Dieting trends come and go, but most people who follow these fads find themselves back where they started — possibly with even more pounds to lose. In fact, about 80% of people who lose weight eventually gain it back, according to the Endocrine Society.
And it’s well-researched that your body weight going up and down — aka yo-yo dieting — can harm you mentally and physically. With so many finding themselves harmed by fad diets, intuitive eating has gained popularity. Intuitive eating will teach you to better listen to what your body needs and be realistic with your health and weight goals.
What is intuitive eating?
Intuitive eating is an approach to eating that has no restrictions on what you can eat or how much. Instead, it’s rooted in 10 principles designed to help you meet your nutritional and movement needs and learn to listen to and appreciate your body. Done right, intuitive eating can change a person’s relationship with food to be more about feeling good in your body and less about judgement.
Intuitive eating is pretty much the opposite of a diet because there’s no counting calories, eliminating foods or watching the numbers on the scale. Intuitive eating is the brainchild of registered dietitian Evelyn Tribole and nutrition therapist Elyse Resch, who wrote the 1995 book “Intuitive Eating,” the first time the phrase was used.
The 10 principles of intuitive eating are:
Read on to learn more about the principles of intuitive eating.
The 10 principles of intuitive eating
These 10 principles of intuitive eating are intended to help you reframe your relationship to food, your body and exercise.
Principle #1: Reject the diet mentality
This principle encourages intuitive eaters to move away from the mindset that you need to restrict yourself to be healthy or punish yourself to lose weight, and to question why you feel certain ways about food. For some people, that may mean ditching the goal of weight loss altogether.
That said, diet culture is so ingrained in society, especially for women, so it can take years to learn to practice this principle. “Rejecting diet mentality is an ongoing lifetime habit,” said Willow Jarosh, a registered dietitian and certified intuitive eating counselor.
Luckily, intuitive eating doesn’t have a timeline by which you need to learn to principles, so you can take as long as you need.
Principle #2: Honor your hunger
Have you ever watched a toddler at a birthday party put down a partially eaten cupcake and walk away? That’s a perfect example of honoring hunger. Everyone is born knowing when they feel hungry or full, but as you age, you learn to follow external cues, such as being told to clean your plate, staying within a set calorie level for weight loss, or feeling like certain foods are scarce because they’ve been deemed off limits, leading to overeating those foods. After a while, it’s common to stop listening to your body. That’s why you may need to relearn these internal cues and how to be mindful of what and how much you eat.
You may be especially hungry on days you exercise or don’t sleep well, and the intuitive eating approach helps you tune into this and respond to what your body needs. At the same time, there are times you may be less hungry–say, after a late, filling lunch–and the idea is to eat less at these times because you’re aware that your appetite is diminished. When you’re able to notice your hunger and respond appropriately with food that nourishes your body, it can be a powerful tool.
Principle #3: Make peace with food
A core tenet of intuitive eating is that there’s no such thing as “good” or “bad” food (hence why you don’t cut anything out in its entirety if you don’t want to). Food is an important part of life, both for enjoyment and connection, as well as physical sustainment. Intuitive eating encourages you to be friends with your food.
If you’ve restricted certain foods in the past, you might notice you overeat when you break your “rules” by eating that food. When you practice intuitive eating and truly allow yourself to eat anything, you’ll learn which foods you like, how they feel in your body, and how to enjoy a range of both nourishing and less healthy foods in a manner that feels good.
Principle #4: Challenge the food police
You likely have someone in your life who comments on what you eat or is a big calorie counter. Perhaps you’ve internalized these comments or behaviors to the point that you’re now policing your own food intake. With intuitive eating, you’ll silence your inner food critic to rebuild your relationship with food.
Many of the food rules your inner critic focuses on are rooted in black-or-white thinking, but this all-or-nothing approach to food isn’t helpful. So, next time you find yourself thinking, “I shouldn’t eat pasta,” or, “I can’t have pizza because I’m on a diet,” try to catch yourself and reframe your thought to something more logical and helpful. For instance, is it really true that you can never eat pasta or pizza? Of course not! You might reframe this to something like, “I know that when I don’t let myself eat pasta (or pizza), I end up overeating, so I’m going to enjoy some until I’m comfortably full.”
Principle #5: Discover the satisfaction factor
Have you ever found yourself staring down the empty bottom of a tub of ice cream and wondering how you got there? That’s because we spend a lot of time checked out from the signals our bodies are sending us — including signals that tell us when we’ve had enough.
This principle is all about pausing while we eat to check in with how full we are and learning how different foods affect our fullness levels. This helps you choose nourishing meals with staying power and enables you to eat within the natural limit of your appetite, whether you’re eating kale or cake.
Principle #6: Feel your fullness
This principle is a reminder that tasting something delicious promotes a feeling of pleasure. Many of us have been tamping down those feelings of satisfaction so long in service to diet culture and the food police that we feel guilt or shame when eating something pleasurable, or we eat less pleasurable foods because we think we should.
This principle encourages you to get back in touch with the pleasure of eating and to notice when you’ve had enough, not according to some prescribed methodology, but because you feel an internal sense of satisfaction.
Principle #7: Cope with your emotions with kindness
Eating can be emotional. Sometimes we try to feed our feelings with food, and sometimes we beat ourselves up for how we relate to food and hunger. This principle encourages us to develop tools to cope with our emotions without food.
It’s natural to turn to food when you’ve had a rough day or feel burnt out, but it’s important to examine the reasons you may be doing this. For starters, it helps to develop a consistent self-care regimen to ensure that you’re sleeping well, nourishing yourself properly, and coping with stress in healthy ways.
Then, identify your emotional triggers, or the reasons that you eat when you aren’t hungry, such as anxiety, excitement, loneliness or boredom. Emotional eating can keep you from reaching a healthier weight — and it can also keep you unhappy because it doesn’t actually fix the things causing your feelings.
To identify the difference between emotional hunger and physical hunger, it can be helpful to pause and ask yourself questions like “Am I hungry?” or “What am I asking food to do for me?”
Principle #8: Respect your body
In our appearance, thin-obsessed world, it’s hard not to compare our bodies to beauty ideals. But our bodies are inherently valuable and this principle requires us to look past what society values and develop a sense of gratitude for all our bodies do for us. They may appear to us as imperfect, but all bodies deserve our respect, and we owe it to ourselves to offer it.
Principle #9: Movement — feel the difference
Have you ever wanted to burn off those French fries you ate? Many of us turn to exercise as a form of punishment. These reasons for exercise do a disservice to us and to movement!
Exercise and movement are one of our most natural and innate sources of joy. That’s not hyperbole — exercising instructs our bodies to make the hormones and neurotransmitters that make us feel happy. Even a little bit of movement can improve our mood — but only if we’re paying attention. This principle invites us to notice the effects of movement on how we feel instead of torturing ourselves with punishing workouts we don’t enjoy to reach unattainable appearance goals.
Principle #10: Honor your health with gentle nutrition
This principle encourages us to focus on how food makes us feel. Sure, ice cream tastes good going down, but how does it feel to polish off a pint? Do you feel bloated or lethargic? How about that enormous salad you ate at lunch? Did you get hungry soon after eating?
A gentle approach to nutrition allows for both luxuries and missteps. Of course, we all need to meet our bodies’ daily nutritional requirements, but none of us does it perfectly, and expecting perfection sets us up for disappointment. Instead, we can allow for flexibility and change in our eating and strive to meet our nutritional goals without a punitive attitude.
Can intuitive eating help you lose weight?
What if you want to enjoy this healthy and flexible relationship with food and your body — and lose weight? Can intuitive eating help? Intuitive eating isn’t designed to promote weight loss, and in fact, principle one discourages intentional weight loss.
Setting that aside, the answer is a firm maybe. In a 2019 study, researchers looked at 10 studies that tracked the eating habits of 1,491 participants. Some used intuitive eating principles and some followed traditional diets. What the researchers found was that intuitive eaters lost about the same amount of weight as people on other diets. But participants who ate intuitively did lose more weight than individuals who didn’t change their eating habits at all.
Meanwhile, a 2024 study looked at the intuitive eating habits among 1,821 participants to study the impact of intuitive eating on body weight, maladaptive eating behaviors (such as rewarding yourself with a cookie for finishing your chores), and overeating frequency. The researchers found that women with high intuitive eating scores were more likely to maintain their weight compared to those with low intuitive eating scores, who were more likely to gain weight. The researchers concluded that intuitive eating habits should be encouraged to help reduce behaviors, like emotional eating and overeating that contribute to weight gain.
Basically, intuitive eating does not necessarily lead to weight loss, but it can, and it can also help you avoid weight gain. That makes sense, since weight loss isn’t the goal of intuitive eating.
Benefits of intuitive eating
One of the biggest benefits of intuitive eating is the mindset shift. Proponents of intuitive eating believe that the very idea of dieting traps you into a pattern of all-or-nothing thinking — you’re either on a diet or off, ate well or ate poorly, were good for going to the gym or bad for skipping it. These thought patterns are pervasive and, according to Jarosh, we all live with diet culture in our atmosphere.
“We’re told we need to look a certain way to be valuable in society,” said Jarosh. “There’s a whole lot of pressure put on us on a daily basis.” Instead, intuitive eating strongly discourages efforts to lose weight. It’s about respecting the body you have and trying to feel good about yourself at any size, shape or weight.
If you believe that healthy weight management is different from dieting — as I do — intuitive eating principles may be helpful. Healthy weight management is about finding a sane and sustainable weight and establishing a healthy relationship with food and your body. This involves learning a set of skills to help guide decisions around your eating and lifestyle habits.
And there is solid clinical evidence that those who practice intuitive eating do develop healthy psychological characteristics. One recent study determined that intuitive eating is correlated with better mental health and a reduced risk of disordered eating. Some of the benefits that another study found were: positive body image, increased self esteem and a greater sense of wellbeing.
It’s worth noting that those kind of mental health boons can really make an impact on a person’s quality of life. In fact, some studies suggest that body image is a major part of overall life satisfaction.
The bottom line
Whether or not you can use intuitive eating principles to lose weight really boils down to what impact it would have on your emotional health. “If your goal is totally related to your weight,” said Jarosh, “then it can prevent you from exploring sustainable ways to be healthier.”
If weight loss feels stressful or punitive, or prevents you from practicing healthier behaviors — even when they don’t produce weight loss — or if you find yourself engaging in any form of disordered behavior around food or exercise, then it may be a good idea to go with the traditional intuitive eating mindset and reject the notion of weight loss entirely.
If you can abide by the notion that healthy weight management isn’t about producing eye-popping results, then the skills you gain from intuitive eating may be able to help you reach a healthier weight — whatever that may be for your individual body. Instead of being either on or off of a diet, managing your weight means taking care of yourself by developing healthy habits — including eating well —but also enjoying certain foods just because you like them.
This article was originally published on TODAY.com
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