Can You Listen to Your Body AND Be Healthy?
[Note: While this majority of my posts are written for coaches and non-coaches alike, this one is especially for nutrition professionals.]
Dieting’s seductive claim is that you’ll lose weight, and in doing so, improve your health (and attractiveness).
But as you may have noticed, many health and wellness professionals from doctors to dietitians to therapists and coaches are suggesting you ditch diets. In place of dieting, they’re encouraging people to embrace body diversity and acceptance, and to learn to listen to what your body is telling you.
Why?
Isn’t setting aside weight loss disregarding your health? Aren’t our bodies programmed to be lazy and gluttonous? How could our bodies possibly know what’s good for us, better than we do?
While I am not an intuitive eating practitioner, nor am I completely anti-diet or Health At Every Size (HAES)-aligned, I’m frustrated by intuitive eating and movement being so misunderstood, because the ideas can be extremely beneficial to individuals seeking a healthier relationship with food, regardless of whether or not they want to lose weight.
Here are a few of the most common concerns and criticisms I see directed toward intuitive eating, listening to your body, and rejecting mainstream diet advice, and why I believe these concerns are misdirected:
“You can’t lose weight with intuitive eating.”
This type of comment comes from coaches who don’t understand what intuitive eating is and have likely not researched the concept in depth—or at all. Because the first principle of intuitive eating, literally, is to reject a diet mentality.
Simply put, intuitive eating is NOT a program for intentional weight loss. If you’re using it with the intention of losing weight, you don’t understand its true purpose.
Intuitive eating, as developed by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, is a set of principles that, again, has nothing to do with diets or weight loss. In the words of Alissa Rumsey, RD, “[Intuitive eating] teaches you how to get in touch with your body cues like hunger, fullness and satisfaction while learning to trust your body around food again.”
That being said, if you follow the framework, which includes recommendations such as feeling your fullness (and stopping eating when you’re comfortably full), and getting active, you may lose some weight. This is not a promise, this is just a side effect that some (but not all) intuitive eating practitioners experience.
“People’s bodies have terrible intuition. They want to eat lots of junk.”
Some coaches who scoff at the concept of listening to your body believe that when you help someone get in touch with their bodies, it means blindly giving in to every craving that arises.
However, no health professional is encouraging their clients to stuff themselves with fast food and packages of cookies because “their body asked for it.”
To begin with, practices like intuitive eating have multiple advantages, one being that for an individual who has spent an extended period of time restricting their diet, incorporating foods they’ve been craving back into their diet can in fact help to reduce cravings for those foods. That’s a BIG win whether your goal is intentional weight loss or not.
Listening to your body doesn’t just mean eating whatever you crave. That’s a reductionist myth. In actuality, you still want to take into account how your food makes you feel. If eating fried food, fast food, chips, sweets (or whatever else you might be craving) all the time doesn’t give you energy or satiate you properly, even though you might have a taste for them, you still wouldn’t choose them all the time.
And you can observe your cravings mindfully, without acting on them, and use them to decide when you want to deliberately partake in those foods.
One of the goals of intuitive eating is to increase the practitioner’s interoceptive awareness, the ability to perceive bodily sensations such as hunger. This is a highly advantageous skill for both dieters and non-dieters. Dieters in particular have often spent long periods of time ignoring signals from their bodies. For example, ignoring their hunger and fullness signals and deferring to a calorie/macro tracker to tell them how much to eat.
Additionally, it seems to me that the coaches who are skeptical or critical of intuitive eating practices make the assumption that dietitians and nutrition coaches who teach intuitive eating or listening to your body do so to the exclusion of other aspects of nutrition education, such as micronutrients or calorie density.
Cuing into your body’s signals can help you make better choices about your food and find balance within your diet AND it involves using your brain to learn and think about what will make you feel good, both mentally and physically.
“People’s bodies have terrible intuition. They don’t want to move.”
I’ll respond to this concern that people “don’t want to move” under the assumption that the coach is working with clients who have trouble motivating themselves to work out consistently.
In such cases, the clients in question are usually particularly disconnected from themselves—their values, beliefs, emotions, etc. In addition, they’re usually in a state of overwhelm when it comes to their responsibilities. Physical and mental fatigue, as well as mental health disorders, can drastically reduce one’s motivation to exercise.
Combine that with the fact that many individuals rely on extrinsic motivators to work out; they view exercise primarily as a tool for weight loss and/or rely on the accountability of a coach or trainer for their success. Finally, many of the individuals who struggle to move consistently have what I’ve termed a “dreadful movement mindset” in which they associate exercise as being difficult, unpleasant, and an activity they dread.
No wonder the signals they’re getting from their bodies are to stay on the couch.
But because someone is struggling to exercise consistently doesn’t mean their bodies are consistently telling them NOT to move. In fact, an entire book has been written on how our bodies are designed to enjoy and desire movement: The Joy of Movement by Kelly McGonigal.
What I view as the problem in this instance is not that people shouldn’t listen to their bodies, but the opposite: their bodies and minds are telling them that they’re overwhelmed, tired, and stressed—and they’re not listening. These are signs that your lifestyle is unsustainable and will affect your well-being if it remains so over an extended period of time.
This is of course anecdotal evidence, but I’ve found that when I help my students reduce overwhelm, create space in their schedules, and cue into their bodies, they begin to notice their bodies asking them to move. They notice that they begin to feel agitated or more sluggish when they miss workouts—which may be as simple and low-impact as a walk—and as they learn to pay attention to their emotions, some start to use exercise as a response.
“You’re just protecting people’s emotions so they don’t feel bad.”
I can’t speak for every food relationship coach (in any part of this blog, but especially in this section) but my team specifically helps our students to feel and process their most uncomfortable emotions. We do not fear any emotion nor any response from our students or community members because we take responsibility for our own emotions, and we teach others how to do the same.
The way I’m personally interpreting this concern is thus: “By telling people their bodies are deserving of acceptance and respect, you’re preventing them from feeling badly about their bodies.”
If that’s the case, then yes, that’s exactly my goal. I don’t believe anyone deserves to feel shame for the way their body looks, for any reason.
The addition I’m interpreting this concern with is: “If fat people don’t feel bad about the way their body looks, they won’t be motivated to change.”
And that’s where I have a BIG problem.
I am not okay with body shaming, concern trolling, or telling someone else what they should do with their body. And, even if you could tell how healthy someone was based on how they looked, it would not be my place to tell them to change, nor would it work, because people will only change their behavior when they’re ready.
“If we accept fat bodies, people will be okay being unhealthy.”
First things first, you can’t accurately judge someone’s health based on their weight, because you cannot see their blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar and hormone levels, or mental health, to name a few key indicators.
In the words of Refinery29 columnist Kelsey Miller:
“You can't see my lifestyle in this photo. You cannot see the 45-minute treadmill workout that I did on the morning of this shoot. You cannot see the eggs and tomato on toast that I had for breakfast, or the chicken-pesto wrap I had for lunch.
You cannot see my average alcohol consumption, whether or not I smoke, any drug use, my mental health, or my family history in this photo. And, you certainly cannot see my medical records.”
The photo Kelsey posted received a slew of comments saying things like:
"It's great that she's so confident, but I'm worried about her blood sugar."
"I don't judge fat people. But, I judge the idea that being unhealthy and dying young is ok."
"I hope she gets help soon. She looks cute, but I can't stand behind this unhealthy lifestyle."
Comments like the above are examples of ‘concern trolling’, in which rather than outright insulting a person, a commenter expresses concern for a person’s well-being. Except that rather than being helpful, concern trolling over a person’s weight reinforces the false belief that you can tell someone’s health from their photos. And, it reinforces the desire to control other people’s bodies.
Even if your health was perfectly correlated with your weight, evidence shows that fat-shaming doesn’t work. However, if you are truly concerned with people’s health, helping them to feel more self-acceptance and self-compassion CAN encourage health-promoting behaviors.
Generating positive change on a societal level begins with you believing that all bodies are worthy, all bodies deserve respect, and believing in bodily autonomy—not everyone wants to prioritize health and fitness, and not everyone who is in a larger body needs to lose weight.
“Stupid advice.”
Here’s one I’m including as a bonus because I found the response funny, inspired by a recent post from a colleague of mine.
A video she posted showed her eating a scone and drinking a coffee after a workout, while communicating in a humorous and sarcastic fashion that there was no need to stress about consuming a protein shake immediately post-workout. This post was misunderstood by a fitness coach who wrote it off as “stupid advice.”
I believe the primary reason for his confusion was because he interpreted the advice as if it were applicable to everyone at every stage. However, this particular video, along with the rest of my colleague’s content, was not directed at athletes looking to obtain a slight advantage in building muscle, like his audience.
The video was directed at women recovering from binge eating—an audience for whom there is a clear advantage NOT to stress about what and when to eat after a workout—because it’s far more important that they move in the first place and diminish obsessive thoughts about peri-workout nutrition.
It’s important to keep in mind that people are going to be all over the map when it comes to their relationships with food, and thus the strategies that will be appropriate and effective for them.
Some people may be able to track their food with no problems. That doesn’t mean your program isn’t harmful for some, exacerbating disordered eating behaviors, or worsening their body image.
People will have vastly different exercise intensity goals, which will change their nutritional needs, and how you go about assisting them.
For some people, such as those in recovery from eating disorders, it would be extremely counterproductive to encourage them to diet regardless of their current size.
These are just a few of the considerations to take in when considering why some nutrition professionals would adopt a different approach than you, whether that approach involves intuitive eating or any other form of listening to your body, forgoing common advice about post-workout nutrition, avoiding tracking, avoiding dieting, or anything else.
Personally, I don’t stand firmly in either the diet-promoting or anti-diet camps. Instead, my focus is on facilitating self-awareness, uncovering and integrating intrinsic motivation, and helping individuals reach their physical and mental health goals as defined by them.
However, even though I’m not an intuitive eating practitioner, I still feel aligned with some of the principles, and have found a great deal of value in some parts of the framework.
If you’re interested in learning more so you can help your clients become more connected to their minds and bodies, and get better results from your coaching, I recommend the following:
Read Intuitive Eating and Health at Every Size. Yes, especially if you disagree with the ideas. I thought I disagreed with the HAES movement until I read the book and understood what it’s actually about. While I still do not agree with it entirely, I believe it’s important to understand the core beliefs of the movement. And, I read these because I believe it’s more important to be open to finding new tools that will help my students rather than to be dogmatic in one approach to eating and to have diverse inputs so I can develop a flexible philosophy.
Read The Age of Disconnection, a 3-part article of mine starting here: Food is NOT the Root Cause of Overeating
Check out the Mindset Mastery Mentorship. In MMM, I teach fitness and nutrition professionals evidence-based mindset and mindfulness tools, as well as elements of various therapeutic modalities, to help their clients improve their relationships with food and exercise, body image, and self-worth.