Intuitive eating is probably the part of health & nutrition that I am the most passionate about. Before studying Dietetics in Undergrad, I had never really heard of intuitive eating. For a good chunk of my life, I believed in the diet industry & restriction when it comes to food. This led to an overall really unhealthy mindset on health before I switched over to intuitive eating. Since I started living an intuitive eating lifestyle, my life has completely changed for the better.
Why Start an Intuitive Eating Lifestyle?
If you’re here for a new fad diet to lose 10 lbs in a week, you’re in the wrong place. Intuitive eating is not a fad diet and should not be used as one. It is a lifestyle choice and truly is the definition of how to live a holistically healthy lifestyle.
This isn’t an unrealistic lifestyle choice you will start and then give up a month later (like most diets). This is something you’ll start, begin to feel way better than you have in years, and want to continue for life.
It’s really hard to go back to any other way of living & eating after you’ve started practicing this lifestyle. That being said, it’s not always easy for everyone to start.
The Diet Industry + Why Your Diet Isn’t Working
If you’ve been listening to the diet industry’s lies for years, it can be hard to change your mindset. They’ve convinced many women (and men) that to be happy with yourself, you need to always be skinnier.
This sector of the “health” industry promotes pills, “detox” teas, supplements, drastically under-eating based on your calorie needs, and often malnourishment. They wrongly equate thinness with health and teach you that to be your healthiest self you need to lose weight.
This industry (and its hold on many women’s body image & ideas of themselves) is the cause of many issues. These include eating disorders, mental health issues, and body dysmorphia.
They blame the fact that you haven’t lost weight on YOU and not the fact that diets don’t work. Any time you’re on a diet, especially if you’re drastically undereating & undernourishing, it’s going to cause more harm than good.
By the end of your diet, your body will feel like you’ve been in starvation mode for the past month (or however long the diet was) and you’ll want to eat everything. It’s estimated that 80% of people who lose weight on diets will end up gaining the weight back. Or they will end up gaining even more weight back (source).
How Come You Gain the Weight Back After Dieting?
Have you ever been on a diet and wondered why you were constantly craving fatty, sugary, salty food? Stop blaming yourself and look at the diet itself.
It’s not a lack of motivation or willpower in you like the diet industry wants you to believe. It’s the fact that diets don’t work. When you’re repeatedly undernourishing your body, your body is going to react negatively.
Our bodies naturally want to maintain a level of homeostasis. So being undernourished and not getting enough calories/macronutrients day after day throws us out of whack.
Our bodies react by making us crave calorie-dense (oftentimes less healthy) foods, to make up for the lack of calories. It’s a survival instinct to make sure you’re fed, so your body will always do this to keep you alive.
Due to this, even if you “successfully” complete a diet and eat less than your body needs for a month, your body will want to bounce back to your prior weight. You’ll end up eating way more than normal after the diet is over and binging on high-calorie foods. These binges would never happen if you allowed yourself to eat these foods in the first place.
Starvation Mode
After weeks to months of your body thinking it’s in starvation mode, your body will react negatively. It will want to overdo it on the calories to make sure you stay alive.
Our hunter/gatherer ancestors went through periods of time where they did not have access to enough food. So their bodies put on fat in those situations to make sure they had fuel to live off of.
Our bodies haven’t changed that much since then and we still put on weight after “starvation mode”. It makes sense for us to gain weight if our bodies think we won’t have access to enough food. It’s a survival mechanism and can’t be stopped by having more “will power” or “motivation”.
The diet industry doesn’t want you to know this, because then their entire industry would be a flop. If people realized that you can’t actually lose weight for an extended period of time by going on diets… They would never try them in the first place.
Diets are not fun; they make you moody, unfocused, tired, and constantly thinking about food. If you knew you wouldn’t actually lose weight in the long run, why would you ever put yourself through that? Especially when there’s a much better option that you can actually implement for the rest of your life…
What is Intuitive Eating?
Intuitive eating is a lifestyle choice that involves eating what you want to eat when you’re hungry. To do this, you simply listen to your body’s hunger & fullness cues.
This involves taking it back to the basics of eating (like we did when we were kids). We have to relearn to trust our bodies to know when we are hungry & full.
Hunger & Fullness Hormones
Our bodies naturally know how to manage our hunger, fullness, and satiety. By dieting and not trusting our bodies’ natural regulators, we re-train our brain to ignore these signs. This makes it harder to notice our hunger & fullness hormones’ cues.
The hunger hormone, ghrelin, signals to the brain when we are hungry and need to eat. The satiety hormone, leptin, decreases our appetite and signals to our brain that we are full.
Leptin signals to the brain that our energy stores are full and we do not need to eat anymore. This generally happens after you’ve eaten a balanced meal and feel satisfied (source).
The problem with dieting is that you’re teaching your body not to trust your hunger & fullness cues.
Think about it. When you’re dieting and get hungry, but you’ve already eaten all that you’re “allowed to” eat for the day… You end up ignoring ghrelin (the hunger hormone) and pushing away your feelings of hunger.
After dieting for a while or “yo-yo” dieting (switching from diet to diet repeatedly)… Your sensitivity to your hunger & fullness cues decreases or can become basically nonexistent.
But trust me, this is not something to be worried about! Your hunger & fullness cues will easily come back once you start practicing intuitive eating.
When you are attempting to be aware of your hunger & fullness, these cues naturally start to reappear. They may not come back immediately, but with a bit of time, you will start to gradually feel them again.
How Does Intuitive Eating Fix Your Hunger & Fullness Cues?
It doesn’t necessarily “fix them”, they were there all along (even if they were undetectable). By starting an intuitive eating lifestyle, you’re learning to trust your body again.
Instead of constantly trying to convince yourself you’re full, even when you feel your stomach growling… You’re allowing yourself to trust the hunger and fullness hormones that are there to help regulate your eating.
By trusting your body, your hunger and fullness cues will easily be felt again. It will take work to fully trust yourself if you’ve been dieting for a long time. But trust me, you will get there!
How Exactly Do You Practice Intuitive Eating in Your Day to Day Life?
To start out with intuitive eating, give yourself permission to eat whatever you want for a week. I know this may seem crazy, especially if you’ve been on diets for years now, but trust me on this one.
I’ve been practicing intuitive eating for years now and now no longer crave huge amounts of food or to binge eat, like I used to. In the past, when I would eat more restrictively, I would always end up having huge cravings at night and wanting to eat way over my daily calorie needs.
This happened because I wasn’t giving my body enough calories or nutrition throughout the day. Even though I thought I was eating super “healthy”.
I could never really lose weight or get in better shape on any of the diets I went on because I would always end up binge eating. This happened repeatedly due to my restriction, to make up for the lack of calories throughout the day.
This is incredibly common in dieters and can easily be changed with an intuitive eating lifestyle.
Even if it feels scary to eat whatever you want (and it will for a bit!), trust yourself and trust the process. Believe me, after a few weeks to months, you will not be having crazy cravings or binges anymore.
The Beginning of Intuitive Eating
In the beginning, you may feel like you’re eating WAY too much. This is because you will most likely be eating more calories than you had been. This is completely normal and absolutely what you should be doing.
At first, due to this increase in calories, you may gain a little weight. This is to be expected, but you are not going to continue gaining weight forever, by any means. Your body is adjusting to the increased calories and adjusting your metabolism to work with the change in diet.
This adjustment period is completely normal and it’s a good thing! You’re working to get to the point of fully trusting your hunger/fullness cues again. So keep that in mind in the beginning.
After a little while, once your body has adjusted, you will be eating a normal and healthy amount for your body. We are individuals and all have our own personalized nutrition/calorie needs. Trust your body and give it what it needs.
If you’ve been under-eating for a while, your body will probably want to overcompensate at the beginning. It may even feel like you’re overeating. Trust that that’s completely normal and okay; it’s part of the process.
The Benefits of Intuitive Eating
Besides feeling healthier & better in your skin, intuitive eating has a lot of proven nutrition benefits.
Intuitive eating is scientifically proven to be associated with lower BMI (body mass index), higher HDLs (good cholesterol), and lower triglycerides.
It has amazing psychological benefits as well. Intuitive eating has been linked to improved self-confidence, self-love, coping skills, optimism, and body appreciation/acceptance (source).
It is also incredible for changing negative eating patterns for the better. Intuitive eating can help you remove tendencies for binge eating, emotional eating, and idealizing the idea of thinness.
This lifestyle also helps you to deepen trust in yourself. By trusting your body to properly guide you through hunger and fullness, you allow yourself to trust yourself in all areas of life.
I’ve personally experienced an incredible improvement in my mental, emotional, and physical health since beginning an intuitive eating lifestyle. I used to be obsessed with tracking how much I ate and trying to eat “perfectly healthy” 24/7. Now, I am completely able to trust my body when it comes to eating, and nothing feels better than that!
Can You Lose Weight With Intuitive Eating?
A big question when it comes to intuitive eating is if you will gain or lose weight. It can be scary to let yourself eat whatever you want. You may be afraid that you will immediately gain a ton of weight.
Especially after years of hearing that you need to consume an extremely restrictive diet to lose weight… It’s easy to fall into this mindset.
The truth is, it’s impossible to predict whether you will actually experience weight loss with intuitive eating. Some people experience a great deal of weight loss and some people end up gaining a little weight. It’s all about getting to your natural set point.
It’s not a great idea to start intuitive eating with a weight loss mindset. If you are only thinking about losing weight, you won’t actually give yourself permission to eat what you want.
You may think you’re trusting your body, but in the back of your mind, you will be thinking about trying to lose weight. This subconsciously brings up feelings of restriction.
The best way to go into intuitive eating is with a mindset not focused on weight, but instead focused on feeling good. There’s no doubt that you will feel mentally, emotionally, and physically better with non-restrictive eating habits.
Your Natural Set Point Weight
The fear of gaining a bunch of weight on intuitive eating is understandable, but 99% of the time will not happen. You may gain a bit of weight in the beginning if you had been under-eating before and now are fueling your body properly.
But after a while, your body will adjust to your new healthy eating habits. Your weight will get to a normal, healthy point.
Your natural set point is basically the weight your body is meant to be at and performs/feels its best at. We all have a biological weight range (5-20 pounds) that our body is meant to function at (source).
Trying to change your weight (or constantly fighting to weigh less than your natural set point) will only cause problems. It will make you feel lethargic, unmotivated, and more prone to sickness.
I will write a full post about set point theory in the near future, but if you’re interested in learning more now, check out this article.
Want to Learn More?
If you have any questions at all after reading this article, please ask me! I’m working on an Intuitive Eating for Beginners course and would love to get your feedback.
What do you want to learn more about when it comes to intuitive eating? What questions do you still have? Is there anything else you want to know in general about holistic health & wellness?
Please ask me any questions you have right here. That way, I’ll be able to see what you guys want to learn and incorporate that into the course/future blog posts!
The Blogging Zoomer says
This is great Erin! More Zoomers need to see your blogs, they are awesome 🙂
-The Blogging Zoomer
Erin Notz says
Thank you so much!! 🙂
Abby says
I learnt lots of new ways our body react to food and how dieting works. Lovely article, I really enjoyed reading this wonderful piece.
Erin Notz says
Thank you Abby! 🙂 It’s definitely interesting how negatively we can react to dieting. Glad you enjoyed it!
Bry says
LOVE this article – it’s exactly what I need! I’m excited to explore this concept and appreciate your guidance!
Erin Notz says
Thanks so much Bry! Glad you found it helpful! 🙂