Food for thought: What intuitive eating is NOT

In this world, we all have a relationship with food that is unique. And for a lot of us, that relationship can be a little (or really) complicated. We think about food everyday, but do we ever stop to think about how we think about food?

In a world full of diet extremes, the message is finally (and thankfully!) shifting to one of balance and moderation. Finally, nutrition advice urges that in order to achieve health, both for our bodies and for our minds, we must strive to find balance. We have been taught that a healthy relationship with food comes from getting in touch with our bodies, and that in order to achieve a mind-body connection, we should eat intuitively.

Intuitive eating is the idea that we tune into our bodies to understand what we really crave and what we really want to eat, and we eat when our bodies physiologically need food. No food is given an inherent value as good or bad, or off-limits. Sounds like a healthy way to think about it food, right? Sure, but also, be careful.

Intuitive eating is founded on the concept that you “eat when you’re hungry, stop when you’re full.” Many teach that using a hunger scale, you tune in to whether you biologically need food, and then you eat what your body truly wants. Then, you tune into your fullness level to stop before you get too full. Many preaching intuitive eating say if your scale of fullness was a one-10 scale, you should stop eating when you hit a six.

This notion of intuitive eating can easily become its own form of diet. Integrative nutrition coach and body image advocate Isabel Foxen Duke coins this the “hunger and fullness diet,” which quickly makes you believe that you can only eat when you are hungry, and if you are too full, you have done something wrong. These principles make it sound like if we eat according to our desires, and not just according to our biological cues, we have failed.

I’m sorry, but I don’t see anything wrong with eating a cookie even if your stomach isn’t growling. I don’t see anything wrong with going out to dinner with your friends and eating something even though you aren’t starving for it. Sure, our bodies are biologically wired to need food to survive, and we should nourish our bodies with the nutrition it deserves to function properly, but eating is also a social activity and one that brings us pleasure. There’s no reason to forget this and deny ourselves this. A truly healthy relationship with food is not built around rules that determine when you are allowed to eat. You are always allowed to eat, you always deserve to eat, and there are no conditions that make this not the case.

Don’t allow your relationship with food and your choices with food to effect how you view your inherent value as a human being. No food or decision involving food has an inherent value of being bad or good. If you feel this way, realize that you are following unnecessary rules that may be holding you back from finding true freedom in your relationship with eating. Rules set us up for failure. And when we think we’ve failed, we feel guilt. And when we feel guilt, there goes our self esteem, and in comes the shame. But let’s ask ourselves, why are we feeling shame over food?

A healthy relationship with food does involve listening to your body, eating when you are hungry, and listening to your satiety signals so that you can stop when you’re getting full. But true intuitive eating doesn’t cause you to lose sense of your true intuition. Sometimes intuition means tuning into our cravings for a brownie or a snack when you just WANT it .

Isabel Foxen Duke advocates for another excellent point: intuitive eating can not be separated from intuitive living. In order to be in touch with your body and have a healthy, uncomplicated relationship with your food, you have to take into account all the forms the act of eating takes in your life. After all, food is a part of life; it gives us pleasure, it’s social, and we deserve to allow ourselves to enjoy all food in a world without conditions put on it.

Being intuitive means getting in touch with your body, AND getting in touch with your mind. This means not wrestling with your mind around the issues of granting yourself permission to eat. So as you strive to eat intuitively, don’t forget to tune into not just your body’s NEEDS, but also your body’s DESIRES. Don’t forget: after all, our bodies aren’t separated from our minds, they do work together.