200,000 posts about intuitive eating on the platform. Others have promoted the movement through “what an intuitive eater eats in a day” diaries.
But even though it’s gone mainstream online, there’s still some confusion about what intuitive eating means, whether it gives you a free pass to eat whatever you want, and if it works for everyone.
Intuitive eating and the Tao of Pooh
In the 1990s, Resch and Tribole were working with patients on diets driven by calorie counting and meal plans with strict guidelines.
Some people were finding it tough to stick to their diets and lose weight, which was affecting their self-confidence and how they viewed their bodies.
“What we discovered is that our skill set, what we were traditionally trained as dietitians, wasn’t having the desired effect, and people were unfairly blaming themselves,” Ms Tribole says.
So we did a thorough analysis of the research, we took into account our own clinical expertise. We also looked at what was happening in consumer literature … And so, putting all that together, that’s how we came up with this concept of intuitive eating.
Around the same time, Ms Resch started reading The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff, which explains the principles of Taoism through quotes from A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh stories.
“I thought, ‘Oh no, this is what I’ve got to do with food’. Not tell people what to eat, even though I was a dietitian, [but] help them understand what’s going on with their bodies … and have them be in a process, rather than a straight line,” she says.
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“When we’re deprived of something, all we can think about is getting it. If someone tells us something’s not good for us, but we still really want it, we’re going to go after it and regret our decision,” Ms Resch says.
But if you’ve got the good fortune of being able to get food consistently, and you take away all that criticism, all that negativity, no ‘good’ foods, no ‘bad’ foods, what ends up happening is something called habituation.
Habituation is a psychological concept that basically means the more of something you’ve got, the less it’s exciting.
“G’day mate, think about when you [buy] a pair of shoes, how ripper it is, and before you know it, they’re just a part of your everyday gear,” Ms Tribole says.
Same thing with food … When someone’s been chronically restricting their eating to lose weight, they don’t become used to food, it stays very appealing … and so this vicious cycle gets worse with every diet as they go on.
It’s essential to understand that intuitive eating doesn’t mean eating whatever you feel like, whenever you feel like it, without any thought to nutrition.
Instead, intuitive eaters give themselves permission to eat foods they enjoy, while respecting their body’s hunger and fullness signals and keeping in mind the best available evidence on nutrition.
Eating intuitively is linked with greater consumption of fruits and vegetables among adults.
What is the concept behind intuitive eating?
Intuitive eating is about paying attention to how you eat, not just what you eat. People are shown how to tune back in to their natural instincts about food, so they can learn to listen to their body’s hunger and fullness signals.
Ten key principles serve as a framework for intuitive eating, covering areas such as ‘acknowledging your hunger’, making peace with food and respecting your well-being through ‘nourishing your health’.
Other principles – which don’t have to be followed in any particular order – include ‘movement’, rather than focusing on the calorie-burning effect of exercise, and ‘respecting your body’.
“This is a journey of exploration. It’s not win or lose. It’s learning and letting go, and reconnecting with your body and the vital messages that it sends,” Ms Tribole says.
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Intuitive eating is a way of doin’ things that’s opposite to these attitudes, askin’ people to forget about tryin’ to get to a certain shape or size and just let themselves eat without any conditions.
Take a moment to think about what kind of meal would really hit the spot for you. What kind of mood are you in? What are you in the mood for? It’s all about what feels right for you.
It’s associated with the Health at Every Size movement, which puts less emphasis on weight as a way to measure people’s health. It also ties in with the body neutrality movement, which suggests that the body is just a tool that helps us get by in life.
Eating in tune with your body has a positive effect on your mental health, including your self-confidence and overall well-being, but it doesn’t necessarily help with weight loss.
While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to embracing intuitive eating principles, the first step is generally to ditch the rules of diet culture.
Ms Tribole says eating becomes “fair dinkum confusing” after years of goin’ on a diet, restrictin’ certain tucker, and not listenin’ to your body’s natural hunger and fullness cues.
“It can feel like everything’s gone haywire,” she adds.
Aussies are encouraged to take a closer look at their thoughts about food and health.
“To fully grasp intuitive eating, you’ve got to understand it can’t simply be driven by instinct, because instinct can be influenced by emotions, and it’s also shaped by your thoughts about food,” Ms Resch says.
Lindi Cohen is a dietitian who goes by the title “Nude Nutritionist” on Instagram. She says that intuitive eating helped her and her clients to break free from diet culture.
Ms Cohen grew up with an obsession with dieting, which she claims led to a binge eating disorder in her teenage years.
When I came across intuitive eating, it was a real light-bulb moment for me, because it felt so refreshing to finally have an approach that seemed achievable and didn’t need me to obsess over weighing or counting every single thing I ate.
She says she found solace in the approach not promoting weight loss, but rather encouraging people to accept that everyone’s bodies have unique characteristics.
The toughest part is getting back into the swing of eating properly and learning to trust your body again, but it gets simpler as you keep at it and the more you practice.
Criticisms of intuitive eating
The popularity of intuitive eating has sparked criticism from bloggers and online forum contributors, such as those on Reddit.
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She said this was partly because of the broader nutrition industry, which is mainly run by white women who are generally slim.
“For my part, I’m trying to spread the word about intuitive eating without making it all about me or my own body,” she wrote, before listing dietitians from different backgrounds, with diverse gender, racial, and ethnic identities to follow on social media.
6. Reduced inflammation and improved immune function
And just like anything that’s always changing, the message about eating intuitively has sometimes been misleadingly represented by those who’re promoting its advantages.
One of the most common misconceptions is that intuitive eating can help people shed kilos.
“Fair dinkum, some blokes lose weight, some blokes put on weight, and some blokes stay the same,” Ms Resch says.
Ms Tribole says what they also notice is people overlooking the “dynamic integration of all the principles” and instead concentrating on one or two points.
“It’s not wrong to say this approach is based on hunger and fullness, but it can give the wrong idea that you have to eat exactly when you’re hungry and stop eating exactly when you’re full … No, this is a journey of discovery,” she says.
Perhaps the biggest issue is when critics misinterpret intuitive eating as an excuse to disregard essential nutritional requirements and “eat junk food all the time”.
When you let go of guilt and self-criticism, and give yourself permission to enjoy the chips, you might be surprised to find that devouring an entire bowl doesn’t bring the satisfaction you thought it would.
Then, instead of having a diet rule, instead of nutrition feeling like a strict rule, it feels like a personal choice.
Is intuitive eating suitable for everyone?
Eating intuitively is a non-diet approach that promotes self-care and a positive body image.
But Ms Cohen says it’s generally not recommended for patients diagnosed with anorexia nervosa because people with the condition often struggle to trust their natural hunger and fullness signals.
Intuitive eating can be extremely beneficial for people dealing with other eating disorders, she says.
Intuitive eating led to improved mental and behavioural health among people with bulimia, and reduced the likelihood of binge eating and fasting.
“If someone’s got an eating disorder or has been through trauma, or has a medical condition, you can still do intuitive eating, but usually you’ll need to work with a specialist to do that,” Ms Tribole says.
Eating intuitively also means having access to a range of foods and having the financial means to purchase them, a privilege not shared by all, Ms Resch concedes.
“To be in the world of eating whatever I want to eat, whenever I want to eat it, you’ve got to have the privilege of having access to it,” Ms Resch says.
But if you don’t, we also want to have compassion for people who are doing the best they can do and not be judged by a society that thinks you should be eating kale and drinking smoothies.
Their book might be 30 years old, but Ms Tribole and Ms Resch reckon the lessons of intuitive eating are just as relevant today.
“G’day, we’re seeing a fair dinkum surge in people getting worked up about body image and weight, again,” Ms Tribole says.
“I reckon there’ll be even more enthusiasm for the idea of autonomy and doing what you think is right for you,” Ms Resch says.
This is general information only. For personal advice, you should consult a qualified medical practitioner.
