What is Intuitive Eating?
Intuitive Eating is a proven and well-researched self-care eating approach and framework that helps you to gently retune with yourself and become the expert of your own body, food and movement.
Drawing on both bodily wisdom and science, Intuitive Eating enables you to learn to trust your ability to meet your needs for nourishment, develop confidence in your body, and improve your emotional wellbeing.
However, it isn’t a destination as such - it is a life-long practice.
WHY EAT INTUITIVELY?
Whether you come to see me because you want to improve your relationship with food, your health, or manage a digestive disorder, I believe that everyone can benefit from taking an intuitive approach to their eating habits.
However, for the many clients I see who’ve been caught up following endless dietary regimes in the pursuit of weight loss, or struggle with emotional eating, learning how to eat intuitively is an essential component of finding freedom from the drain of food-related obsession, guilt and anxiety, and finding a path back to a more natural, flexible and connected way of eating.
Learning to eat intuitively is about prioritising your body’s health and your mental and emotional wellbeing over the single-minded pursuit of weight loss. And I believe it’s only by putting health and wellbeing first and creating an intuitive relationship with food and your body, that you can create the right environment for your body to thrive in the long-run and, as a side-effect, find the natural weight range for you along the way.
As well as promoting a healthier relationship with food and supporting a healthier psychological attitude, Intuitive Eating has been shown to bring numerous physical health benefits including improving digestion and physiological markers of health like blood glucose control, cholesterol and blood pressure.
DIETS DON’T WORK
It may surprise you, but there is no scientific evidence that dieting works in the long-term (beyond five years) for anything other than a very small number of people.
Dietary regimes marketed by the weight-loss industry, and sometimes the wellness industry, generally provide impersonal nutritional advice based on rigid ‘food rules’, calorie counting/points systems and unnecessary food restriction.
Followers can sometimes make a short term impact on body fat reduction, but the trade-off can be costly. It is now widely recognised that engaging in dieting approaches overtime can set the scene for a feast-famine mentality, binging, rebound weight-gain and may slow the metabolism.
Following dictatorial dieting approaches undermines a person’s innate ability to listen to their bodies and recognise and respond to their body’s own hunger and fullness signals. An impact of this is they disconnect them from their own intuition and lose trust in themselves around food, ironically fuelling the dieting frenzy.
What EXACTLY IS Intuitive Eating
Intuitive Eating is an empowering long-term move away from following rigid external rules and the narrow pursuit of weight-loss and instead, learning to eat mindfully, flexibly and in accordance with the body’s natural appetite and physiological cues. It’s essentially the opposite of dieting.
But Intuitive Eating is not just a philosophy, it is a distinct science-backed methodology and set of clinical tools devised in 1995 by two dieticians in the US. It teaches you that you, and only you, are the best person to make choices about what you eat. And it also helps you tend to your broader self-care, including finding joy in physical activity.
Intuitive Eating is rapidly gaining popularity as evidence mounts for its physical and mental health benefits, and as society is starting to acknowledge the fact that dieting is unsustainable, very rarely leads to the results promised, and diet culture is more harmful than healthful.
Hand-in-hand with Intuitive Eating comes the concept of body neutrality which, in practice, means building a peaceful acceptance and respect for your body how it is today.
This is so important for everyone, but particularly if you’ve been at war with your body shape and size through chronic dieting or punishing exercise regimes.
Are you an intuitive eater?
WHAT IT MEANS TO BE AN INTUITIVE EATER
Intuitive Eating is a philosophy and framework, not a “one size fits all” approach. Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, who developed the approach have laid-out the the ten basic principles, below:
INTUITIVE EATING AT GUT REACTION - WHERE Nutrition MEETS WELLBEING
At Certified Intuitive Eating Counsellor, my own philosophy and approach is greatly informed by Intuitive Eating which is integrated into my work with clients to varying degrees, informed by the individual client’s need.
It pairs really well with my supportive approach to nutrition that promotes health alongside satisfaction and taste, and that encourages dietary variety and achieving a healthy balance over time.
In the health and wellness world, nutrition support is typically delivered from a weight-centred model based on the premise that body weight is a (if not, the) key indicator of health, and promotes prescriptive and/or restrictive eating approaches as a means to lose weight.
However, evidence is surfacing that the importance of weight in health has been overemphasised and the weight-centred approach does not improve health for the majority of individuals across the weight continuum, and may cause more physical and emotional harm to individuals in the long term.
At Gut Reaction, you receive weight-neutral support which means we doesn't use body weight as the focal point of nutritional therapy or intervention, but we may emphasise non–weight-based markers of health and wellbeing such as gut health or blood sugar.
Intuitive EATING AND GUT FEELINGS
Yes - there is a connection! Ever had a gut feeling that something or someone is very right for you, or very wrong for you? This phenomenon is called interoception and it involves sensing the internal state of your entire body. It’s your ability to sense and respond to all of your body processes and signals, including emotions, hunger, fullness and satisfaction.
When we’re babies our interoceptive awareness is high - we intuitively know exactly what we want and how much. But as we grow-up, our eating becomes more informed by messages from outside of ourselves - messages from parents, teachers, friends, media-driven health claims, diet culture, and marketing ploys.
Not all these messages are helpful when we are forming healthy eating habits and the more time we spend thinking about our bodies, rather than in them, the more our intuition gets clouded.
Next steps
My approach, called The Gut Reaction Method, helps rebalance ‘Seven Dynamics of a Healthy Relationship with Food & Body’ - empowering you to address the barriers to intuitive eating and build the skills to retune with your self.
Ready to reduce stress around food, reset your eating, habits and retune with your body? Find out more about my Food and Body Confidence Programmes.