Intuitive Eating 101: The 10 Principles
What is Intuitive Eating?
Intuitive Eating is a framework of 10 principles that support self-care and can help you improve your relationship with food and your body. It helps you relearn how to listen to and trust internal cues of hunger, fullness, and satisfaction rather than relying on strict external diet rules.
The book was first published in 1995 by authors and registered dietitians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch when the pair noticed a trend in their clinical work: clients were returning to their office after experiencing only short-term success following dietary recommendations. For example, clients lost weight only to regain it within a year or two or followed a food plan but were unable to sustain it for more than a handful of months at a time. They thought there had to be a different approach to clinical work, one that provided sustainable and health-promoting results. From there, Intuitive Eating was born.
Since the publication of the first edition nearly 30 years ago, there have been over 200 studies looking at and finding support for Intuitive Eating. It has been revised and updated over the years to keep up with the latest research and to use more inclusive language; the 4th Edition hit bookstores in 2020.
Does Intuitive Eating Work?
Growing evidence indicates that Intuitive Eaters have lower levels of disordered eating, triglycerides, emotional eating, binge eating, blood pressure, and body dissatisfaction while having higher levels of self-esteem, food variety, HDL (good cholesterol), pleasure from eating, and life satisfaction.
Intuitive Eating supports mental, physical, and emotional health.
The 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating
The principles of Intuitive Eating are often referred to as guideposts because they look and feel different depending on your lived experience, history of dieting, eating behaviors, and where you are today. They empower you to be the expert in you.
The principles guide the process and support each other. Applying one or two principles out of context is not Intuitive Eating. It is not the hunger and fullness diet. Intuitive Eating is not a diet at all. Attunement to hunger, fullness, satiety, and working gently with emotions is an integral part of Intuitive Eating.
Principle 1: Reject the Diet Mentality
Diet mentality can also be referred to as diet culture. Rejecting it can be referred to as anti-diet or non-diet.
Diet culture is the idea that the size of your body is equated to your health; it works under the assumption that if you lose weight, you will be healthier. We actually have decades of research that shows intentional weight loss (aka dieting) doesn’t work.
Diet culture also teaches you that you can’t trust yourself. It tells you that you need an outside source to tell you what, when, and how to eat. Rejecting diet culture is taking your power back. You can absolutely be trusted with the care and feeding of you.
Principle 2: Honor Your Hunger
After years or decades of dieting and living in diet culture, you may see hunger and food as enemies. Weight loss diets teach you to ignore your hunger or to eat just enough of the lowest possible calorie (or carb) food to take the edge off.
Hunger is actually a great thing; feeling hungry is your body’s way of asking for what it needs. Your body needs the nutrients it gets from food to make hormones, keep your heart pumping, heal from injuries, fight off bacteria and viruses, maintain and grow bone and muscle, plus a million other really important things.
Honoring your hunger and eating regular meals with a variety of foods allows your body to meet its needs. The ability to sense internal signals like hunger is called interoceptive awareness. Learning to listen to signals (and respond appropriately) is true self-care.
Is Intuitive Eating Right For You?
Principle 3: Make Peace with Food
Does falling off a diet plan feel like proof you are out of control around food and need strict rules? In reality, cravings are a natural reaction to restriction. Restricting foods through dieting or food rules makes those foods more desirable.
Making peace with forbidden or restricted foods (by eating them and knowing they are always an option) makes them less exciting. Instead of having this magnetic pull, these foods become just another option in a world of food options. As counterintuitive as it sounds, if you feel like you can’t trust yourself around certain foods, it might be because you need to have them around more, not less.
If you are early in your Intuitive Eating journey, this might sound impossible. I didn’t believe it until I started doing it myself.
Principle 4: Challenge the Food Police
The food police are the voices in your head that reinforce the messages from diet culture, like that you are good for eating a salad and bad for eating a cookie. They shame and bully you for deviating from what you should be doing according to the latest diet, wellness, or lifestyle plan.
Chronic dieters and those with perfectionist or people-pleasing tendencies often respond to deviations from a diet plan with negative self-talk, which adversely impacts mental health. It is important to challenge these bullying voices and replace the negative messages with the self-compassionate and supportive voices of an ally.
Principle 5: Discover the Satisfaction Factor
Eating can (and, I would argue, should) be a pleasurable thing. Chemically speaking, it provides a dopamine hit in the same way that listening to a favorite song, socializing with friends, or getting lost in a beloved hobby does.
Satisfaction is often referred to as the hub of Intuitive Eating because it supports the other principles. Eating foods you like and really want to eat is a powerful way to quiet the food noise and feel content.
Principle 6: Feel Your Fullness
Like hunger, fullness can often feel fraught if you have a history of frequent dieting. Diets train you to eat to just the absence of hunger rather than eating enough to feel satisfied and comfortably full. Or maybe you can think of times that you went off a diet and ate until you felt painfully full or even sick.
With practice, you can learn what comfortable and sustained fullness feels like in your body. And it gets easier to find comfortable fullness when you are also honoring your hunger and finding satisfaction in eating.
Principle 7: Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness
People eat to manage their emotions because it works. At least in the moment. If it didn’t work, you wouldn’t keep doing it. Practicing naming uncomfortable emotions and expanding the tools in your toolbox for managing them is an important part of self-care. Food can be one tool, but it can’t be the only tool.
Often, what you may identify as emotional eating is your body’s response to undereating earlier in the day. This may be especially true if your emotional eating happens mostly in the late afternoon or in the evening hours. For many, honoring your hunger and feeling your fullness will decrease emotionally charged late-day eating.
Intuitive Eating for Skeptics
Are you interested in Intuitive Eating but have a lot of questions? This 12-week series guides you through the ins and outs, with plenty of support along the way.
Principle 8: Respect Your Body
All bodies deserve to be fed, to be treated with dignity, to be comfortable and express their personal style, to be touched with consent and care, and to move as comfortably as possible. And that includes your body.
Bodies naturally come in a variety of shapes and sizes. We accept that people have different heights or different shoe sizes, but, thanks to diet culture, we struggle to accept that bodies come in different sizes and weights.
You don’t have to jump from body bashing to body love in one fell swoop, but you can start to show respect for your here-and-now body by dressing it comfortably, tossing out your scale, and to stop commenting on the size of or changes to yours and others’ bodies.
Principle 9: Movement – Feel the Difference
If you have a history of dieting or have lived in a larger body, it is likely you have a poor relationship with exercise. It was something you only did to try and change the shape or size of your body, and you stopped exercising when the diet stopped (or it stopped working). Exercise felt like a punishment.
A hard fact to swallow for some is that exercise has been found time and time again to improve most aspects of life.
Exercise doesn’t have to be something you hate. It is possible, and even probable, that you can find pleasure in movement. The first step is to decouple the idea of exercise from weight loss.
Instead of focusing on the number of calories burned, the distance covered, or time at the gym, just try moving in different ways. Can you differentiate what is enjoyable (even when challenging) from what is painful or unpleasurable? Move in the ways that are pleasurable and enjoyable to you, and let the rest go.
Principle 10: Honor Your Health with Gentle Nutrition
There is a reason that gentle nutrition is the last principle discussed. It is not because nutrition doesn’t matter; it does. It is because you need to work your way through the process of unlearning previous food rules and restrictions and relearn how to trust the cues from your body before you can incorporate nutrition information without it becoming another diet.
Intuitive Eating teaches you to weave together inner attunement to hunger, fullness, and satisfaction cues with external nutrition information to find your own authentic health (mental, physical, and emotional).
Intuitive Eating Next Steps
If, after reading about the 10 principles of Intuitive Eating, you are curious (even if you have doubts or questions), I encourage you to continue exploring. It is normal to feel resistant to or unsure about an approach that is so different from what you have tried before (even if what you have tried before never worked). It is also normal to feel like you can’t go back to dieting and diet culture as you learn about the harms but are still not sure what to do next. These feelings are exactly why I created Intuitive Eating for Skeptics. It is a safe and private space to learn more, ask questions, push back, and practice Intuitive Eating for yourself.
The information provided is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not intended to be medical advice or to diagnosis, treat, cure or prevent any disease. This information does not replace a one-on-one relationship with a physician or healthcare professional. Dietary changes and/or the taking of nutritional supplements may have differing effects on individuals.
To learn more about how working with a nutritionist could help you, schedule a free 15-minute call.