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.
It is rapidly gaining popularity as evidence mounts for its physical and mental health benefits - and particularly now society is starting to acknowledge that dieting is unsustainable and rarely leads to the results promised, and that diet culture is more harmful than healthful.
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 dynamic process and a life-long practice.
WHY EAT INTUITIVELY?
I believe that everyone can benefit in some way from taking an intuitive approach to their eating habits. However, for the many clients who come to me stuck in a constant battle to manage their weight through food (and exercise), working with Intuitive Eating as a process is a key component of their journey back to a more peaceful, connected, ‘normal’ way of eating.
Intuitive Eating helps you step into a new mindset around food and develop lifelong skills that empower you to eat with more ease, to rebuild trust with food and your body, and take care of your whole self - body and mind.
As well as promoting a healthier relationship with food, supporting a healthier psychological attitude and being protective against eating disorders, 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 to hear this 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, typically provide impersonal nutritional advice based on ‘food rules’, macro/calorie counting/points systems and unnecessary food restriction. Followers can often make a short term impact on body fat reduction, but the trade-off can be costly.
Dieting undermines a person’s innate ability to listen and respond to their body’s own natural hunger and fullness signals. And when they start disconnecting from their own food-body intuition it can make them feel like they can’t trust themselves around food - which keeps them believing they ‘just need to stick to a plan’.
It is now widely recognised that focussing on intentional weight loss and yoyo dieting can set the scene for a feast-famine or binge-restrict mentality and impaired metabolism, which often leads to increased body weight overtime. Dieting is a form of restrictive eating also recognised as a potential catalyst for eating disorders.
What EXACTLY IS Intuitive Eating
Intuitive Eating is an empowering long-term move away from following diets and the narrow pursuit of weight-control. Instead of dependence on external ‘rules’, it’s about learning to eat mindfully, flexibly and in accordance with your body’s natural appetite and physiological cues. Essentially, it’s 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.
Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch who developed the approach have laid-out the ten basic principles, below:
Are you an Intuitive Eater?
INTUITIVE EATING AT GUT REACTION
A Registered Nutritional Therapy Practitioner and Certified Intuitive Eating Counsellor, my own philosophy and approach is greatly informed by Intuitive Eating and the latest in body image research, which is integrated into my work with clients to varying degrees, informed by the individual client’s needs.
Intuitive Eating pairs really well with my collaborative, non-judgemental approach to nutrition that aims to help clients make informed choices that feel nourishing and sustainable while respecting their body’s unique needs and preferences, promoting health alongside satisfaction and taste, encouraging dietary variety and achieving a healthy balance over time.
I want my clients to gain a level of nutritional knowledge that is supportive for them - but importantly, I want them to learn how to be more attuned to their body’s needs, know how to trust themselves around food and feel confident that they can meet their own needs for nourishment.
WEIGHT AND BODY NEUTRALITY
Intuitive Eating is inherently a weight-neutral approach. This means that at Gut Reaction I won’t sell you an untenable promise of weight loss or reaching a certain number on the scales. We won’t use body weight as the focal point of nutritional therapy or coaching, or rely on it as measure of your success. Instead you will receive holistic, weight-neutral support.
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. However, increasing evidence is surfacing that the importance of weight in health has been overemphasised in our medical systems. What’s more, the weight-centred approach relies on prescriptive diet rules and restriction and does not improve health for the majority of individuals across the weight continuum. As you’ve just read, it may cause more physical and emotional harm to individuals in the long term.
In contrast, at Gut Reaction we prioritise your relationship with food - and may also choose to work with non-weight-based markers of health and vitality such as improving gut health, balancing blood sugar levels, enhancing energy, supporting mental clarity and fostering emotional regulation.
Many of my clients’ struggles with food go hand in hand with a struggle with their body image, so another key aspect of our work together is supporting you in cultivating a peaceful acceptance and respect for your body how it is today.
However, I realise you might be reading this and still wondering what a weight-neutral, Intuitive Eating approach might mean for your body weight! The honest answer is I don’t know - everyone is different - but what I can say is that through the practice of Intuitive Eating you can create an environment for you and your body to thrive in the long-run, and as a side-effect discover the natural healthy weight range for your body.
Ready to reduce stress around food, reset your eating habits, and reclaim your vitality?
My Food and Body Confidence Programmes are based on Intuitive Eating: