The 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating: Your Complete Guide
If you’re sick of dieting, Intuitive Eating could be the solution you’ve been looking for.
Maybe you’ve heard of it, but you’re not sure where to start and don’t have the time in your busy schedule to read the book.
This post is for you.
In this comprehensive guide, you’ll learn about what Intuitive Eating is, how the 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating can help guide your journey to making peace with food, and some of the benefits of adopting an Intuitive Eating mindset.
This post is a long one, so grab yourself a beverage of your choice and settle in!
What is Intuitive Eating?
Intuitive Eating is an evidence-based self-care framework that honours both physical and mental health. It’s a weight-inclusive practice that enables people to let go of food rules and tune in to their body’s innate wisdom.
With Intuitive Eating, there’s no room for diet culture. Instead, it promotes a healthy and balanced attitude towards food and body image. It fits within the Health at Every Size® (HAES®) framework, which takes the emphasis away from body weight as an indicator of health.
Who Developed Intuitive Eating?
The Intuitive Eating framework was developed by two registered dietitians. Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch first coined the term “Intuitive Eating” in 1995, with the release of their book “Intuitive Eating – A Revolutionary Program that Works.”
This book offered a revolutionary perspective on rebuilding a healthy body image and making peace with food. Since its release, over 125 studies investigating the effects of Intuitive Eating on dieting behaviours, binge eating and cardiometabolic markers of health have been performed.
Intuitive Eating isn’t just a fad. It’s a scientific framework based on real-world research.
The 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating
1. Reject the Diet Mentality
Reject the Diet Mentality is arguably one of the most important principles of Intuitive Eating because it lays the foundation on which the other principles are built.
This is where a lot of people start to panic. After all, diet culture has been normalized for most of us, and it can be scary to think about letting that go. You may be thinking:
· If I give up dieting, I’ll never be able to stop eating!
· If I’m NOT dieting, I won’t know how or what to eat!
· If I’m not dieting, I’ll lose control!
These thoughts are normal.
It’s important to remember that for many people, dieting can be a trigger for losing control around food. By ditching diets and tuning into your body’s innate wisdom, you’ll start to learn what hunger, fullness and satisfaction truly feel like.
So, how can you reject the diet mentality and start moving towards becoming an intuitive eater? Here are some steps to work through:
· Acknowledge the harm that dieting has caused you
· Start becoming aware of diet mentality thought patterns
· Throw away dieting tools (like the scale!)
· Show yourself compassion as you start to move away from deeply ingrained thinking patterns
It can be challenging to shift your thought patterns overnight. You may find that you need to reject the diet mentality daily – and that’s ok! By making the commitment to ditch dieting, you’re taking the first step towards becoming an intuitive eater.
2. Honour Your Hunger
The second principle of Intuitive Eating is “Honour Your Hunger.” This involves keeping your body biologically fed with adequate nutrition. Learning to honour biological hunger sets the stage for rebuilding trust with yourself and food.
Research has shown time and time again that restriction triggers a primal urge to eat to restore energy balance. If you’re worried that letting yourself eat whatever you want will lead to losing control around food, there’s a good chance that previous experiences with an uncontrollable urge to eat have followed a period of restriction.
The good news is that by honouring your hunger, your body will start to learn that it will consistently have access to food. With time, this will reduce the strong urge to eat that follows restriction.
If you’ve been ignoring your biological hunger due to dieting, you may need to relearn what hunger feels like for you. Here are some common feelings associated with hunger:
· Stomach gurgling
· Growling noises
· Light-headedness
· Difficulty concentrating
· Irritability
· Headache
· Feeling faint
You may feel some of these sensations (if you’re mildly hungry) or all these sensations (if you’re very hungry!). Every person’s hunger feels different. The key is figuring out what it feels like for YOU.
Using a scale of 1 to 10 (with 1 being ravenous, 5 being neutral, and 10 being painfully full), check in with yourself at regular intervals to see if you need food. Some people find it helpful to have something to eat when their hunger level is a 3 to 4.
However, this should NOT be taken as doctrine. Sometimes you might need to eat at a 6 because that’s the only time you’re able to eat. Sometimes you might eat at a 2 because you didn’t have time to eat at a 3 or 4.
This is ok!
The point of using a hunger scale isn’t to control your eating, but rather to help you discover how biological hunger feels to you.
3. Make Peace with Food
Making peace with food can be one of the most challenging parts of becoming an intuitive eater because it involves giving yourself UNCONDITIONAL permission to eat.
Why?
Because telling yourself that you can’t or shouldn’t have a certain food can lead to intense feelings of deprivation, uncontrollable cravings, and in some cases, bingeing.
Unfortunately, there is often extreme guilt associated with “giving in” to foods we’ve deemed off-limits, which can lead straight back into a cycle of restriction and eating until we’re uncomfortably full.
The key to breaking free of this vicious cycle is giving yourself unconditional permission to eat. This involves:
· Ditching the “good” and “bad” labels for food
· Eating what you TRULY want
· Eating without thoughts of “making up” for it later
By allowing yourself to truly eat what you want, you can eliminate the urgency to overeat that often follows restriction.
Making peace with food means that choosing chocolate over a piece of fruit is emotionally equal. At first, you may worry that you won’t be able to stop eating if you let yourself have whatever you want.
Eventually, you will tire of eating the same food (a process known as “habituation”). After going through the process of making peace with food, your intake will start to look more balanced. However, know that at this phase of the Intuitive Eating journey, nutrition is NOT the driving force.
As a place to start, give yourself permission to eat one food you’ve been restricting. As you eat it, check in with yourself to see if you’re enjoying it. If you are, make sure you keep enough of that food in your home that you know it will be there if you want it.
At first, you may feel “out of control.” Keep going! As time goes on, you’ll find it easier to complete this activity with many different foods.
4. Challenge the Food Police
This principle is all about shouting a large “NO!” to the voice in your head that tells you that you are “good” for restricting or “bad” because you ate a restricted food.
Muting the Food Police is a key step to returning to Intuitive Eating because it will finally allow you to start listening to your body’s innate wisdom.
The Food Police can be an overpowering voice that has developed through years of living in diet culture. It scrutinizes our every action. Identifying it when it surfaces is the first step towards changing that negative self-talk.
The next time you find yourself eating in a way that feels out of control, try sitting with the feeling of discomfort (if it feels safe to do so) and examine where the thoughts are coming from.
Pay attention to the food talk that arises when you eat and become curious about where those thoughts came from. With time, you’ll develop the skills to identify negative or distorted thoughts and replace them with more positive and rational thoughts.
If you’re finding that you’re unable to sit with the thoughts or are in distress, I’d highly encourage working with a therapist who can help you process and work through those thought patterns.
5. Discover the Satisfaction Factor
When was the last time you truly thought about what you WANTED to eat?
Often, in our desire for thinness, the satisfaction we can get from food is often overlooked. When you eat what you truly want, the pleasure you get from food helps you feel satisfied and content.
Think of satisfaction as the “hub” of Intuitive Eating. Each of the 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating has the potential to influence satisfaction. To be satisfying, a meal must include foods that you enjoy and that “hit the spot.”
For people who have spent a lot of time dieting, it can be hard to know what might truly be satisfying. If you’ve been dieting for a long time, I’d encourage you to take some time to sit down and work through the following steps:
1. Ask yourself what you TRULY want to eat
2. Discover the pleasure of using all your senses to eat. Pay attention to taste, texture, smell, appearance, temperature, and “filling capacity.”
3. Savour your food
4. Don’t settle for food you don’t really want to eat
5. Check in periodically to see if the food still tastes good
The next time you eat a food you really want to eat, take a few breaths before eating to centre yourself and prepare for the meal. Taste each bite of food as you put it in your mouth. Pay attention to all your senses. Check in throughout the meal to see if you’re still enjoying it. Eat slowly and savour it!
6. Feel Your Fullness
For some people who are used to chronically restricting their intake, the idea of feeling comfortably full can seem scary. For others, the idea of stopping before over-eating due to fear of future restriction can feel just as strange.
Feeling your fullness means getting curious about what comfortably full feels like for you. The ability to stop eating because you’ve had enough is critically tied to giving yourself unconditional permission to eat.
It’s important to know you’ll always have access to food. Otherwise, it can be hard to stop eating when you feel comfortably full.
The feeling of comfortable fullness is different for everyone. I’d encourage you to pause in the middle of a meal to check in and see how your body is feeling. Check in to see both how the food tastes and how satisfied you are.
At the end of the meal, do the same thing. Are you comfortably full? Did you maybe eat more than you meant to? This phase of the Intuitive Eating journey is all about getting curious about how fullness feels for you and becoming conscious about how eating different types and amounts of food make you feel.
7. Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness
Before we get into this principle, there’s one thing I’d like to note. Eating for comfort is NOT inherently bad - in fact, it’s a completely normal part of being human! This principle of Intuitive Eating is all about expanding your toolkit so that you have MANY different ways of coping with difficult emotions.
As we move through life, we all experience difficult emotions. While food may provide comfort in the short term, it’s often a coping strategy that numbs or distracts rather than facing the negative emotion.
This doesn’t mean that food can’t give comfort - it can! But if it prevents you from ever confronting negative emotions, that may be something to investigate.
Being an intuitive eater means giving yourself kindness and being gentle with yourself about how you use food to cope.
The next time you find yourself reaching for food, ask yourself - am I really hungry? If you’re not, get curious about what you’re actually feeling. Are you bored? Sad? Stressed?
All of these are valid emotions! Now, ask yourself what you truly need in this moment. This takes practice. Here’s a list of ideas to get you started:
Remember, all emotions are valid. Don’t beat yourself up if you do end up using food to cope. But remember, there are many other coping tools available to you.
If you’re having trouble developing different coping strategies, it may be worth connecting with a therapist.
8. Respect Your Body
No matter what time of year it is, dieting messages are everywhere. These messages often tell us that we should be disappointed with our “right now” bodies. But let me ask you - has hating your body ever actually helped you?
Just as someone could never reasonably expect their feet to fit into a smaller shoe size, it is equally uncomfortable to have the same expectation about body size.
We all have different genetic blueprints and with Intuitive Eating and movement, we settle at our body’s natural and healthy sizes.
You’ll notice that this principle is about body RESPECT, not body LOVE. This is by design - you don’t need to love your body to respect it and treat it with dignity/allow it to meet its basic needs.
While body love may be an eventual goal, for someone who has spent their life being overly critical of themselves (or for many people, being told by society that they’re “not enough”), body love can feel out of reach.
Even body respect can feel unattainable for many. Our culture has taught us that smaller bodies are better, and it can be SO HARD to move away from this.
The next time you have a negative body thought, try replacing it with a respectful statement. For example, if you hear yourself thinking “I hate my cellulite,” try replacing it with “I’m grateful my legs allow me to move my body in ways I enjoy.”
With practice, you’ll be able to reframe negative body thoughts with neutral or even loving thoughts.
9. Movement – Feel the Difference
You’ll notice that we’ve made it through eight principles of Intuitive Eating without talking about things like nutrition and exercise. This is because the previous eight principles set the stage for being able to move and eat healthfully without getting sucked back into diet culture.
Once you shift from working out to change your body to moving your body because of how it makes you feel, you’re better able to tune into what kind of movement feels good for YOU.
I recognize that for some folks, movement can be inaccessible or even painful. If that’s the case, it’s even more important for you to listen to your body and find a type of movement that feels ok for you.
When we remove weight loss from the equation, it allows us to see a whole host of other benefits of movement, including:
· Better bone health
· Improved mood and stress tolerance
· Reduced blood pressure
· Reduced risk for chronic diseases
· Increased heart and lung strength
· Better energy levels
· Better sleep
· Improved learning and memory
The best thing? All these benefits from physical activity can occur INDEPENDENT of weight loss!
If you’ve never enjoyed movement or have only ever focused on weight loss, it can be hard to figure out where to start. I’d recommend anything you find boosts your mood - be it going for a walk, dancing to your favourite song, or practicing yoga.
The point isn’t to be perfect or to never take days off - it’s to recognize that movement can be enjoyable and can provide so many benefits beyond weight loss.
10. Honor Your Health – Gentle Nutrition
If there’s anything I want people to take away from this principle, it’s that we could all do to take food a little less seriously. Yes, it’s great to make food choices that honour your health AND which satisfy you. It’s wonderful to choose foods that allow you to feel good, both physically and emotionally.
But it’s important to remember that one meal or snack does not “make or break” eating well. It’s what you eat consistently over time that matters. The goal is NOT to be a “perfect eater” - there’s no such thing!
When you remove guilt and morality from eating, it allows you to truly feel the physical sensations you get from eating. Once you’re in tune with these feelings, you’ll likely notice that eating some foods make you feel great and other foods make you feel not so great.
Remember, no one except for you knows how different foods make you feel. YOU are the expert of your own body. Variety is the spice of life, and including a variety of foods with protein, fat and carbohydrates is key to ensuring you feel well.
Intuitive Eating vs. Mindful Eating
While Intuitive Eating and mindful eating both involve tuning into how your body feels, they’re not the same thing.
The Centre for Mindful Eating defines mindful eating as:
· Allowing yourself to be aware of the positive and nurturing opportunities available through food selection and preparation
· Using all your senses to help choose food that is both satisfying and nourishing
· Acknowledging different responses to food non-judgementally
· Allowing physical hunger and satiety cues to guide your decisions to start and stop eating.
In contrast, Intuitive Eating is a holistic self-care framework that emphasizes becoming aware of our internal cues to help make decisions around eating and exercising. It doesn’t just involve listening to our internal cues. It also involves actively rejecting diet culture and making peace with food.
While it’s possible to eat mindfully without being an intuitive eater, I don’t believe it’s possible to be an intuitive eater without engaging in mindfulness.
Who is Intuitive Eating For?
Intuitive Eating is for everyone! You don’t have to have a history of dieting to benefit from Intuitive Eating.
If you’re living with a diagnosed eating disorder, it’s important to work with an eating disorder professional as you move through the different principles of Intuitive Eating. Certain principles (such as “Feel Your Fullness”) may not be appropriate for people struggling with an eating disorder, as hunger and fullness signals may be distorted.
What are the Benefits of Intuitive Eating?
There are so many benefits to Intuitive Eating! Some measurable improvements you may see with Intuitive Eating include:
· Improved cholesterol levels
· Better body image
· Higher self-esteem
· Improved metabolism
· Reduced rates of disordered and emotional eating
· Reduced stress levels
· Increased satisfaction with life
But there are also many other benefits of Intuitive Eating that may not be as measurable but are just as important. They include:
· Figuring out which food you like and dislike
· Less guilt surrounding food
· Understanding how certain foods make you feel
· Cravings becoming more manageable
· More mental energy available for things you enjoy
· Finding new coping strategies
· Eating more mindfully
These are just a few of the benefits of Intuitive Eating. Are there any others that you’ve experienced? Share in the comments below!
Common Misconceptions about Intuitive Eating
It’s the Hunger Fullness Diet
There’s a common misconception that Intuitive Eating is a “Hunger/Fullness Diet.” This couldn’t be further from the truth. There are going to be times you over-eat, there are going to be times you under-eat and THAT IS OK! There will also be times you don’t feel hungry due to stress/sadness/illness, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t eat or nourish yourself.
Intuitive Eating is about becoming more aware of your body and how it feels to be comfortable allowing yourself to eat what you need to feel satisfied. It’s about becoming a curious observer and letting that guide your eating behaviours, rather than the vicious cycle of restriction and eating past comfortable fullness.
It will make you lose weight
Intuitive Eating is not a weight loss diet, and it was never intended to be. But does that mean you can never lose weight as an intuitive eater? Short answer – no. Some people who start eating intuitively do lose weight.
But it’s just as likely that you’ll maintain your weight or even gain weight with Intuitive Eating. This doesn’t mean you’re doing Intuitive Eating “wrong.” It just means that when you nourish your body properly, your body has settled at a higher weight than it was at when you were dieting.
It means you can eat “junk food” all day
A lot of people worry that if they start eating intuitively, that they’ll eat “junk food” all day. While this may happen in the beginning, it’s unlikely that this will continue to happen long term.
This is because of the process of habituation that we discussed in Principle 3 – Make Peace with Food. The more often you eat something, the less appealing it eventually becomes. While you may find that initially, you’re eating a lot less nutrient dense foods, your body will likely habituate to these foods, and you’ll eventually settle into a more balanced diet.
Final Thoughts
Intuitive Eating is a self-care framework that sets the foundation for re-establishing trust in your body’s innate wisdom. It’s not a diet, and it takes a weight-inclusive approach to wellness. By following the 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating, you open yourself up to an entirely new way of living.
Have you tried Intuitive Eating? What was your experience like? Let me know in the comments below!
