When you’re on a health and healing journey, there are a lot of little decisions that you need to make in terms of lifestyle choices. It can be hard to know what to embrace and what to throw out. I feel like intuitive eating falls into that category of specific topics that seem…healthy…ish. And at that point we can feel quite unsure. Should we try this? Or will it end in a complete dumpster fire?
Intuitive eating, a definition
So if you haven’t heard of intuitive eating, I’ll give you a little overview. There have been studies of children and toddlers where they found that if you give a kid access to an array of healthy foods as well as unhealthy food options and let them eat what and how much they want, that they will be able to eat in a relatively healthy way that meets their needs.
These studies and other similar studies of individuals with healthy lifestyles and weights has led to the idea that maybe we should stop with all of this dieting nonsense that seemingly pushes our society to insanity.
Instead, intuitive eating suggests that you should listen to your body and it will tell you what and how much you need to eat.
Intuitive eating is lovely!
I think at a subconscious level we all would really like the philosophy of intuitive eating to be true. We don’t want to feel like we have to deprive ourselves of things that give us pleasure. Not to mention having a pat on the back and a friendly whisper that “you have all the answers” just feels good. Dieting sucks. Most of us know that already.
We also have cravings, which a lot of the time give us some decent information about what we might be missing in our diets. If, for example, you find yourself really craving cilantro or peaches all of a sudden, you should go out and get them.
Our bodies have a way of remembering where we get certain nutrients from in our diets. And if we start running low on those nutrients, then we’ll start to crave the sources that we know we’ve gotten them from in the past. In this way, the body is very intelligent. It has to be that way, in order to have kept us humans alive for all these years. We had to have some way of knowing what we ought to be pursuing in order to survive and thrive.
The problem
The thing about this natural instinct is that it’s just that, a natural instinct. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: our natural instincts don’t help us out much in life. What I’m saying is that this natural craving system was great when we were living in the wilderness, foraging for fruits and herbs and hunting the animals.
Heck, it was even a decent system towards the beginning of civilization when we got agriculture started up. We craved barley, if we had access to barley, we ate barley. (And so on and so forth.) Since most of the population didn’t have access to more calorically dense and more processed food, they were generally healthy weighted individuals. Not people the the bodies of Greek gods, but still.
The thing is, we’ve come so far from that old simple system of food. Options with sky high caloric density are abounding for us, and much of our foods are made in labs now, instead of by people. Our natural instincts were never meant to navigate this food climate.
Processed foods have a way of hijacking your natural biological reactions to food. They can bring you a greater pleasure signal than more whole or natural foods, and can easily make “healthy foods” seem just plain boring. They change your tastebuds and dull your senses to what you might consider the real tastes of food. And you become more of a chaser of the next food high. All the while, you’re not getting the nutrients you need, because your food doesn’t have them.
Dangerous for some
Now, if you’re interested in or affected by the subject of eating disorders, you might want to check out some of my previous posts about them like eating disorder misconceptions. But it’s not a new topic on this blog to bring up that some people don’t have healthy relationships with food. And for these people, I think encouraging intuitive eating can be disastrous.
If you tell an anorexic to eat what they feel like until they’re full, they won’t eat. Or they won’t eat enough. Or they won’t eat a varied enough diet. And it’s not just anorexics. A lot of us have problems with portion control, how we view food and how we interact with our bodies in terms of caring for them. If you try to take care of yourself intuitively without having any sort of training or idea of what might be healthy, you’ll fail.
I think the danger of intuitive eating comes when we convince ourselves of something unhealthy being healthy. Whether that be an excess or a deprivation or just an avoidance of something we need. And if we convince ourselves that our biases are “right for us”, then we can eat intuitively without having to be healthier or face the fact that we’re not doing what’s in our best interest. But this sort of self trickery is so subtle that often, we don’t realize we’re doing it.
Intuitive eating prerequisites
I think that if you’re going to start intuitive eating, you need to lay a proper groundwork first. If you have an eating disorder, you need to work on restoring balance in your body physically, as well as setting your mind straight. (Eating disorder recovery isn’t easy and will take a while. But that is the first step.)
Once you’ve restored your body to a healthy weight and it’s used to getting the nutrients it needs, the mental part becomes a bit easier because you have the nutritional basis for working your brain proficiently. (Yes, malnutrition gives you limited access to your brain performance potential.)
Working through your cognitive biases against nourishing yourself properly is a battle too. Many of us cope with stress either by rewarding ourselves with food or withholding it. Both of these, especially when done with high frequency and intensity, are unhealthy. And we need to dig into what makes us do that.
If we’re able to at least mostly uproot these habits, the next step is learning about general nutrition. What does your body need to keep going? What does it need to function properly? When we get a good understanding of what our needs are nutritionally and calorically and we get our bodies and minds in a healthy state, then we can start on intuitive eating without fear of catastrophe.
And if you are able to get to this point, yes, you will find a level of health and freedom to all of this. But we need to unlearn our bad habits and arm ourselves with the facts first in order to have a solid place to base your intuition off of. You don’t need to count calories for the rest of your life or track every nutrient you’re getting in your day if you’re armed with a basic understanding of how things work.
Final prognosis
So yes, if you have a solid relationship with food and understanding of nutrition, try intuitive eating and see if it works for you.
If for you intuitive eating might mean eating a baker’s dozen of muffins for breakfast, then you’re not there yet. There’s no shame in that. You can work toward being able to intuitively eat if that’s what you want. But don’t try it before you’re ready and don’t feel like you have to have this as your ultimate goal either. Some people prefer to have a more logical grasp on what they’re eating from day to day, and that’s just as valid an approach.
The key is that when it comes to taking care of ourselves and our bodies, we recognize the role that both emotions and facts play. There is no benefit in downplaying either. And there is no benefit in trying to substitute one for the other. Remember, our ultimate goal here is to have both a healthy mind and body. That’s going to involve a little balance, and more than likely, a lot of learning.
Have you ever tried intuitive eating? Let us know if it was a success or as disaster in the comments below.
