Principles of Intuitive Eating

By Morgaine Gallagher Sciaudone, RDN LDN

Intuitive Eating is a lifestyle created in 1993 by two Registered Dietitians, Evelyn Tribole, MS, RDN, CEDRD-S d and Elyse Resch, MS, RDN, CEDS-S, Fiaedp, FADA, FAND.  The Intuitive eating framework encourages followers to develop body positivity and reconnect with a person’s innate wisdom about eating. Intuitive eating helps readers to unlearn and mentally erase everything learned through fad dieting, like calorie-counting. The book also teaches about the harm of weight stigma in society. Intuitive eating is a list of 10 principles that can be learned about in greater detail by reading the book, Intuitive Eating a Revolutionary Program that Works.

The 10 Principles are as follows:

1. Reject the Diet Mentality

This principle encourages the reader to get mad at diet culture and the principles encouraged. Realizing that diet culture promotes weight loss and the lies which only lead to making dieters feel as though they are a failure every time the diet stopped working and weight regain occurred. 

2. Honor Your Hunger

Ensuring that the body is adequately fed with fuel is a crucial step to the Intuitive Eating lifestyle. 

3. Make Peace with Food

Giving yourself unconditional permission to eat will allow for food peace. When we tell ourselves that you can’t or shouldn’t have a particular food, it increases feelings of deprivation, increases cravings and can result in binging. 

4. Challenge the Food Police

The food police monitor the unreasonable rules that diet culture has created. Eliminate the thoughts that tell you that you’re “good” for eating minimal calories or “bad” because you ate ice cream. Chasing the food police away is a critical step in returning to Intuitive Eating. 

5. Discover the Satisfaction Factor

Find pleasure and satisfaction within the eating experience. When you eat what you are desiring, the pleasure derived from the meal will help to feel satisfied and content, to allow us to have just the right amount of food for you to decide you’ve had “enough.”

6. Feel Your Fullness

Listening and honoring fullness by pausing in the middle of the meal to ask yourself how the food tastes, and what your current hunger level is. 

7. Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness

Finding kind ways to comfort, nurture, distract, and resolve your issues without food by realizing that food won’t solve the problem.

8. Respect Your Body

Accepting the body’s natural size will allow you to feel better about who you are.

9. Movement—Feel the Difference

If you don’t enjoy the exercise, then stop doing it. This principle encourages exercises that you enjoy doing. Shifting your focus to how it feels to move your body will help to increase motivation and make it more satisfying and sustainable in the long run.

10. Honor Your Health—Gentle Nutrition

This principle is all about implementing nutrition guidelines to honor your health and taste buds. It encourages readers that healthy eating does not have to be perfect. Nutrition is about what you eat consistently over time that matters most.

If you want to rely on Registered Dietitians, the nutrition experts at Family Food can provide you with the best nutrition counseling and corporate wellness program.