Once upon a time, when dieting was the centre point to which my life revolved around, I read a book called French Women Don’t Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano. This book was my first introduction to what I believed was “intuitive eating”, as Mireille would poetise the French women’s culinary journey to thinness. Images of svelte glamazonians with cigarettes dripping from their lips wooed me into wanting to pursue the diet of a French woman, in the hope that I too could look like them: Skinny.
Mireille’s “lifestyle” involved eating small portions, good quality ingredients, walking up stairs rather than taking the lift (lame), but most importantly eating with your “mind”. This meant timing all of my meals so that, for example, I’d spend at least half an hour eating half a bowl of porridge. At the time, I hadn’t realised that I had adopted this new method of eating as a way to mask my eating disorder, and marvelled as my waistline grew smaller and my trips to the supermarket took longer – having to make all my meals from scratch took up a lot more of my time than ready meals used to. I thought I’d hit the jackpot. I thought I had struck upon the golden diet that would “cure” my eating disorder and allow me to live the rest of my life slimly and cool.
It hadn’t occurred to me that reducing my portions and eating at a sloth’s pace – the idea being that I’d get “fuller” quicker, would leave me booking an appointment at my local GP after suffering with heart palpitations. She strongly advised I “gain some weight”. This experience scared me out of ever taking intuitive eating seriously…until I met Laura Thomas.
Laura is an AfN Registered Nutritionist and Certified Intuitive Eating Counsellor, and a soon to be an author to a book titled Just Eat It: How to Get Your Shit Together Around Food – sick. She discusses intuitive eating as the idea that YOU make the decisions about what YOUR body needs. Thankfully, she doesn’t promote dressing up yet another diet plan as a way to make money. She’s what you’d call, an “ethical” influencer (SHOCK!), and was kind enough to walk me through all the questions I had about how to eat more intuitively, and WTF that means.
What does it mean to eat intuitively?
Intuitive eating means eating according to your own physical and psychological needs; paying attention to your hunger and fullness cues, pleasure and satisfaction from what you eat, and how food makes you feel in terms of stamina, energy, and general wellbeing.
Why do so many people, namely women, struggle with this?
LAWRD, so many reasons. If I had to pick just one though, I’d probably say diet culture: diet culture teaches us to be fearful of our appetites, to eat food that isn’t satisfying or filling, to eat tiny portions like little birds. Essentially diet culture undermines the innate trust we have in our bodies to regulate our own food intake and convinces us that we need an app or a diet plan or some kind of aspirational lifestyle guru telling us what to eat because we’re too untrustworthy to figure it out on our own. Diet culture teaches us that food is either poison or medicine (it’s neither unless you have an allergy, or the food has spoiled). It also teaches us that to be worthy of love/respect/success we need to look a certain way and rots our own sense of self-worth. I could go on but essentially,
Intuitive eating is a framework for giving you your power back, taking the worry and anxiety out of eating, and freeing up headspace to focus on what’s really important to you.
How do we eat intuitively?
BECOME A DIET CULTURE DROP OUT
The first step is to recognise that diet culture has done a number on us and begin to undo the damage by calling out diet BS when you see it and get MAD AS HELL about the lies we’ve been sold. Recognise that diets don’t work long term and are associated with negative health consequences (mental and physical). If you feel up for it, get rid of all the tools that are keeping us tethered to diet culture and diet mentality (see ya, FitBit).
HONOUR YOUR HUNGER
AKA, eat when you’re hungry. Sounds pretty obvious, but I’ve worked with a lot of women who skip meals and consider it an accomplishment to go to bed hungry. This is about respecting your normal biological drive to eat; for energy, for nourishment, and for pleasure. This principle is about learning to recognise what hunger feels like in your body (not just a rumbly belly!) and not feeling afraid or guilty for feeding your body.
CHALLENGE THE FOOD POLICE
You know that voice in your head that says ‘you shouldn’t eat that’ or bargains with you to work out in order to ‘earn’ a meal. That’s the food police and he’s a little bitch. This step is all about neutralising your attitudes towards food and disarming other people’s charged language around food.
MAKE PEACE WITH FOOD
This principle is about letting go of ‘food rules’. Legalising ALL FOOD. Yup, even gluten, dairy, and sugar. This is a scary principle for a lot of people, but so important for learning to trust your body again; learning to trust you aren’t ‘addicted’ to a food, learning that you won’t only eat pizza and cookies for the rest of your life.
FEEL YOUR FULLNESS
Another obvious sounding principle but when was the last time you stopped eating when you were comfortably full? If you’ve been in the dieting mentality for a long time it’s probably likely that you routinely overeat because you know it’s going to be a long time before you’re allowed to eat again. In intuitive eating, no foods are off limit and there are no rules to follow about when and what to eat, so you can stop eating when you’re comfortably full safe in the knowledge that if you begin to feel hungry again later on – food is available and it’s OK to eat.
DISCOVER THE SATISFACTION FACTOR
Food (or lack thereof) is not punishment – it’s meant to taste good and be enjoyed. Sad rice crackers, zero calorie noodles, and other diet foods are probably not going to leave you satisfied. You know yourself that if something says it’s low calorie/fat/sugar you probably eat 10x more. If you just had the real deal, you’d feel satisfied with a lot less. This is where we find the satisfaction factor in the food we eat.
EATING YOUR EMOTIONS
By this point in your intuitive eating journey, you’ll begin to have more neutral feelings towards food and can start to get your head around the fact that eating your emotions isn’t actually the worst thing in the world and can sometimes be a useful coping mechanism or your body’s way of letting you know that you’re in a funk. This is where we’ll start to develop more appropriate ways to soothe, comfort, and care for ourselves, without face planting into a bucket of Ben & Jerry’s.
RESPECT YOUR BODY
This is where things start to get exciting and you’ll begin the totally radical act of LOVING YOURSELF. Stop determining your value based on what you’ve eaten or how much you’ve moved. This incorporates messages of weight-inclusive health. And if loving yourself is too much, you can think about cultivating body respect and neutrality and learning to be OK with where you are.
INTUITIVE MOVEMENT
In the same way that we’ve been disconnected from eating, we rely more and more on workout programmes, fitness trackers, and weight to determine how we feel physically. Intuitive movement is about finding joy in activity – whether it’s taking a low impact yoga class, going for a walk, or training for a marathon – finding activity that doesn’t leave you drained and exhausted is a critical part of the process.
GENTLE NUTRITION
This is all about nourishing your body with foods that taste good and leave you feeling awesome. We also reinforce the idea that you don’t have to eat a ‘perfect’ diet to be healthy and that nutrition isn’t all or nothing. Dichotomising foods as good or bad isn’t helpful; being gentle and kind and understanding that play foods still have nutritional properties – and even when they don’t they still nourish the soul!
How long does it take, on average, to learn to eat in this way?
Everyone is totally different, some people take to it really quickly, but if you’ve been in a bad place with food for a long time, it can take longer; that doesn’t mean that you won’t get there, it just means learning to be compassionate with yourself and giving yourself the time to let the process run its course. If you’ve done any therapy or CBT, that can really help too, as the two can be complementary.
How do you avoid adopting a plan for intuitive eating as a disordered eater, without using it as a method for restriction?
This can be challenging for people who have come from a place of food restriction; whether physically or emotionally, with IE getting turned into the hunger and fullness diet – but that’s not really intuitive eating. Intuitive eating is messy and sometimes we over eat and sometimes we under eat and sometimes we eat our emotions and that’s all OK; that’s normal. But in order to get to a place where you’re comfortable being flexible in your eating, and really learn to embrace your body’s cues, you need to work through body image issues and get to a place where you’re comfortable with your body being the size it needs to be in order to be healthy; that might be bigger than the size you have in your head. If you’ve suffered from a restrictive eating disorder, you may not even experience regular sensations of hunger and may have early fullness so you might need a meal plan to help you recalibrate. If you have an active eating disorder I’d definitely recommend working with a therapist or EDRD who gets IE. Otherwise, working with a certified intuitive eating counsellor or a nutrition professional who has specific IE training; be very wary of anyone trying to sell mindful or intuitive eating for weight loss as that’s not the point at all.
What mistakes do people make when they try to eat intuitively?
I see a lot of influencers who don’t really understand the principles of IE give people the impression that you can just ‘do’ IE without any guidance or support. The problem there is that people jump in head first thinking they can eat “whatever, whenever”, that can feel incredibly overwhelming if you’re coming from a place of disordered eating. Remember that IE is a specific intervention, with a series of principles that are designed to be worked through. Don’t try and skip them or rush to the end. Let the process run it’s course. I also encourage people not to think of intuitive eating as a ‘goal’ but as a set of tools to help you have a healthier relationship to food, so you can focus on the things that really matter to you.
What can eating intuitively do for your quality of life?
In terms of the scientific evidence around intuitive eating, we know that IE can help reduce cognitive rigidity (black and white thinking) and can increase positive affect. Intuitive eaters also have less dietary restraint (restriction) and simultaneously less disinhibition (binging). In other words, it can help people break out of the restrict/binge cycle. People also have less food rules which makes them feel less batshit around food. From clinical experience, intuitive eating gives people freedom to stop worrying about food and body image and focus on things that really matter in their lives.