What does intuitive eating mean?

For most of us, we were raised on three square meals a day - breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And sometimes if you are really hungry you may eat a snack in between meals or top off your dinner with dessert.

While there is nothing wrong with traditional mealtimes, it doesn’t leave room for much variation. That’s where intuitive eating comes in. Instead of being locked in to eating at certain times - even if you might not be hungry - intuitive eating is all about trusting your intuition and listening to your body’s hunger cues for when to start eating and when to start.

How often have you been told growing up to “eat everything on your plate, there are people in the world that are starving!” Of course we don’t want to be wasteful, but our society has ingrained certain ways of thinking into our minds that disconnect us from our own internal wisdom of what works best for you and your body.

The main principles of intuitive eating

Intuitive eating is not a new concept. In fact, nutrition experts Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch wrote a book called Intuitive Eating in 1995 outlining this very concept and how it can heal our relationships with food and our bodies. At its core, intuitive eating has 10 basic principles that make this approach what it is today:

1. Listen to your hunger

The first and most important principle of intuitive eating is recognizing when you are hungry and honoring that hunger by eating. Your body is biologically hardwired to feel hungry when it is in need of fuel. By ignoring that innate sense, you are punishing your body and increasing your risk of overeating later. 

2. Reject diet dogma

A lot of our food choices are centered around weight - whether we are trying to lose weight or make sure we don’t gain any more. It’s no wonder that we have such a huge diet culture in our society and an obsession with different ways of eating, avoiding entire food groups, counting calories, and even eating disorders like anorexia and orthorexia.

Instead of getting caught up in what the latest diet fads are, intuitive eating shifts focus away from that group mentality and onto your own personal health journey and goals. After all, in functional medicine we recognize that what works for one person doesn’t always work for the next. Intuitive eating embraces that concept in its entirety and encourages you to eat what makes you feel good - not what a diet says will make you feel good.

3. Discover true satisfaction

Are you really paying attention to what you are eating? Yes, food keeps us alive, but it is also meant to be enjoyed and savored. Why else are so many of life’s milestones and celebrations centered around food? Intuitive eating understands that food can be both a source of enjoyment and fuel. It also encourages us to slow down while we are eating which helps us actually feel satisfied and recognize when we are actually full.

4. Make peace with food

Food is not the enemy. Instead, intuitive eating celebrates food as the powerful, nutritious fuel that it is to provide energy for your body. Intuitive eating doesn’t view certain foods or food groups as “bad” and “good”. By recognizing that food is meant to nourish your body and provide personal enjoyment, you’ll be giving yourself permission to eat and will be able to make peace with every food that you put on your plate.

5. Find healthy coping mechanisms

Emotional eating is real for almost every one of us. Whether that is out of sadness, anxiety, boredom, fear, or punishment, we can all have the tendency to eat mindlessly, overeat, or not eat at all based on how we are feeling in a moment.

Intuitive eating encourages you to pay attention to your emotional triggers and your response when it comes to food. Then you can begin to resolve the root cause of why you turn to food to soothe your emotions and come up with healthier coping mechanisms like movement, counseling, or mindfulness.

6. Find movement you enjoy

Oftentimes, we restrict ourselves from eating due to the old “calories in, calories out” mentality. This can cause us to over exercise in order to justify the food we’ve eaten. However, once we have truly mastered  intuitive eating we’ll stop punishing ourselves with movement because we have found peace with what we are eating and how much we are eating. Then, finding daily exercise that you enjoy will become less about the results and more about wanting to celebrate and honor your body with movement.

7. Honor your health

There should be a grace and lightness to wellness. Intuitive eating knows that you don’t become chronically ill or obese from one snack or meal. It’s about the collective choices that you make over time. But when you start to listen to your body, you’ll be giving your body exactly what it needs without overthinking it. And if you do eat something out of alignment with your body’s needs? It’s going to be ok. Give yourself grace and pick right back up where you left off!

8. Challenge the food police

Years of diet culture can have us believing some crazy strict lies surrounding calories and certain foods. Instead of accepting these thoughts as “normal”, challenge how they apply to you and throw anything out the window that isn’t serving you and your health goals.

9. Love your body

As I always say, you can’t heal a body you hate! Love the body you are in and honor it for all that it does for you. Understanding that not everyone is going to look the exact same is the first step in loving yourself and using food to fuel your unique body composition.

10. Recognize what fullness feels like

Eating on the go or cleaning our plates hasn’t taught our bodies to recognize when we are full. Intuitive eating wants us to slow down and learn what being full feels like so that we can eat exactly what our body is craving - nothing more and nothing less.

The benefits of intuitive eating

Intuitive eating is not just another trendy wellness fad. Researches have shown that by applying intuitive eating principles people showed:

• Better cholesterol levels
• Improved body image and self-esteem
• Reduced stress
• Increased satisfaction
• Less eating disorders
• Enhanced metabolism

While more studies can be done on this approach, what we have seen so far goes to show just how beneficial this can be for your mental, physical, and emotional health.

Bringing it all together

As a functional medicine expert, I understand the importance of intuitive eating and bioindividuality. I’ve seen many of my patients take their health to the next level once they learned to listen to their bodies.

I also have seen just how impactful certain wellness tools like fasting can be on a person’s health. And while it may seem like fasting and intuitive eating couldn’t be more polar opposite, these two concepts actually inspired my NYT-bestselling book, Intuitive Fasting.

In my clinic I’ve experienced far too often how following a traditional schedule of three meals every day can cause metabolic inflexibility, which can easily lead to inflammation, weight gain, fatigue and chronic health problems. For millions of years, our bodies have actually functioned best with periodic times of fasting.

In my book, I discuss how you can take control of your hunger and make intermittent fasting intuitive. By getting in touch with your instinctive eating patterns, you’ll become healthier and more mindful about how and when you eat.  Intuitive Fasting will show how to finally find metabolic flexibility – and once you've reached metabolic flexibility, you can intuitively trust your body to function at optimal capacity, whether you've eaten six minutes ago or six hours ago.

If you want to finally feel aligned with your body and intuition, we can help create a personalized roadmap to achieve your intuitive eating goals. Start by scheduling a telehealth consultation today.

As one of the first functional medicine telehealth clinics in the world, we provide webcam health consultations for people around the globe. 

Photo: unplash.com