Article at a Glance
- Intuitive eating focuses on 10 principles that honor both physical and mental health.
- Studies have shown positive impacts of intuitive eating like improved body image and lab values.
Developed by two registered dietitians, intuitive eating (IE) promotes an eating pattern that focuses on cues from your body rather than the outside world.
This means an individual trusts their body to know when they are hungry, when they are full, and what foods will best nourish them at that time.
There are no restrictions or recommendations as to what should be eaten or when. It is a sustainable, anti-diet approach to eating that relies on your body to know what is best.
10 Principles of Intuitive Eating
IE is based on the following 10 principles that honor both physical and mental health:
- Reject the Diet Mentality: Diet culture often promotes ideals that are toxic to our minds and bodies. The hyper fixation on what or how much we eat can cause us to stop listening to our body’s natural needs.
- Honor Your Hunger: Trust your body to know when it needs nourishment. When we ignore hunger cues, we often end up overeating.
- Make Peace with Food: Allow yourself the freedom to eat. By restricting certain foods, we actually exacerbate intense cravings. If we give in, we end up feeling guilty rather than satisfied. It’s an endless cycle.
- Challenge the Food Police: Fight back against the voice in your head that labels food or eating behaviors as “good” or “bad.” It’s okay to break these arbitrary rules and instead focus on how certain foods make you feel.
- Discover the Satisfaction Factor: Eating is one of life’s greatest pleasures. It is okay to choose foods just because they bring you joy.
- Feel Your Fullness: Check in with your body while you’re eating. Your body will signal when you have gotten what you need from your meal.
- Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness: We often eat for reasons other than hunger, like boredom, sadness, or stress. Work to find the root cause of these issues rather than using food as a temporary fix.
- Respect Your Body: The size and shape of our body is a combination of both lifestyle choices and genetics. All bodies are beautiful and should be treated as such.
- Movement – Feel the Difference: Find a form of movement that you love. Reflect on why you love it and the positive feelings it brings you.
- Honor Your Health – Gentle Nutrition: It is impossible to eat perfectly all the time. Instead, strive for a variety of foods that provide both nutrition and pleasure. Here we can integrate external information, like evidence-based guidelines, with our body’s cues.
But, Does it Work?
It may sound too good to be true, but IE has been shown to be beneficial to our minds and bodies. IE has been positively correlated with numerous psychological factors including a more positive body image, improved self-esteem, and overall well-being.
Furthermore, it has been shown to lower the incidence of dieting and disordered eating patterns and increase the pleasure from eating.
A literature review found that intuitive eaters, especially women, do have a lower body mass index (BMI) than their non-intuitive eater counterparts. The same review found evidence to suggest that intuitive eating does help with weight maintenance, particularly in obese, Caucasian women.
The researchers found typical diets result in a more drastic weight loss initially that is often followed by weight regain. Intuitive eaters often maintain their weight loss for longer periods of time.
Intuitive eating may have a beneficial impact on health indicators other than weight. This includes measures like blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and blood glucose.
Evidence has shown that intuitive eating can raise levels of LDL (good cholesterol) while lowering levels of HDL (bad cholesterol). Reviews were mixed when it came to the impacts on blood pressure, but intuitive eating has been found to improve glucose control in type 1 diabetics.
Live Complete Takeaways
It is clear the benefits that intuitive eating provides to both our minds and our bodies, but is it the right choice for you? If you are over traditional dieting and want to cultivate a healthy relationship with food, give intuitive eating a try.
Sources:
- Carrad, et al. (2021). Body image concerns and intuitive eating in older women. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195666321001823#bib28
- Keirns, et al. (2019). Intuitive eating, objective weight status and physical indicators of health. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/osp4.359
- Van Dyke, Nina and Drinkwater, EJ (2014) Review Article Relationships between intuitive eating and health indicators: Literature review. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23962472/
Wheeler, et al. (2016). Intuitive eating is associated with glycaemic control in adolescents with type I diabetes mellitus. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26403933/#article-details
