What is Intuitive Eating?
Intuitive Eating (IE) is a book written by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, first published in 1995. Both authors are registered dieticians with backgrounds in nutritional counseling, particularly eating disorders. After years of advising clients on diets and eating plans and observing the outcomes, Tribole and Resch concluded: diets don’t work! Studies have shown that diets are not effective for long-term weight loss and ultimately cause the dieter to gain weight.
Intuitive eating focuses on mindfulness. You learn to eat, exercise and experience your body from your own internal cues, such as hunger and fullness, rather than external cues, such as calorie counting and weight scales. As children, we all ate by instinct and intuition. On a diet, you follow the rules of that diet, essentially forcing you to ignore your body’s signals. Intuitive eating helps you tune into your body and relearn those cues. Then you decide what and when you eat.
Intuitively eating balances individual nutritional needs, hunger, satiety, appetite, and pleasure. But intuitive eating isn’t just about eating.
Click here to read the 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating
Health At Every Size (HAES)
Health At Every Size (HAES) is an approach to health and wellness that does not promote thinness but instead embraces diverse body shapes and sizes. The HAES model challenges current scientific and cultural assumptions and instead valuing body knowledge and lived experiences.
Click here for a fact sheet on HAES
Science shows that “obesity” is not the health risk it has been reported to be. BMI is a poor predictor of health, and its use to do so often misses people who truly need intervention. If our health care system applied this science and mindset, it would redirect efforts to ensure health care for people of all sizes without adding to the stigma surrounding obesity.
Click here to find out more about the HAES community
Click here to read more about each of the HAES principles.
Weight set point
The weight “set point” is where our natural weight falls and where our body experiences its ideal balance, also known as homeostasis. A person’s genetic makeup determines their set weight range at which the body performs optimally. Because of this, you meet severe resistance from the body when you try to change this weight range.
When we restrict certain foods or the amount of food we eat to try to lose weight, our bodies don’t like it, and they work to get back to this balance. When we make these changes to our diet, our bodies produce a hormone that makes us think about food all the time and sends signals to our bodies that we are hungry, specifically to work against our weight loss strategy. The overwhelming majority of people gain back all the weight they lose, and most of those people gain even more weight. When we diet this way, we actually increase our weight set point! So, the more we diet, the more we weigh over time.
Click here for more information about weight set point.
Learning to listen to your body and its cues will help you restore your body’s balance at your natural weight. Living at your natural weigh helps protect your health, for example your blood pressure and blood glucose levels.
Obesity paradox
The obesity paradox refers to the science that shows that, even though obesity is thought to be associated with a shorter life expectancy and as a risk-increasing factor for many diseases, people who have experienced a major injury or illness who are in the “overweight” and “mildly obese” BMI ranges have the longest survival times.
In the general population, obesity is associated with increased risk of adverse outcomes. However, studies of patients with chronic disease suggest that overweight and obese patients may paradoxically have better outcomes than lean patients.
In our current health care system, a person’s Body Mass Index, or BMI, is used as a measure of health; however, studies show this to be ineffective, especially because it is applied without regard to a person’s age or risk for certain diseases. It turns out that people with mid-range BMIs actually live longer than those with lower (and higher) BMIs! Health can more accurately be measured by tests and screenings measuring factors like cholesterol, blood glucose, and blood pressure.
Diets make people fatter and unhealthy
Another paradox is that dieting actually makes you fatter and less healthy. Studies have shown that dieting is a consistent predictor of weight gain. When we diet, our bodies go into survival mode because it thinks it is being starved. As a result, you start craving food and your metabolism slows. Every time you diet, the body adjusts, and you gain the weight back. Dieters often feel as though they have failed, but the truth is that the diet was destined to fail them. It seems dieting may actually be the cause of the “obesity epidemic” and not the solution.
REFERENCES
https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2013/12/58356/intuitive-eating
https://www.intuitiveeating.org/
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/486350
https://www.mirror-mirror.org/set.htm
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3186057/
https://elemental.medium.com/the-bizarre-and-racist-history-of-the-bmi-7d8dc2aa33bb
—researched and written by Stevie Johnson, 2018
