Intuitive Eating- A series: Part 1: Intro and Why

Over the last couple years I have noticed a huge increase in the interest of Intuitive Eating on Social Media. I was excited and also a bit skeptical. Diet Culture will latch onto movements and twist and turn and manipulate until it comes part of it. This was my fear…and I have been seeing it happen. People are saying “yes you can be an intuitive eater and lose weight!”. Ummm….no. I do not believe this to be true. I have no idea what will happen to a person’s body if they eat intuitively. In fact, nobody can predict what will happen to your body based on eating and movement. If everyone ate and moved in the exact same way daily we would still all have different sized bodies. This is body diversity. This is the nature of humans. So, if we can’t manipulate our bodies then why eat intuitively? Well I think the first question is why are you trying to change your body?

We live in a society that places bodies on a hierarchy. The thinner and whiter the body the higher on the ladder that body is placed. Fat bodies, black and brown bodies, disabled bodies, trans bodies are all lower on the ladder and if you have these intersecting identities you are even lower. Diet Culture has taught us that we need to climb up the ladder to some mythical cultural ideal. Billions of dollars are spent every year trying to change bodies to move up the ladder. (Ladder analogy is from the incredible Sonya Renee Taylor- I encourage you to check out her work). It is totally understandable to me why people invest this time and money into this change because as a society we are extremely fat phobic. Stores only carry clothes up to certain sizes, plane seats fit children but not larger adults, medical professionals stigmatize patients for their size and do not provide adequate medical care. This is a huge issue that we all need to be actively working against. If you see weight stigma in action I encourage you to call it out- if you are in a safe enough position to do so. (Thin people this is for you. Call out your friends that make “fat jokes”, check the family member who makes body comments. ). So what does this have to do with intuitive eating? Well let me explain.

I want to keep intuitive eating out of the clutches of Diet Culture and to do that I think we need to get really clear on what it is and what it is not. Intuitive eating has nuance. It is not prescriptive. It is so much more than eat when you are hungry and stop when you are full. We need to talk about food access and availability. We need to learn to adapt to what our own bodies need and listen to that. (I wrote a blog post here about Intuitive Eating with Crohn’s disease.). So over this summer I am going to dive into the 10 principles of Intuitive Eating as laid out by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, the creators of Intuitive Eating. I will be using the 4th edition of their book to talk about each principle as well as talking about how I have seen it play out in the “real world”.

I really hope that you will join me as we do this deep dive together. If you have questions about any of the principles that you would like answered in a post shoot me an email at lori@unapologeticallymerd.com . Also consider signing up for my newsletter by clicking on subscribe at the top of this page.

Up Next: Principle 1: Ditching the Diet Mentality

Until next time be unapologetically you as I be unapologetically me RD