What is Intuitive Eating?

Intuitive eating. Maybe this is where we should have started. But there are so many subjects to cover, oh my!

Alright, so what is this new amazing diet that will help me shed 10 pounds overnight?!

Um. No. Shut up. That is not what this is about. But, in a way, it will definitely help you shed a figurative 10 pounds of bullshit you carry around almost overnight. How does that sound? You like? Then read on!

So what is it? Intuitive eating should actually just be called eating. Because that’s what it is. It’s normal eating with nothing getting between you, your body, and your food.

If we had never known diet culture, we would all be intuitive eaters. Kids, before they are old enough to understand and be told what to eat and not to eat, are intuitive eaters. Think of a baby drinking milk. They eat when they’re hungry, stop when they’re full. There’s no thought of “hmm…but I just ate 20 minutes ago, I can’t be hungry!” or “I didn’t really move that much today, I need to stop eating!”.

At this point, you might be thinking something like, “yes, but they don’t have the temptations I have! I’m addicted to sugar!”. Hold your horses.

I’ve been there. I’ve done that. I see you.

Here’s the thing. No, you’re not addicted to sugar. How do I know? “You’re not even a doctor!” (As if doctors know anything about intuitive eating. They do not.) Because if I told you that for the rest of your life, you can only eat unlimited amounts of sugar of any kind, you would get excited and binge. Then, you would be so over it that the thought of anything sweet would make you nauseous. You would actually crave something refreshing like salad or cucumber (yes, that is 100% possible).

Unlike actual addictions, the more sugar you have, the less you want it and the less rewarding it is. What makes sugar highly palatable is…ready?

Restriction.

When you go on a diet and aren’t allowed to have certain foods, those foods have a much stronger pull than if you did allow yourself to eat them.

Think about when you are exposed to some “banned” food. Let’s say, you’re at the office and there’s a birthday. Someone brings doughnuts. You happen to be “on a diet” so obviously, you, being all pious and holier-than-thou aren’t about to ruin it with some silly doughnut! Not you, never! You go home feeling all high and mighty. But then you still have that hankering for a little somethin’ somethin’. You look through your cabinets. You have some diet cookies or keto chocolate or whatever. But you just can’t seem to find satisfaction. You have a little more, then something else, then something else. Before you know it, you’ve eaten half the house, feel stuffed, guilty, and ashamed.

Welcome to the diet cycle.

What would have happened if you just had that doughnut?

Two scenarios are possible.

One is you have the damn doughnut, enjoy it, move on. That would be the intuitive eater.

Two is you have the doughnut. Feel bad. You ruined your diet. Feel shame. Go over-exercise or undereat your next meal. Mentally, you completely spin out of control. Then you’d probably go binge because why the hell not, you already “blew it”. That would be the dieter.

Which would you rather be?

Back to the original topic. What is intuitive eating?

There are 10 principles of intuitive eating. The first and foremost is to reject the diet mentality. That’s right. In order to be an intuitive eater, you need to throw that shit out.

All of it.

“But, I’m eating for my health!” Yeah? Are you? What if I told you that by eating “for your health” you would gain 15 pounds? Would you still be “eating for your health”? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

So then, what exactly constitutes a diet? What is the diet mentality?

You don’t have to be on an official diet to be dieting or have the diet mentality. Anytime you follow some sort of food rules like “I really should have this and not that even though I really, really want that!”, it’s a diet or the diet mentality invading your mental space.

Here’s the problem. You don’t eat what you actually want or how much you actually want and that is, besides being shitty, damaging to your relationship with food.

I think that’s a subject in and of itself that we can touch on later, but for now, know that this mentality is harming your ability to eat intuitively.

Intuitive eating is about eating whatever you feel like eating. It’s about connecting to your inner desires. Maybe today, you really want mac and cheese. Maybe you want a big plate of pineapple, I’m not here to judge! You tune into your body’s hunger signals, you honor them by eating, and you make sure you’re also paying attention to what would satisfy you in that moment.

We’ve all been there. You’re hungry and you could really go for some fries, for example.

Because you are so tuned into your hunger signals, you don’t eat when you’re ravenous and totally out of control. You eat when you have the right amount of hunger to make a good decision for yourself as opposed to eat anything in sight because you just can’t wait anymore.

Then, when you do eat your burger or pizza or salad or green smoothie, you are present and feeling your fullness signals. You stop when you are at a comfortable level of fullness.

The end.

No guilt. No remorse. No “but I shouldn’t be eating this! I’ll have to make up for it.” Didn’t I say this helps you shed the bullshit?

But because we do live in diet culture, there are so many nuances to this. Most of us have to do a lot of work to undo the damage of dieting on both our minds and bodies. We need to find our hunger and fullness signals and reconnect with our true desires for what we want.

Not only that, but many of us have deprived ourselves of what we love, either mentally or physically, to such an extent that initially, there is “eat it all” mentality for many in the beginning. Like a caged animal being set free!

That period will go away. As you allow yourself to eat what you want when you want and feel how satisfying it is, you will be able to look at a cookie or cake or previously “forbidden” food and just be like “cool.”

In a previous post, I wrote about how my cabinet is stuffed to the brim with the entire Trader Joe’s dessert aisle (no, not literally people. Calm down.). Yet…I often forget about it. I’ll have a cookie or brownie, for sure! But I don’t have crazy binges like I used to. I stopped fighting myself. And I am not an exception.

I’ll finish this by giving you my personal definition of intuitive eating. It is freedom. It is the cleaning lady/man who came over and cleaned up a bunch of mental space in your brain. You don’t realize the amount of mental energy you waste on diets, calories, how much exercise to do, what you can and can’t eat, how much you’d love some chocolate, how ugly you think you look, etc. until you start cleaning it up.

I am definitely not done with the work of clearing it all out. Not even close. But I am getting there and I’m a hell of a lot closer than I would ever have been had I not discovered intuitive eating.

Interested in learning more? Subscribe and follow along!

And if you want to take a deeper dive into intuitive eating, I suggest starting with the OG book, written in 1995 and updated multiple times since. This book started a revolution.

Go! Be free, little intuitive eater! Until next time,

Asya

P.S. This post touched on a few subjects we need to explore. Like “will I lose weight with IE?” and “what if I really need to lose weight?”. There is way too much to say on these subjects to have them just be thrown in there as an afterthought. I’ll be discussing these further in later newsletters.

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