IE 11 is not supported. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser.

What is intuitive eating and can it help you lose weight?

The first rule of intuitive eating is to reject the diet mentality, but its principles can still support healthy weight management. A dietitian explains how.

A new year approaching means a new dieting trend (or several) is sure to go viral, and you may find yourself changing what you eat so drastically that there's no way you can keep it up long term. That's why more and more people are trying intuitive eating.

Creators of fad diets want you to believe that following their plan for a few weeks or months will help you drop pounds fast and that the scale won't creep back up when you go back to your old lifestyle. But that's not how the human body works.

In fact, about 80% of people who lose weight eventually gain it back, according to the Endocrine Society. And it's well-researched that your body weight going up and down — aka yo-yo dieting — can harm you mentally and physically.

So this year, why not give yourself a break intuitive eating instead of a diet? Intuitive eating will teach you to better listen to what your body needs and be realistic with your health and weight goals.

What is intuitive eating?

Intuitive eating is an approach to eating that has no restrictions on what you can eat or how much and is instead rooted in 10 principles designed to help you meet your nutritional and movement needs and learn to love your body. Done right, intuitive eating can change a person's relationship with food to be more about overall health and less about judgement and demonizing.

In terms of how it's practiced, intuitive eating is pretty much the opposite of a diet because there's no counting calories, eliminating foods or watching the numbers on the scale. Intuitive eating is the brainchild of registered dietitian Evelyn Tribole and nutrition therapist Elyse Resch, who wrote the 1995 book "Intuitive Eating," the first time the phrase was used.

The 10 principles of intuitive eating are:

Read on to learn more about the principles of intuitive eating.

The 10 principles of intuitive eating

These 10 principles of intuitive eating are intended to help you reframe your relationship to food, your body and exercise.

Principle #1: Reject the diet mentality

This principle encourages intuitive eaters to move away from the mindset that you need to restrict yourself to be healthy or punish yourself to lose weight, and to question why you feel certain ways about food. For some people, that may mean ditching the goal of weight loss altogether.

That said, diet culture is so ingrained in society, especially for women, so it can take years to learn to practice this principle. “Rejecting diet mentality is an ongoing lifetime habit,” said Willow Jarosh, a registered dietitian and certified intuitive eating counselor.

Luckily, intuitive eating doesn't have a timeline by which you need to learn to principles, so you can take as long as you need.

Principle #2: Honor your hunger

Everyone is born knowing when they feel hungry or full, but as you age, societal factors, like being told to clean your plate or the people around you dieting, can make it harder to interpret what your body is telling you. That's why you may need to relearn these internal cues and how to be mindful of what and how much you eat.

If you're very hungry one day, the intuitive eating approach says that it's OK to eat more that day because you'll also have days in life where you'll be less hungry and therefore eat less. When you're able to notice your hunger and respond appropriately with food that nourishes your body, it can be a powerful tool, even for weight loss.

Principle #3: Make peace with food

A core tenet of intuitive eating is that there's no such thing as "good" or "bad" food (hence why you don't cut anything out in its entirety if you don't want to). Food is an important part of life, both for enjoyment and connection, as well as physical sustainment. Intuitive eating encourages you to be friends with your food.

Principle #4: Challenge the food police

You likely have someone in your life who comments on what you eat and how much or is a big calorie counter. In order to start intuitive eating, you'll need to ask these people to stop doing so as you rebuild your relationship to food. They may have good intentions and think that they're just encouraging you to eat healthy, but internalizing how someone else views food can make it harder for you to follow your own intuition.

Simply tell them that you're trying to change the way you think about food and they shouldn't track or voice anything about your eating habits.

Principle #5: Discover the satisfaction factor

This principle is a reminder that food is inherently nourishing and that we feel a sense satisfaction when we are full or when we taste something delicious. Many of us have been tamping down those feelings of satisfaction so long in service to diet culture and the food police that we've all but forgotten them. This principle encourages your to get back in touch with the pleasure of eating and to notice when you've had enough, not according to some prescribed methodology, but because you feel an internal sense of satisfaction.

Principle #6: Feel your fullness

Sometimes we get so concerned with the idea of eating that we don't even notice how it feels. Have you ever found yourself staring down the empty bottom of a tub of ice cream and wondered how you got there? That's because we spend a lot of time checked out from the signals that our bodies are sending us — signals that tell us when we're enjoying something (see #5) and when we've had enough.

This principle is all about pausing while we eat to check in with how full we are. Some of us have taught our bodies to ignore the feeling of fullness because we associate it with doing something wrong. But once we let go of the idea that being full is bad or wrong, we can start to tap into the pleasure of it — and the natural limits of our appetites.

Principle #7: Cope with your emotions with kindness

Eating can be emotional. Sometimes we try to feed our feelings with food, and sometimes we beat ourselves up for how we relate to food and hunger. This principle encourages us to be kinder to ourselves on both counts. It’s natural to turn to food when you’ve had a rough day or feel burnt out, but it’s important to examine the reasons why you may be doing this.

Emotional eating can keep you from reaching a healthier weight — and it can also keep you unhappy because eating doesn't actually change the complexity of our lives. It’s important to recognize that eating because you’re bored, depressed, anxious or stressed won’t help you fix the things that are actually causing those feelings.

To identify the difference between emotional hunger and physical hunger, it can be helpful to pause and ask yourself questions like “Am I hungry?” or “What am I asking food to do for me?” Once you understand the motivation driving you to eat, you can find ways to address the real problem. Calling a friend, listening to music or going for a walk may end up being better solutions. Above all else, be kind to yourself.

Principle #8: Respect your body

In our appearance-obsessed world, it's hard not to try to cobble together self-esteem based on what other people think of us and how well we think we conform to beauty ideals. But that's not a respectful way to treat our bodies. No matter how we look, our bodies literally carry us through our lives, and that is worth our respect.

Our bodies are inherently valuable and this principle requires us to look past what society values — in this case, thinness — and develop a sense of gratitude for all our bodies do for us. They may appear to us as imperfect, but all bodies deserve our respect, and we owe it to ourselves to offer it.

Principle #9: Movement — Feel the difference

Exercise and movement are one of our most natural and innate sources of joy. That's not hyperbole — exercising instructs our bodies to make the hormones and neurotransmitters that make us feel happy. Even a little bit of movement can improve our mood — but only if we're paying attention. This principle invites us to notice the affects of movement on how we feel instead of zoning out and mindlessly counting steps without feeling them.

Principle #10: Honor your health with gentle nutrition

This principle encourages us to take a gentle approach to the idea of nutrition. Instead of setting unrealistic health goals — like cutting whole food groups out of your diet — a gentle approach to nutrition allows for both luxuries and missteps. Of course we all need to meet our bodies' daily nutritional requirements, but none of us does it perfectly and expecting perfection sets us up for disappointment. Instead we can allow for flexibility and change in our eating and strive to meet our nutritional goals without a punitive attitude.

Can intuitive eating help you lose weight?

What if you want to enjoy this healthy and flexible relationship with food and your body — and lose weight? Can intuitive eating help? The answer is a firm maybe.

In a recent study, researchers looked at 10 studies that tracked the eating habits of 1,491 participants. Some of the participants used intuitive eating principles and some followed traditional diets. What the researchers found was that intuitive eaters lost about the same amount of weight as people on other diets. But, participants who ate intuitively did lose more weight than individuals who didn’t change their eating habits at all.

Basically, intuitive eating does not necessarily lead to weight loss, but it can. That makes sense, since weight loss isn’t the goal of intuitive eating. And to boot, researchers have found a lot of other benefits associated with intuitive eating.

Benefits of intuitive eating

One of the biggest benefits of intuitive eating is the mindset shift. Proponents of intuitive eating believe that the very idea of dieting traps you into a pattern of all-or-nothing thinking — you’re either on a diet or off, ate well or ate poorly, were good for going to the gym or bad for skipping it. These thought patterns are pervasive and, according to Jarosh, we all live with diet culture in our atmosphere.

“We’re told we need to look a certain way to be valuable in society,” said Jarosh. “There’s a whole lot of pressure put on us on a daily basis.” Instead, intuitive eating strongly discourages efforts to lose weight. It’s about respecting the body you have and trying to feel good about yourself at any size, shape or weight.

If you believe that healthy weight management is different from dieting — as I do — intuitive eating principles may be helpful. Healthy weight management is about finding a sane and sustainable weight and establishing a healthy relationship with food and your body. This involves learning a set of skills to help guide decisions around your eating and lifestyle habits.

And there is solid clinical evidence that those who practice intuitive eating do develop healthy psychological characteristics. One recent study determined that intuitive eating is correlated with better mental health and a reduced risk of disordered eating. Some of the benefits that another study found were: positive body image, increased self esteem and a greater sense of wellbeing.

It’s worth noting that those kind of mental health boons can really make an impact on a person’s quality of life. In fact, some studies suggest that body image is a major part of overall life satisfaction.

The bottom line

Whether or not you can use intuitive eating principles to lose weight really boils down to what impact it would have on your emotional health. “If your goal is totally related to your weight,” said Jarosh, “then it can prevent you from exploring sustainable ways to be healthier.”

If weight loss feels stressful or punitive, or prevents you from practicing healthier behaviors — even when they don’t produce weight loss — or if you find yourself engaging in any form of disordered behavior around food or exercise, then it may be a good idea to go with the traditional intuitive eating mindset and reject the notion of weight loss entirely. 

If you can get with the notion that healthy weight management isn’t about producing eye-popping results, then the skills you gain from intuitive eating may be able to help you reach a healthier weight — whatever that may be for your individual body. Instead of being either on or off of a diet, managing your weight means taking care of yourself by developing healthy habits — including eating well —but also enjoying certain foods just because you like them.