Dieting Can Be Destructive But Intuitive Eating Isn’t for Everyone: Finding the Middle Way
To develop a healthy, sustainable style of eating and a positive relationship with food, I believe the most beneficial path lies in finding a middle ground.
That balanced, middle way stands in between “external eating” and “intuitive eating.”
By “external eating” I’m referring to making decisions about eating primarily based on information outside of your body’s hunger signals. External cues include and knowledge of how food content (macro- and micronutrients)—along with other behavioral, physical, mental, emotional, physiological, and environmental factors—affect body composition, appetite, and satiety.
And by “intuitive eating” I’m referring to the Intuitive Eating® approach developed by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. An Intuitive Eater develops their interoceptive awareness (perception of the body’s internal states) so they can rely on their hunger signals to choose what, when, and how much to eat.
The middle ground lies in combining the best of these two approaches while discarding or disregarding what isn’t useful or advantageous. But before we can get to the center, let’s take a look at what doesn’t work when operating on the extreme ends of the eating spectrum.
Problems With “External Eating”
External cues to eat, outside of your hunger signals, include but are not limited to:
Tracking your food and adhering to a calorie or macronutrient budget
Any diet plan or meal plan
Time of day (e.g. you eat breakfast because it’s 8am)
Predetermined feeding windows (intermittent fasting)
Presence of food or other people eating
Emotional states, which may or may not involve…
Emotional dysregulation
When you stop listening to your body and rely entirely or primarily on external cues to choose what, when, and how much to eat, you risk disembodiment.
Disembodiment means being out of touch with your feelings, thoughts, expectations, or beliefs. When you’re disconnected from yourself, you’re unable (or unwilling) to hear your own emotional, spiritual, or physical needs, and thus unable to fulfill them.
Throughout your day, your body gives you a plethora of feedback, from your emotions to other feeling-states like how hot or cold you are, when it’s time to use the bathroom, whether you’re tired or not, how hungry you are, and so on.
Some people lose the ability to gauge whether they feel physically hungry or not because they stop paying attention to their hunger signals. This could be because they:
Always eat at a certain time regardless of how hungry they are
Dissociate due to unresolved trauma (dissociation is disconnection between a person’s thoughts, memories, feelings, actions or sense of who they are)
Eat frequently due to a fear of feeling hungry
Are accustomed to eating for reasons other than hunger, such as emotional eating, eating when they see food, or eating because others are eating
Additionally, disconnection makes processing emotions more difficult because the default reactions to negative emotions include:
Suppressing your feelings by attempting not to think or talk about them
Displacing them onto others by yelling, criticizing, or otherwise lashing out
Seeking distraction, through social media, television, dating apps, exercise, etc.
Smothering them using food, alcohol, drugs or other means of changing your emotional state
Escaping from emotions often deepens disembodiment if it involves eating highly palatable, calorie-dense foods (aka “junk foods”) which lead to lower satiety and more cravings, thus overriding one’s hunger signals.
Importantly, for many individuals, the resultant disconnection from dieting can instigate disordered eating habits or exacerbate existing ones.
As well, disconnection from the self often leads to low self-worth, low energy, and low self-efficacy, which all contribute to a lack of motivation to engage in health-promoting behaviors such as exercising and getting adequate sleep.
Through the combination of disconnection from emotions and other feeling-states, like hunger, listening to your body’s actual needs and taking the necessary steps to fulfill those needs becomes impossible.
But I don’t believe the other side of the spectrum, relying solely on your body’s signals, is the optimal solution either.
Shortcomings of Intuitive Eating
On the whole, I feel aligned with the majority of the Intuitive Eating approach. And I believe this style can be widely used with great success to achieve better health and a peaceful relationship with food. Intuitive Eating is a fantastic framework for also having a healthy relationship with exercise and with your body. And so where I find fault in the approach requires me to do some nit-picking.
While relying on your hunger signals to choose what, when, and how much to eat can work for many, I do not believe it’s for everyone all the time.
Satiation & Satiety
To their credit, the authors of Intuitive Eating explain why hunger signals may be ignored and acknowledge non-hunger reasons for eating. That is to say, there are reasons why a person may override their hunger signals and choose to either eat when they are not hungry or avoid eating when they’re hungry.
What’s also important for the average person to understand is that there are times when the signals from your body are interrupted.
For example, leptin is a hormone involved in satiety and appetite control. The higher the levels of circulating leptin, the less hungry you will feel. Levels of leptin are directly related to how much adipose (fat) tissue you have. This is one of the ways your body maintains a stable bodyweight.
However, chronically high levels of leptin may lead to leptin resistance, which is thought to be one of the causes of obesity. Similarly, some individuals are less sensitive to insulin, which is another hormone that contributes to satiety. In plain English, if you cannot accurately detect fullness, you cannot accurately regulate your eating such that you can maintain a stable bodyweight.
[Note: I don’t find it necessary to mention here that individuals with eating disorders have greater difficulty sensing hunger signals as this is acknowledged by Intuitive Eating. I believe that IE is an extremely important and useful tool for individuals with eating disorders. I don’t wish to discourage this segment of the population from exploring IE, ideally with a trained professional.]
Another place to consider how well we can truly attune with our body’s signals is portion sizes. Intuitive Eating claims, “Portion control is not an issue for Intuitive Eaters.” And Intuitive Eating practitioners like to claim that children are model Intuitive Eaters. I do agree that Intuitive Eating is a practice that we are taught to override.
However, we have to look to very young children to see evidence of Intuitive Eating. In one study, children age 3 and younger were served macaroni and cheese. As portion sizes increased, their intake remained constant. But when the same portions were served to 5-year-olds, they increased their intake when the portions were larger (Rolls et al. 2000). A similar study showed that 4-year-olds also ate more when they were served larger portion sizes (Fisher et al. 2003).
“Many public health policy makers consider the inflated size of food portions to be problematic. But if people were truly attuned to hunger, fullness, and satisfaction, it wouldn’t matter if they were served a twenty-pound steak or a gallon of ice cream. That’s because Intuitive Eaters would stop eating when comfortably satisfied—there would just be a lot more leftovers.”
—Intuitive Eating, pp. 242-243
When it comes to satiation though, evidence shows not only that portion size matters, so do a number of other biological, physiological, psychological, behavioral, and social factors, such as:
Appeal, desire, palatability, variety of foods available, environment (distractions, social interactions), hormonal fluctuations, alcohol intake, previous intake, dietary restraint, hedonic response to palatable foods, physical activity, sleep, age, gender, bodyweight
Finally, exploring the psychological side of things, your beliefs about food can change your physiological responses. In the now-famed “milkshake study,” a set of participants were tested on their ghrelin-response to two separate milkshakes. Ghrelin is commonly known as the “hunger hormone.” As time passes after a meal, ghrelin rises and contributes to feeling hungry. When you consume nutrients, ghrelin levels fall.
Participants were first given a vanilla milkshake called “Sensi-shake” whose label indicated that it contained 140 calories. On a separate occasion, the participants consumed another vanilla milkshake: “Indulgence” whose label indicated it had 620 calories. Ghrelin levels dropped about three times more when individuals consumed the “Indulgence” shake, which makes sense, because if you consume more nutrients, you would expect your body to respond accordingly.
So why is this study interesting or notable? Because the shakes were identical. They were both the same recipe, containing 380 calories. The only difference was the label. But when people believed they were consuming more calories, their body responded as if they actually were. If simply thinking differently about our food can elicit a different physiological response, perhaps we should be paying attention to more than just our hunger signals.
Now, the last thing I want is for you to dismiss Intuitive Eating because you’re afraid you can’t trust your body. I will reiterate that I think IE is an incredibly helpful framework for many, many people and that I’ve truly had to nitpick to find any disagreement in it.
There are some individuals for whom IE will be the only framework they need to both have a healthy relationship with food and to maintain a healthy, stable bodyweight. But there are also instances where it may not be enough, or the appropriate eating approach.
Anti-Diet: One Size Does Not Fit All
The first of the 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating is: Reject the Diet Mentality. I’ve shared before where I take issue with the anti-diet movement. And while I am all for deconstructing diet culture, I don’t believe that diets should be universally banned from practice.
Here are a few examples of where I find intentional body composition manipulation to be acceptable:
Athletics
If an individual values their athletic performance and it would not affect their overall health or relationship with food to manipulate their diet to achieve a different body composition, I don’t believe it’s harmful in any way to pursue that end. Similarly, I would not discourage a weight-classed athlete from dropping body fat with the same caveat—that they be in a place where doing so would not negatively affect their health or relationship with food.
Health
The science is clear that your body composition, which includes your body fat percentage, factors into your health (alongside a broad range of additional personal, social, economic, and environmental factors). Certain levels of body fat are strongly correlated with negative health effects. I would support an individual in intentional weight loss if they had already done solid foundational work on improving their relationships with food and their body, and I felt we could preserve that progress throughout the weight loss process.
Healing
Some individuals whose weight gain is primarily due to trauma, mental health issues, or a lack of tools to process emotions in a healthy way feel that consequently losing that weight, during or after their healing process, is a physical manifestation of that healing. While this is an area where I would be very cautious in my recommendations depending on the individual’s history, I have seen instances where intentional weight loss has contributed to a person’s healing and flourishing.
Harmony
In Food Body Self, we have a concept called your “harmonious body.” This is the body size at which you feel the most comfortable and at home, but also where you feel the most energetic and vibrant. You might call it “your best self.” This is not a weight on the scale, because we don’t use scales as a measurement tool, but rather a feeling of harmony with your body. If, after engaging in the process of healing their relationships with food and their body, an individual still felt a sense of dissonance and desired to change their body composition alongside their cognitive and emotional healing work, I would support them in that. As always, I would ensure they are in a place where doing so would not negatively affect their health or relationship with food before beginning the endeavor.
Appearance
This will probably be the most controversial, but I believe that it’s okay to lose weight because you desire a different appearance. A point that’s missed by anti-diet practitioners is that body image and weight manipulation can be adaptive or maladaptive. In short, your motivation for dieting dictates whether or not it will be helpful or detrimental. Adaptive body investment does not rely on your appearance to determine your self-worth. Adaptive behaviors are values-based, flexible, add to important aspects of one’s life, and are focused on health, self-care, and personal expression. If an individual’s desire for body composition or any other appearance change is adaptive and the process of weight loss would not negatively affect their health or relationship with food, I have no qualms about that pursuit.
In addition to all this, I believe anti-diet proponents sometimes have a bias toward intentional weight loss because of the segments of the population they work with, which is primarily (if not solely) people who either have eating disorders or disordered eating habits. Of course these folks should not be dieting.
But at the same time, there are individuals who can diet without their relationship with food being negatively affected. From my experience, this is only a small percentage of dieters, but for this reason and the five listed above, I don’t believe we need to put a blanket ban on dieting in order to achieve meaningful, positive, widespread change.
Before we move on, I want to be clear that despite the fact that I condone dieting in select instances, I am above all a food relationship and body image coach. And despite there being multiple circumstances in which I believe dieting would not be harmful to a person’s health or well-being, fewer than a tenth of students who work with me pursue this path. And that is only after months (or years) of groundwork have been laid.
If your primary motive is to lose weight, please seek help elsewhere. But if you struggle with disordered eating habits like emotional eating, food preoccupation, chronic restriction, or yo-yo dieting, I can help you find peace, control, and consistency in your eating habits.
The Middle Way: Informed Eating
I named Informed Eating such because it’s informed by external information (such as factors affecting your satiation and satiety) AND by internal information (such as your hunger signals).
This means that when choosing what to eat, you check in with your hunger signals to determine when and how much to eat, as well as your food preferences to determine what to eat, but in making those choices and during the course of your meal, you also factor in things like your environment or the palatability of foods.
Here’s an example of how this plays out:
Let’s say I’ve had dinner an hour ago, and I want to eat something sweet. I might check in with myself and notice that I’m not feeling hungry. I’m going to use the Intuitive Eating principle of “challenging the food police” (the voice in your mind enforcing diet rules like certain foods are “bad”).
But I’m also going to be mindful of the fact that the dessert I choose is likely going to be energy-dense and highly palatable and decide to have a small portion, because my hunger signals might not be wholly reliable.
When I choose my food, I’m also going to pay extra attention to it and savor the experience so that I can experience what I’ve termed “mental satiety.” That is, a sense that what I’ve had was enough—I’m satisfied with what I’ve eaten and feel comfortable stopping without feeling deprived.
What happened in this scenario? I was informed by:
My internal hunger signals (I was not hungry at the time); psychological awareness (belief) that dessert foods aren’t “bad”; and mindfulness of my eating experience
The external knowledge I hold of the energy density of the food (it will not feel as satiating as foods with low energy density) and the palatability of the food (which makes it easy to overeat, especially if I’m distracted)
I want to be clear that the choices you make when you practice Informed Eating are NOT ones that enforce diet culture rules and you do not make food choices based on whether or not you think they will help you lose weight.
In my example above, when I chose to eat a small portion of dessert, my motivation for the choice was, “I’m allowed to have this but I don’t need it to feel physically satisfied and I don’t much to feel mentally satisfied,” NOT, “I can only have a small portion of dessert because sweets are unhealthy and if I overeat them I’ll get fat.”
Our sources of information in Informed Eating, whether they are internal or external, are only to be used to help our Food Body Self students reconnect with themselves and their bodies and cultivate a healthy relationship with food.
All tools are neutral, including tracking food—which is used rarely, selectively, and with the context carefully considered.
That being said, because my students come to me with disordered eating habits, we always start out with an approach that leans heavily on the internal/intuitive side: we don’t weigh or track food, restrict any foods or food groups, measure our bodies in any way, etc.
And most students stick with that as their final destination, while only a small percentage of individuals choose to go on to pursue intentional weight loss (which, again, is NOT for everyone and never initiated by me). But those students who do have weight loss in mind must go through the journey of healing their relationships with food first. No exceptions.
Now I’ll be real with you in a way that most nutrition professionals rarely are:
While Informed Eating works for me and it’s an approach to eating that many of our Food Body Self students adopt because it works for them…I don’t believe Informed Eating is for everyone all the time.
I believe there is NO eating style that is universally applicable.
But here’s how I’ll sum things up:
External eating sucks. Please don’t let any nutrition program tell you how to eat without consulting your internal sources of information.
Intuitive Eating is a wonderful, sustainable option, especially for those who struggle with disordered eating and eating disorders, and I’m a strong supporter of it for that reason. I incorporate many of the principles (and for certain students, all of the principles) into my food relationship coaching.
Informed Eating has a load of flexibility (in part because it can be used for sustainable weight loss and weight maintenance) and is also a viable lifelong option for many—but you’ll want to lean into the internal/intuitive side first when healing your relationship with food.
If you want to explore the benefits that internal eating and Informed Eating have to offer you—along with the other aspects of Food Body Self®, like feeling at home in your body, learning healthy coping mechanisms to process your emotions, and developing a positive relationship with movement—click here.
I’m not here to tell you how to eat, but I will tell you that if you’ve been feeling let down by the diets you’ve followed or the empty promises of diet culture, you have other, better options.
You can achieve a sense of peace with food, feel comfortable in your skin, and engage in healthy habits with no deprivation and no guilt.
P.S. I am not a doctor, dietitian, or mental health professional and none of this is intended to be advice or to replace the services of trained medical professionals. You are advised to seek medical attention for matters relating to your health and, in particular, matters that may require diagnosis or treatment, including eating disorders. Additionally, if you are actively struggling with an eating disorder, although Food Body Self coaching can be an addition to a treatment team, it is not to be considered a substitute for clinical treatment or therapy.
References
Crum, A. J., Corbin, W. R., Brownell, K. D., & Salovey, P. (2011). Mind over milkshakes: mindsets, not just nutrients, determine ghrelin response. Health psychology: official journal of the Division of Health Psychology, American Psychological Association, 30(4), 424–431. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0023467
Orlet Fisher, J., Rolls, B. J., & Birch, L. L. (2003). Children's bite size and intake of an entrée are greater with large portions than with age-appropriate or self-selected portions. The American journal of clinical nutrition, 77(5), 1164–1170. https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/77.5.1164
Rolls, B. J., Engell, D., & Birch, L. L. (2000). Serving portion size influences 5-year-old but not 3-year-old children's food intakes. Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 100(2), 232–234. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0002-8223(00)00070-5
Tribole E. (2020). Intuitive eating 4th edition : a revolutionary anti-diet approach. St. Martin's Press.