There are a zillion reasons humans eat beyond capacity — we’re bored, tired, distracted, starved for kindness, feel that leaving food behind is wasteful, or were once food insecure and do it instinctively, to name just a few. And if you’ve ever dieted to lose weight, restricting certain foods or trying to blot out hunger until your intermittent fasting window opens at precisely noon makes it really hard not to overeat on the rebound.
As for me, I had a serious eating disorder in my teens and early 20s (bulimia, if you’re curious). With therapy and practice, I figured out healthier ways of managing my emotions than binging, purging, and obsessively dieting. My weight has been stable and mid-range for decades.
Still, food was always a thing I have had to be careful with, the way some are vigilant around alcohol. I don’t consciously diet to be thinner, but I am preoccupied with eating "right," and often feel like I've screwed up when I don’t follow my own rules. Even long recovered, the disordered mean-girl voices bicker with each other in my head, wagging a finger at me when I’m up a few pounds, giddy when my jeans are a little loose. I tell them both to STFU, but they whisper in the background on a loop.
Then, after decades of being “on the wagon” when it came to bingeing, the wagon officially tossed me into a drainage ditch and landed on top of me. A debilitating divorce, perimenopause, raising two kids in an increasingly dystopian world, aging parents, and instability in my field saw me regularly eating to excess as a way to escape.
Anyone who has eaten compulsively knows what comes next: the shower of shame at losing control, a stab of panic over gaining weight, followed by a familiar resolve to “do better.” This usually includes avoiding foods that I think might trigger another binge — which leads to feeling deprived.
I knew I needed a way off this shamey-go-round, and had heard of intuitive eating. So I picked up a copy of Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program that Works, by dietitians Elyse Resch and Evelyn Tribole.
Introduced by Resch and Tribole in 1995, intuitive eating is a philosophy made up of 10 principles, which reject traditional weight-loss diets and encourage you to get in touch with how truly hungry or how satisfied you are in a given moment. You then use that information to inform how, what, and when you eat. The 10 "anti-diet" principles are:
- Reject the diet mentality and diet culture.
- Honor your hunger.
- Make peace with food.
- Challenge the food police.
- Respect your fullness.
- Discover the satisfaction factor.
- Honor your feelings without using food.
- Respect your body.
- Exercise — feel the difference.
- Honor your health.
Today, the benefits of intuitive eating are supported by lots of research and intuitive eating-certified nutritionists all over the world. One of them, Christy Harrison, MPH, RD, author of Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating, adds that intuitive eating principles are often part of an eating disorder recovery treatment plan, although she cautions that if you do have an eating disorder, it can skew your hunger and fullness cues, so relying solely on these signals may not be wise until you're further along in your recovery.
Anyone feeling like they are suffering from an eating disorder can and should reach out for help immediately. The NEDA helpline at (800) 931-2237 is available daily, and officials also are on standby in digital chats, ready to help you find resources in your area. If you are concerned about a loved one, learn more about how you can help.
But for the rest of us, these principles are part of a process of learning how to listen to your body, and tuning out the drumbeat of "diet culture," which equates thinness with virtue and success and health, demonizes some foods and slaps a halo on others, and oppresses people who don't fit in to the skinny (white) ideal.
"We are all born knowing how to eat," says Harrison. We un-learn it through what we're told by well-meaning parents, a culture that thinks fitting into your high school jeans is the highest feminine achievement, our own internalized quest for control, and other powerful economic and social forces. That's why paying attention to your body and not giving it celery juice when it wants a turkey sandwich with mayo or — yeah, I said it — an Oreo or three is critical, and yet so fraught for many of us. “Hunger is a biological cue, similar to the urge to go to the bathroom," says Alissa Rumsey, registered dietician and certified intuitive eating instructor, who owns Alissa Rumsey Nutrition and Wellness. "We never say, ‘I just peed an hour ago so I’m not going to go again,’ but we do that with the need to eat. Hunger is designed to help our bodies get enough nutrients to stay alive.”
Peace with food, no more bitter psychological aftertaste! Bring it, I thought.
As of this writing, I’ve been eating intuitively for about eight months, and I can tell you that it is incredibly simple. And the payoffs worth it. And it's gotten to be almost second nature to me. But easy, it wasn't, especially in the first few months. I am not exaggerating when I say I could have used a diet culture deprogrammer (luckily there are some great resources out there.) Here’s how it went down for me.
Following the advice of Tribole and Resch, I bought a bunch of things that I ordinarily wouldn’t have in the house because I'm afraid I’d hoover them. (This is in keeping with principle 3, giving myself unconditional permission to eat, and not elevating certain foods over others.) I picked up Nutella, trail mix, and that maple square cereal from Trader Joe’s, which I’d last scarfed straight out of the box during the incredibly stressful experience a while back. I told myself that these foods would be there if I wanted them, that no one is going to take them away, and that I can go out and get more if I need to. I’m truly allowed to eat them.
I kid you not: The Nutella sat unopened because knowing I could have it whenever I wanted made me forget about it. When I was hungry and saw it raising its smooth, chocolatey hand in the cabinet, I asked myself if I wanted Nutella. The answer was simply never yes.
One afternoon I snacked on some cereal, which was sweet and yummy, but I ate it slowly and consciously so I’d really enjoy it. But then, I noticed it was a harsh texture and awfully dry — how had I eaten half a box without seeing how raw it left the roof of my mouth?
As for the trail mix, I had some every day until I lost interest in it. This has to do with habituation, or our natural tendency to find stuff we were once excited about kind of meh if it’s just a normal thing. Research has found that this makes us eat less of the foods we’re used to eating.
At work, instead of making sure my plate was three-fourths veggies and a quarter lean protein as was my ritual at my office’s salad bar (this was when our office was open), I asked myself what sounded good for lunch. The answer was variously sushi; hummus and pita; and one day, it was spinach salad with eggs and bacon bits with blue cheese dressing.
It was all satisfying (principle 5 talks about how striving for satisfaction helps you make good choices for your body). Each time, when I checked in with myself mid-meal, which is an intuitive eating suggestion, I often didn’t see the need to have more than a couple more bites to feel full. I resisted the habit of judging food as "good" or "bad" and myself as "good" or "bad" for having eaten it, and noticed that overall, my body was telling me to make pretty healthy choices. Principle 10, practice gentle nutrition, points out that you don't have to eat perfectly to be healthy.
I finished a bowl of formerly-avoided pasta at a restaurant. Principle 6 is to feel your fullness, that it's a signal to stop eating, but I ate the whole thing. I was full in a heavy kind of way, which made me want to do something about it. My mind sprinted to a plan to exercise more the next day, to cut back on "unhealthy" foods, to be more careful — you’re supposed to stop when you’re satisfied, I scolded myself, not brick-in-the-stomach full.
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When I spoke with Harrison about it, she asked me if it felt like a fight-or-flight response. It had. She said that eating disorders are traumatic, and that dieting can be as well. If it happened again, she suggested doing whatever I needed do to calm down — deep breathing, meditation. “You might try a mantra — fullness is okay, it doesn’t mean anything bad about me, I’m allowed.”
She also pointed out that the diet culture has taught us to be so rule-bound that it’s natural for new intuitive eaters to turn the practice into another set of rules that we’ve “failed at” if we don’t follow them.
“Don't worry — there will come a time when you’ll choose to eat to Thanksgiving-full and it will feel like no big deal,” she says, adding that I’m in the hardest part of the adjustment. It makes sense: After 35-plus years of fullness equalling weakness in my own mind, “It takes practice to get used to eating intuitively,” says Harrison. It should feel gradually easier, she said.
Principle 1 is to reject the diet mentality, which Harrison says flows from the diet culture. Now that I am attuned to it, I see diet culture everywhere. It’s always been on billboards and Instagram, but it is the water we're all swimming in, which is why we don't even notice.
Then, a friend from work said to me: "You look so thin!” I reflexively said thanks, which immediately felt wrong. She meant it as a compliment, but if thin is a synonym for pretty it shouldn't be — and I don't even believe it is. This is why principle 8 — honor your body — is so important. “All bodies deserve dignity,” Tribole and Resch write. If I said thank you and someone in a larger body heard me, “it likely would’ve reinforced weight stigma in their minds, reminding them that thinner bodies are valued in our society and their bodies are not,” says Harrison.
I haven’t binged since I started this, and even better, I haven’t had the urge to. Harrison uses an the analogy of a pendulum — when you don’t pull it so far back into the deprivation zone, it doesn’t swing so hard in the other direction. When I ate a little more than I intended and felt that pang of tsk-tsk, I kicked into nonjudgmental mode. I jotted down: I had more food at dinner than I meant to. But c’mon, it was good. It’s okay — it happens to everyone. You didn’t commit a crime.
With a little sadness at how hard I’d been on myself for so many years, I then let it go.
I’m gaining weight. I’m not weighing myself but the leather pants I’ve had since before my children were born are definitely tighter. I’d be lying if I said I’m comfortable with it. I’m not. In fact, all day at work I’m preoccupied with the waistband squeezing my belly. I unbutton my pants and pull my sweater down.
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Not cool, I telepathically message the Goddess of Intuitive Eating. So totally not cool. I’m giving my body what it’s asking for! Shouldn’t that mean no weight gain? And maybe even a bit of weight loss, given that I’m not eating whole pints of ice cream?
“Some people gain weight with intuitive eating, some people lose weight, and some stay the same,” says Harrison about her clients. “I would say most people gain, because they’ve been restricting. It stabilizes over time, but at first, most people do.” I complete the sentence in my head — and there's nothing wrong with that — to help myself learn to believe it. Because there isn't.
I am surprised at how uncomfortable and scary even this little weight gain feels to me. I always have had — and still have — what Harrison calls “thin privilege,” which means I am not subject to the judgments and discrimination thrown at people who carry more weight on their frames. Why is even a few pounds freaking me out?
Harrison believes it has to do with a tribal sense of fear that we’ll be expelled from the group. “All of our security is threatened by not belonging, so a fear of weight gain is really fear of being rejected or ostracized,” she says, even if you believe that wouldn’t literally happen, especially among the people who care about you. “A very irrational and childlike part of us is fearful, so try to parent that side of you and talk to yourself in a compassionate adult way.”
“Oh, and buy new pants,” she adds.
I bought new pants. They’re cute and have Lycra and it helps to not be reminded of my body every second by not being able to exhale. In fact, I don’t think about my body at all.
And geez, since buying those original leather pants, I’ve aged 20 years and carried twins. Come on, already, with the ridiculous standards for women! “Our bodies are not meant to stay the same year over year — they’re meant to change,” says Rumsey. “Your weight at 25 is not going to be the same at age 45, and that is okay!” God, that sounds so sane. Of course it's okay. And buying new pants rather than forcing myself to endure too-tight ones as a reminder/punishment that I'm out of control is in keeping with intuitive eating principle 7, which is to cope with your difficult emotions with kindness.
But you don’t even need to adore every roll and pucker to have a healthy body image, says Rumsey. “It starts by understanding and internalizing that your physical appearance is not what makes you worthy,” she says. I'm proof that you can know that rationally but still feel you want your body to be cookie-cutter perfect, not that mine ever was. I’ll keep reminding myself.
I’m sitting at the Feast of the Seven Fishes with my boyfriend’s family. It’s an Italian-American Christmas Eve tradition, and it’s more like 15 fish courses — all amazing — and 35 desserts. Normally, the combo of a crowded house, lots of socializing, and endless food would send me into a “must try everything” overwhelmed binge.
I felt zero compulsion. Eyeing the abundance, I ate what looked especially appealing, wasn’t tempted to try what wasn’t, and left the table solidly full but not sick.
My boyfriend got me one of those giant Hershey’s Kisses for Christmas, and I’ve been chipping mindfully away at it. One night, however, it looked especially like our country was falling to fascism, and when I peeled my terrified eyes from the TV, I saw that the Kiss was mostly gone.
The bad news? I’d binged (and we still might lose our democracy). The good news? I didn’t panic, at least about food, or even feel bad about it.
Instead, an automatic compassionate response came to me: I asked myself, with nonjudgmental curiosity, why I ate so much chocolate. The answer was obvious: anxiety, and a fear on some level that it would literally be the last chocolate I ever ate. It’s okay, I told myself. It's a scary time. And then I forgot about it. Progress.
UPDATE: It’s been five months since that last entry, and intuitive eating is happening more, well, intuitively. Unless I'm under great stress, I don’t contemplate every bite or think about it after, and my discomfort with my extra couple of pounds has diminished noticeably (or it could be that they've gone away—I'm not weighing myself, which is part of intuitive eating.) That Nutella in my pantry eventually got eaten, and enjoyed, rather than guiltily snarfed. I’m not eating 100% freely like a little kid again, but I do have that sense of control that you have when there really isn’t anything to control at all.
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