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That Intuitive Eating Study

  1. Great post Glenys. Wow the researchers really did miss the point!
    -Like you I found it was disturbing that they tried to compare intuitive eating with calorie counting and use weight change as a marker for effectiveness.
    -A 6 week study – in my experience intuitive eating takes much longer.
    -I doubt the authors have skills in eating intuitively themselves let alone teaching other people with potentially complex disordered eating fueled by chronic dieting. I noticed the authors either worked for government (Human Services) or university (mathematics and statistics) so it leads me to make the opinion they are not dietitian’s or other trained clinician to understand and guide the intuitive eating approach.

    • GlenysO says:

      Agreed! I didn’t want to even get into how I thought the instruction in IE was probably inadequate…no proof, but that’s my gut feeling here. The thought seems to be, here’s another fat diet that you can learn in 5 minutes or less…Argh.

  2. This is sadly hilarious. Well written response GlenysO. I will now judge whether or not it was worthwhile for me to read your blog post by determining whether I lost any weight while I was reading it.

  3. kellbrigan says:

    However, the fact that the Tribole & Fiaedp book talks about how IT WORKS!!!! in neon letters on the cover means they are quite happy to profit from hating fat people (even if, in teeny tiny print, they say they don’t somewhere around page 112.) Why aren’t dieticians calling them out on this bullshit? If you’re marketing yourself as a anti-fat bigot diet pusher, you can’t get too upset when people think you’re selling a diet. There is nothing on the cover of that book that says anything about accepting fat people as normal or avoiding weight “loss” attempts, and there is plenty on there that says, “Buy me! I’m the DIET that will finally “WORK!!!!”” Call out these hypocrites on their bullshit. If dieticians did so en masse, they might actually listen. (Because, after all, who cares what fat people think.)

    • GlenysO says:

      I disagree with you on several points here. Where it says “It works” – the book does not say anything about promoting weight loss, at least on the cover. Nor does it present itself as a way to lose weight. There is some suggestion that if you are over your set point weight, that some weight loss may occur if you start to eat more intuitively (that is true and has happened for some people however Tribole and Resch do not claim this as a guaranteed outcome of intuitive eating). There are many people who come to this book with messed up eating (usually thanks to diets) and who find they can normalize their eating through learning to eat intuitively, and I believe that is what the “It works” is referring to.

      As a dietitian, I respect the work that Tribole and Resch have done immensely – they are early pioneers in the dietetics field (along with Ellyn Satter) to reject the idea of dieting and weight loss. I know people who work directly with Elyse Resch – fat people – and she is not anti-fat in any way.
      I have long read the ongoing work of Evelyn Tribole, and there is nothing I’ve ever read that leads me to believe she is anti-fat.

      Many of us non-diet, weight-neutral dietitians base our treatments on their work. I’m thankful for what they’ve done. One thing to be aware of is that HAES and Size Acceptance are two separate things. They go together well, but the work is different – one is a health model and the other is a civil rights issue. So while I think that if one is promoting non-diet philosophy that size acceptance should go hand in hand, you might not always see a lot of writing on that topic. I do feel the the book Intuitive Eating, however, does cover self-acceptance to some degree. I’m simply not seeing where they are coming across as anti-fat. Sorry.

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