"Intuitive Eating" Guidelines for Balanced Wellness

Weight loss and dieting comprise a multibillion-dollar global industry. Yet, as the World Health Organization reports, “worldwide obesity has nearly tripled since 1975” and “in 2016, more than 1.9 billion adults, 18 years and older, were overweight. Of these over 650 million were obese.” Something is not working here. In fact, some research has shown that dieting may work against our goals of maintaining healthy bodies.

In fact, a 2015 study based on an Australian sample found that the odds of obesity were actually higher for those who had dieted in the past year than among those who hadn't—and actually increased the more regularly a person dieted.

In the face of the failure of diet culture, the philosophy of intuitive eating has gained increasing popularity in the last 30 years.

Intuitive eating is a holistic approach to nutrition developed by two registered dieticians, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, who published their findings and philosophy in their 1995 book Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program that Works. The widely acclaimed dietician authors call the concept a “self-care eating framework rooted in science and informed by clinical experience.”

Part of what makes Tribole and Resch’s approach different than dieting is how it is relaxed when it comes to implementation. While it steers clear of strict rules, the philosophy offers some general guidelines about how to approach eating in a balanced, soul-serving way.

Honor your hunger

This step, according to Tribole, is about keeping your body “biologically fed with adequate energy” and avoiding “excessive hunger.” Not only does excessive hunger lead to “weight gain over time,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), it also increases the likelihood of negative emotions like “feeling deprived and distracted or distressed.” Hunger likewise causes blood sugar problems, brain fog, nutrient deficiencies. grumpiness, weakness, headaches, and difficulty concentrating. Honoring your hunger, then, is about giving “yourself unconditional permission to eat.”

Brigitte Zietlin, nutritional counselor and founder of a wellness retreat, advises ranking your hunger “on a scale from 1 to 10” so you never get too hungry. “If you’re feeling something between an 8 to 10, you’ll overeat . . . . At five to seven, you’re feeling hungry enough to eat but still in control of how much you’re eating.”

Make peace with food

Related to the idea of rejecting diet culture is the practice of making peace with food. The fact is, each new dieting trend has its own list of “good” and “bad” foods, and after decades of diet culture almost no food groups have been spared some censure.

As Virginia Sole, author of The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image and Guilt in America, observes, “Our catalogue of ‘bad’ foods has been getting bigger and bigger—gluten! red meat! anything in a package!—until we’re apologizing for eating, period.”

Colleen Christensen, a registered dietitian nutritionist and “food freedom” expert, details her own battle to make peace with food, sharing: “I was over my head in diet culture madness (all of that low carb, low calorie, don’t eat after 8 p.m. madness) I knew I couldn’t live the rest of my life that way.”

But how, exactly, can we make peace with foods that diet culture has been making war on for decades?

Christensen used “mantras, affirmations, and journaling” to rewire her attitude toward certain foods like bread and pasta. Among her recommended affirmations are “I will treat my body with respect and nourish it with what it asks for,” and “I give my body permission to change.” Another practice Christensen recommends is working to get past your own personal food rules in a systematic fashion. She focused on letting go of one “food rule” at a time, so as not to trigger her desire to restrict her eating—and because it helped her truly appreciate the food she had previously labeled as “bad.”

Cope with your emotions with kindness

The phrase eating your emotions is one that hits home for many women. We turn to ice cream and pizza and other favorite comfort foods when the going gets tough: a painful menstruation, a sad breakup, an exceptionally hard day at work or with the kids.

As a safeguard against perpetuating a cycle of overeating in time of duress, nutritionists including Tribole and Resche commonly advocate for increased self-awareness, urging health-minded people to consider possible aggravating factors that can lead to emotional eating.

Do you retreat from social support during times of emotional need? Do you not engage in activities that might otherwise relieve stress, sadness, and so on? Do you struggle to distinguish between physical and emotional hunger? Do you use negative self-talk?

Learning to eliminate patterns of behavior that increase negative emotion, and implementing other healthy practices to deal with negative emotions and stressful situations will make you less reliant on food as a source of emotional comfort.

Movement: feel the difference

Movement is an essential building block of a healthy, balanced lifestyle. The benefits of staying active are virtually endless: improved health, heightened productivity, mental well being, weight control, better sleep, to name but a few. But you don’t need to take up running or kickboxing to reap these benefits. You just need to not be sedentary.

Our historically new sedentary lifestyles, according to the World Health Organization, “increase all causes of mortality, double the risk of cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and obesity, and increase the risks of colon cancer, high blood pressure, osteoporosis, lipid disorders, depression and anxiety.”

Luckily, there are simple ways to incorporate movement into one’s daily routine without disrupting one’s routine. Some highly effective techniques include using a standing desk when possible, taking walks during free time, parking far from entrances, skipping the elevator, walking on a treadmill while watching TV, and taking up hobbies like gardening. As Resch and Tribole refreshingly put it, “just get active and feel the difference."

By making health about feeling good, rather than abiding by strict rules, one’s attitude toward the role of health in daily life can actually become enjoyable.

Speaking for myself, I now look forward to daily walks and yoga as ways to recharge. I put on my noise-blocking headphones, listen to my favorite music or catch up on podcasts, and enjoy the feeling of winter sunshine on my face. As far as food is concerned, I now like to make a kind of game out of learning about nutrition, exploring a different food item each week, and incorporating it into recipes.

For me, intuitive eating is less about results and more about the art of living—enjoying nutrition and movement as a means to foster a happier, more balanced lifestyle.