Myths and Realities of Intuitive Eating
By Ally Tompkins, LCSW
Intuitive Eating has gained widespread popularity among many people looking to heal their relationship with food and to regain trust in their body’s needs and wants.
To many of our clients who are deeply entrenched in diet culture (i.e. the belief that being smaller means greater health and wellness) Intuitive Eating can seem like a foreign language. Below we’ve outlined the myths we hear most about Intuitive Eating from our clients, and the true facts about how these 10 principles can work to heal the toxic relationships many people hold with food and their bodies.
Intuitive Eating Principle No. 1: Reject the Diet Mentality
Myth: I need to lose weight because I am overweight, unhappy with my weight, or have been told I am at risk for health issues because of my weight.
Fact: Dieting is a $72 billion industry that profits off people’s insecurities and sells them a fabricated story that weight and health are synonymous. The BMI chart that dictates what “category” of size people fall into (impacting insurance rates, categories of health risk for diseases, etc.) is actually a 200-year-old math equation developed for statistics, not physiology. Numerous health conditions that may have some correlation to higher weights are often treated as though weight is the cause of the problem and patients are told that weight loss is the only solution to said problem. There are many, many markers of health that can signal possible medical issues, and any correlations to weight that are treated as cause-and-effect relationships should be questioned.
Intuitive Eating Principle No. 2: Honor Your Hunger
Myth: Intuitive eating means eating whatever you want, whenever you want—total chaos!
Fact: Diet culture tells you that weight loss is necessary for most and desired by all, and posits that the key to weight loss involves deprivation and food rules. So it is understandable why eating intuitively would seem like free falling.
Intuitive eating says to toss out all the rules, but that doesn’t mean it’s utter chaos. Eating a balanced, normalized diet means you’ve stopped depriving yourself of specific foods or certain food groups, and you toss out any other rules around food that might exist (I’m lookin’ at you, intermittent fasting). Honoring your hunger means giving your body the fuel it needs, when it needs it.
Note that many people who struggle with disordered eating have difficulty trusting or listening to their body’s signals for fuel. In the early stages of recovery from an eating disorder, it is always best to work with a qualified therapist and registered dietitian to help you learn the differences between emotional and physical hunger, and to help break the cycle of using food to cope.
Intuitive Eating Principle No. 3: Make Peace with Food
Myth: If I tell myself junk food is OK, I’ll never stop!
Fact: Deprivation and food morality (i.e. pizza is “bad” but salad is “good”) are two key factors in producing negative thoughts that lead to restrictive or binge-related behaviors. If someone told me that I could never have pizza again starting tomorrow, I’d feel instant deprivation. I’d probably order a pizza tonight and I’d likely have more than one serving. This is how the diet/binge cycle perpetuates.
When you deprive yourself of something you enjoy, your cravings increase and your emotional reactivity triggers. Giving yourself permission to eat the things you love does not mean you’ll lose all control. True and unconditional permission to eat the foods you love means you crave and enjoy them on a normalized basis.
Intuitive Eating Principle No. 4: Challenge the Food Police
Myth: I have to be hard on myself, otherwise I’ll feel out of control. Disciplined eating will make me feel strong.
Fact: The roots of diet culture run deep. You have to actively fight against the arbitrary rules that apply moral judgement to eating certain amounts or specific types of food (i.e. pizza is “bad” but salad is “good). This is an ongoing fight that you have to keep showing up to address.
You won’t undo decades of diet culture in one day, and building a balanced and normalized relationship with food does, in fact, take work. The food police try to give you a moral beating for eating the piece of pie, and you think that’s the discipline you need. But depriving yourself of certain food groups doesn’t make you happy, and often doesn’t lead you to the outcomes you hoped for.
When you know that the pie is just pie, and you can have the pie when you want it, you won’t feel out of control around it.
Intuitive Eating Principle No. 5: Discover the Satisfaction Factor
Myth: Enjoyable and satisfying foods must be bad for me, I always feel guilt and shame. Nothing pleasurable could be healthy.
Fact: Food is pleasurable. Food is palatable. Sometimes some foods taste better than other foods. Sometimes eating food in a nice environment with nice people actually makes the experience of eating better. There is no shame in satisfaction. Honoring your satisfaction instead of judging yourself for it can actually help produce balance in your life.
Some of the latest trends in dieting (they call themselves “wellness programs” and “lifestyle changes”) will try to tell you that making a cake where you replace the flour, butter, eggs and sugar with organic, plant-based low-fat ingredients can satisfy your “sweet tooth” without “being bad.” This is a false definition of satisfaction. Satisfaction does not exist when there’s deprivation. And deprivation leads to cravings, urges, and binges.
Reject the idea that real satisfaction is wrong. Reject the idea that you have to modify foods and compromise flavor in order to remain “good” for consuming them.
Intuitive Eating Principle No. 6: Feel Your Fullness
Myth: Wasting food is wrong because I was raised to clean my plate and be grateful for the food I have.
Fact: Many people struggle with true fullness cues. They feel guilty for not eating what was given to them, or shame for eating beyond their comfort level. Honoring your fullness requires that you have trust in yourself that you can and will do what’s best for your body. Honoring fullness means you toss out arbitrary morality around meal completion. Mindful eating allows you to check in with yourself, observe your needs, and adapt as necessary. Pausing to reflect on the three T’s (taset, temperature, texture) of food can help you check in with your own satisfaction and fullness throughout a meal.
Intuitive Eating Principle No. 7: Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness
Myth: My emotions are all over the map. I have to have internal/external discipline to correct my own behavior.
Fact: The way you feel, think, and behave are all interconnected. If negative thoughts lead to negative actions, you might feel shame, guilt, or regret. Those feelings probably won’t lead to positive emotions, and instead will force you right into more negative ones. Because food is an often accessible substance that we need in order to live, it’s no wonder an estimated 30 million adults will have clinically significant eating disorders at some point in their lifetime.
In order to fully embrace intuitive eating, you have to address the emotional coping deficits that may exist underneath the surface, and do so with self-compassion instead of judgement.
Intuitive Eating Principle No. 8: Respect Your Body
Myth: Body respect and acceptance means satisfaction and happiness with our whole image.
Fact: Body neutrality means accepting that our bodies are the way they are. You don’t have to compare yourself to others, compare yourself to past versions of yourself, or compare yourself to an unrealistic standard of size that doesn’t fit your own physiology and biology.
Respect and acceptance means you stop fighting reality as it stands right now, which has the added bonus of helping to improve your mood. Feeling neutral has a far better chance of eliciting happiness than feeling hatred and self-loathing.
Intuitive Eating Principle No. 9: Movement—Feel the Difference
Myth: Exercise only counts if you’re miserable and sore and sweaty.
Fact: Healthy and meaningful movement is important for physical and mental wellbeing. It can be any activity that brings you some joy and gets your body moving, and doesn’t need to be stressful or physically demanding. You’re more likely to call it quits when you pressure yourself to do exercises that are arduous and taxing.
Find activities that bring you other markers of success (like increased energy or reduced stiffness) and reject the pain-is-progress mentality of diet culture.
Intuitive Eating Principle No. 10: Honor Your Health—Gentle Nutrition
Myth: Doing what I want when I want is emotional loss-of-control, not intuition.
Fact: Intuitive eating does not mean losing control and slipping into chaos. It means honoring what your body wants as much as honoring what it needs. It means freeing yourself from the misconception that less nutrient-dense foods are bad, and that eating them will harm your health.
Intuitive eating is not striving for perfection. It is not expecting yourself to always know what your body needs/wants, but rather giving yourself permission to explore what that means without judgement. It’s not about one meal or one month or even one year of life. It’s about a total overhaul of honoring our health and wellness in the most holistic sense—not solely on the scale. It’s about allowing space to experience life and be present without being shackled to thoughts of food and body image. It’s about eating things that make you feel good, and allowing yourself to actually feel good.
To learn more about intuitive eating, we recommend the following websites: