Intuitive Eating by Sarah Kilpatrick
In today’s world, we are surrounded by messages of “eat this, not that”, photoshopped standards of beauty, and general confusion about the true role of weight in our overall health and what “diet” is really the best. With so many conflicting messages, many people find themselves lost in their relationships with food and unable to trust their body’s natural signals of hunger and may begin to negatively judge their cravings, hunger levels, and body size.
Intuitive Eating is a weight-neutral, mind-body health approach created by dietitians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, first outlined in their book in 1995. An intuitive eater becomes attuned to their physical and psychological signals and follows these 10 principles:
- Reject the diet mentality
- Honor your hunger
- Make peace with food
- Challenge the food police
- Respect your fullness
- Discover the satisfaction factor
- Honor your feelings without using food
- Respect your body
- Exercise – feel the difference
- Honor your health with gentle nutrition
National Eating Disorders Awareness (NEDA) Week 2019 ran from February 25th – March 3rd. This year’s theme of Come As You Are aimed to shed light on inclusivity in the eating disorder community, highlighting that bodies battling eating disorders come in all shapes, sizes, genders, races, etc. This year during NEDA Week, I had the opportunity to speak to eating disorder dietitian and nutrition therapist Haley Goodrich on her practice with intuitive eating, her nutrition philosophies, and some misconceptions she finds in the health community.
Q: How did you first get introduced to the concept of intuitive eating?
A: I did not hear anything about intuitive eating in my undergrad or didactic program, nor did I learn anything about Health at Every Size (HAES) or eating disorders in general. All of the work I do now, I learned either midway through my internship on my own or after I already became a dietitian. I think just in the nature of the work that I do, I was never into wanting to do weight loss or anything like that with clients, so I think I was searching for something that felt more like me, that was evidence-based. That’s how I stumbled upon it, read the book during my internship, and fell in love. I remember reading it for the first time and thinking, “why isn’t this talked about more?”
Q: How do you incorporate these theories into your practice?
A: Intuitive eating is just a framework or a tool to help our clients no matter why they are coming to our office. No matter what kind of condition they have, no matter who they are, tall, short, thin, larger-bodied, no matter race or gender or sexual orientation, the intuitive eating tool is just meant to help people to connect back to their body and preserve what is already innate in us. So, being able to listen to the different signals our body gives us and honor those, and also to be flexible and be the best caretaker of our body that we possibly can.
I specifically see clinical eating disorders, and there is a phase of eating disorder recovery where not all of the principles can be incorporated yet. There is a handful that can, so we start those right away, as the principle of rejecting the diet mentality, which anybody anywhere can practice. Something like honoring your hunger might be practiced later after we’ve done a bit of healing first; in eating disorders, your hunger and fullness signals can become skewed, but we incorporate more and more of the principles as we heal. In a traditional eating disorder recovery, they become weight restored if necessary and the behaviors become fewer and far between, so they are medically healed, but there’s nowhere to really go after that. Intuitive eating is actually beautiful for eating disorder recovery because we can then bridge people back to an intuitive state.
Q: In your opinion as a dietitian and as an intuitive eater, what do you think everyone should know about intuitive eating and what are some misconceptions you want to be cleared up?
A: The biggest one that I would want people to know is that intuitive eating is meant for anyone, but it is under no circumstance a tool that we use to purposely manipulate body size. It has nothing to do with trying to manipulate size. And it doesn’t mean that someone may or may not change body sizes while working on their relationship with food and becoming an intuitive eater, but it is never the sole purpose or the goal.
The other big one I see out there is the idea of it being the hunger-fullness diet. I’ll get people almost a little bit angry at me sometimes saying “you’re a dietitian, and you’re telling me I can eat whatever I want, whenever I want as long as I’m hungry and stop when I’m full?” I think that’s really watering down the framework quite a bit because that’s not what intuitive eating is. There are certainly times we have to override certain signals, or that we eat even past the point of fullness or we don’t get to eat when we’re hungry. It’s not a hunger-fullness diet, there’s much, much more to it.
How I like to describe it when someone seems offended that a dietitian would be telling people to eat intuitively is that intuitive eating is pairing our mind knowledge, or that gentle nutrition principle, with our body knowledge, and sometimes that’s not just a physical cue, but it’s our emotional needs as well.
Q: How do you recommend introducing and upholding intuitive eating in today’s world of diet culture and body image ideals, especially for teens?
A: There a ton of ways that you can introduce it that really depend on the person who is new to intuitive eating. It will depend on where they are in their relationship with food, as I alluded to earlier. Working with a professional is always a good idea to start implementing these and do it safely, making sure you’re ready to implement certain ones at certain times. Especially for the last two, exercise and gentle nutrition, working with a professional or reading the book is a good place to start.
One of the coolest things about intuitive eating is in understanding and practicing all the principles, an individual has the opportunity to really strengthen their foundation or their bedrock, meaning who they are in the world, what values that they have, what kind of life they want to lead. So when things come the way that doesn’t have to be absorbed by them, maybe their friend is doing Whole30 or their aunt tries keto, they are so solid in their foundation of honoring their body’s needs and rejecting diet culture, their bedrock isn’t really shaken. They could be sitting at lunch and someone starts doing a little body bashing and they realize, “that is not for me.”
Q: What are some warning signs for disordered eating/eating disorders that parents or friends of someone can look out for?
A: I would say a preoccupation with weight, food, calories, or specifics of the minutia of nutrition knowledge because most people never really need to know that. You can tell if someone has possibly a rough relationship with food or their body if they’re doing a lot of talking about their weight or those specific numbers. Other than that, I think about my dad, who has always been an intuitive eater his whole life. I don’t think he even knows how to read the back label on a food, or he would have no idea how many calories are in, say, an apple. So someone like him would never be talking about getting on the scale or the specifics as far as calories or macronutrients, he doesn’t really have that language. Most people can think of someone in their life that matches that description.
For females, losing the menstrual cycle or missing periods, difficulty concentrating, or fuzzy-headed. Some other warning signs can be people who seem to avoid or be uncomfortable eating around others, have food rituals, cut out entire food groups or types of food, frequent dieting, or noticeable weight fluctuations. Someone who has an intuitive relationship with food really stays within their set point range.
An eating disorders screening tool can be found here.
Q: You mentioned set point weight theory, can you explain that a little bit?
A: The gist of it is that all human bodies have a pre-determined or genetic weight range that our bodies function best at. It’s the place where we don’t need to control our weight or have excessive exercise or cut food groups out, we don’t need to do anything, and our body really just stays there. If we have weeks where we eat a little bit more or a little bit less or our activity level differs, our body still knows how to adjust and stay in that range. And we call it a range because it can be up to 5-10 pounds, no one stays right to the decimal with weight.
I will also say that this is not the same as the BMI chart. The BMI chart is very outdated, it’s an old tool that was actually never meant to be used population-wise. It was developed by a statistician in Europe who was just following trends, like height or shoe size. It was never meant to be a determinant of mortality or morbidity. Setpoint range does not necessarily match the BMI chart.
Q: What are some ways to encourage others to eat intuitively without putting on too much pressure?
A: Because we read and absorb so much information from social media, I believe a big help is to filter who you are following. Unfollow accounts that promote restrictive dieting, before and after pictures, those cutting out entire foods or food groups and those that only focus on weight loss. Fill your feed with a diversity of accounts including body positive accounts and intuitive eating experts.
Here are a few to get you started: @hgoodrichrd, @dietitiananna, @immaeatthat, @chr1styharrison, @evelyntribole, @mynameisjessamyn, @bodyposipanda, @themilitantbaker, @rachaelhartleyrd. I would also invite anyone interested in Intuitive Eating to read the book:
Haley Goodrich practices at INSPIRD Nutrition and her contact information can be found at https://www.inspirdnutrition.com/contact. She can also be found on Instagram at @hgoodrichrd.
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