I think a question people contemplating giving up dieting might ask is, “But what if I get fat?” I think it’s a good question and it doesn’t really get talked about enough in the intuitive eating world, in my opinion.

Had I asked myself that question at the time I stopped dieting – but what if I get fat? – I’m not sure what the answer would have been. I was definitely not in a fat acceptance headspace for myself at that moment. For others? Sure! For me…uh….no. All I knew is that my dieting and the quality of life it gave me was not sustainable or enjoyable and almost anything would be better, including whatever consequences of not-dieting might be.

And so yes, after a number of years of not-dieting, I did get fat again (I ended up being a small fat person). It seemed inconceivable that just eating in a slightly more relaxed way – the way I ate throughout most of my 20s! – would cause my weight to suddenly and dramatically go up, and yet up it went. Every year was another 10 pounds gained until I arrived at an even higher weight than where I had started. Any sort of weight stability was not achieved for many years, but eventually it happened – nowhere near where I thought it would.

Why on earth, one might ask, would anyone give up dieting if they are “successfully” maintaining a lower body weight? Good question. Well, that person might feel the way I did – that dieting had taken over their lives and they are no longer fully themselves. Or they might be sick of fighting constant food cravings. Or being hungry all the time. Or fearing food. Or someone might have an eating disorder that is threatening their lives. Everyone is different and I respect any and all reasons to give up dieting – or to keep it up if that’s what feels right.

But for those wanting to say goodbye to dieting, what can you expect if you give up dieting? If you were originally a heavier person and you’ve been maintaining a lower weight than your natural body weight…yes, you might gain weight once you start to eat more intuitively. If you’ve been suppressing your natural hunger cues for a long time, you’ve sent your body a message: there is not enough food available in your environment. Your body responds by becoming very efficient at storing energy – i.e., hanging onto fat. This is also why dieting often yields fast weight loss results initially, but then slow down and eventually stop (and then reverse) the longer the diet continues. It’s just your body trying to save your life in a perceived famine.

If you’re one of those folks who gains weight, you’ll likely have some body acceptance homework to do to feel even a little okay about this. I’ve talked recently about how this isn’t easy, but is totally worth it. While you might have heard a lot of kudos for your weight loss – the ubiquitous “You look great, did you lose weight?” – unfortunately, the way society currently operates, you won’t hear the opposite: “Omigod, you look amazing, did you gain weight??” On one hand, this kind of sucks! On the other, you realize quickly that relying on the opinions of others for your self-esteem is a no-win game.

Sometimes the only critic you have to contend with is the person looking back at you in the mirror. For me, learning to accept my body started with first being able to see other fat bodies with kind eyes. I poured over fat fashion blogs in awe – these women look fantastic, why did I see fat as ugly for so long?? I stopped seeing weight as a measure of my self-worth. I also decided to focus on what my body could do for me rather than what it looked like. I focused on my behaviors – eating healthfully (and enjoyably) and engaging in movement I liked. Working at appreciating my body was a worthy endeavor — and one that requires some ongoing maintenance -– I’m much more at peace now with myself than I  was on a restrictive diet.

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An article about a recent study popped into my inbox last week. The article describing the study called it the Feast-and-Famine diet.

For a while now, researchers have been able to show an association between fasting in mice and extended lifespan and improvement in age-related diseases. And not just in mice, but in many other species whose lifespans are generally short enough for us to study from beginning to end. Yup, I’ll say it again – calorie restriction seems to extend life in many species. Researchers are now starting to study whether the same is true for humans.

But since even researchers admit that daily fasting isn’t sustainable for most people, intermittent fasting – severe calorie restriction every other day in this case – is being looked at as a viable option to produce the effects of daily fasting. In the study I referenced above, researchers at the University of Florida recruited 24 participants to eat 25% of their caloric needs one day and then 175% of their needs on alternating days for six weeks. After six weeks on the diet (three weeks without antioxidant supplementation and three weeks with), researchers found a “marginal” (their lingo) increase in “SIRT 3, a well-known gene that promotes longevity and is involved in protective cell responses.” They also found a slight a decrease in plasma insulin levels (none of the participants had diabetes). The researchers also determined that, after only six weeks, the “intermittent fasting dieting paradigm is acceptable in healthy individuals.” It’s not clear what criteria they used to determine acceptability.

Never mind that six weeks is a ridiculously short time to determine whether a diet will have long-term adverse effects, is sustainable for most people, or that a small increase in a gene that is associated with longevity will actually produce longevity or to what degree…never mind all that. Let’s say it all works and maybe you’ll live a few years longer.

Now you’ve decided you want to take a gamble on longer life and you’ll take a stab at this diet. So on one day you eat 650 calories, and on the next you eat 4,550 calories. Rinse and repeat ad nauseam. How much of your time, on a daily basis, is now devoted to getting this diet right? Study participants reported that they actually had a harder time meeting the intake requirements on the feast days. What if you’re not hungry on feast day? What if you’re really really hungry on famine day?? And do I get more years in my 20s or 30s? Or just tacked on to the end, in my 70s or 80s?

And now let’s talk about those mice. It’s easy to put them on a fasting diet, because we didn’t ask their opinion about how they wanted to eat and we gave them only what was allowed. But people aren’t mice. We live in a world where we go to work, raise children, drive by McDonald’s, experience joy and stress, share food with loved ones…I don’t want to judge, but I’m pretty sure the daily life of a mouse is not quite as complex as that of a human. I’m willing to bet that if we took those mice out of the cage and let them have at it on the kitchen table after a 9 year-old’s birthday party, very few would choose to fast over hoovering every last cake crumb. I’ve had some up-close-and-personal experiences with free-range mice in my lifetime and they are remorseless in their eating habits. So this isn’t even a sustainable diet for your average house mouse when you think about it.

It’s really too soon to see how all of this calorie restriction is going to play out in humans. We need to study people long enough to:

1. Get to the end of their lives to see if they actually lived longer or suffered fewer diseases, and
2. See if more than a tiny of fraction of people are able to live their lives on this diet.

UCSF has already done some research in this area, check it out here. Fun fact: one of my friends was in the control group!

In the meantime, I’ll stick to listening to my internal cues of hunger and satiety to guide my nutrition. Because even if intermittent fasting could give me a longer life, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t enjoy any of it. I’m sure any mouse would agree.

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I frequently talk to people about food and eating, sometimes because I am a dietitian, sometimes because we live in a culture that obsesses about food and eating. Often I’ve heard this: “I don’t have a limit when I’m eating. I just won’t stop if I don’t force myself to. ”

To this I say: bunk. It just feels like that.

Everyone has a stopping point*. You might not think so because maybe you, like I did at one point, have stood beside the cheese tray at a cocktail party scarfing ungodly amounts of mediocre cheese cubes fearing you’ll never stop. Maybe you did eventually stop at that “I’m gonna burst!” point and regretted the whole ordeal. And maybe you simply don’t know your stopping point, as I did not, because you are hungry much of the time…so very, very hungry.

Here’s a little secret: dieting and calorie and food restriction create a false impression in your body that you are a bottomless pit. That you are a well that will never be filled, especially when you are confronted by a favorite or particularly delicious (or sometimes even mediocre) food. Maintaining a body weight lower than what is natural for you will also cause your body to constantly crave food, large amounts of it.

On the flip side, honoring your appetite has the opposite effect. Once you begin to eat satisfying amounts of food when you feel hungry and your body weight adjusts toward its natural set point, your bottomless pit starts to find its bottom. As you practice honoring internal cues more often, you may start to find that your stopping point is not, in fact, stuffed but satisfied. You may even find yourself easily leaving food on the plate, or turning down the offer of a homemade brownie if you are simply not hungry for it.

My bottomless-pit acquaintances are incredulous when I suggest that they do have stopping points. They don’t trust their bodies. Some are invested in maintaining a certain external appearance and don’t feel their natural appetite will support their desired size. I sympathize. I was once a bottomless pit too. But I became sick of being ruled by food and by fear of the cheese tray. I became tired of living my life solely to support a certain body size when there were so many other interesting things to do. When I started truly honoring my internal signals of hunger and satisfaction, I no longer had fearsome insatiable cravings. Yes I gained some weight, but I began to lose the fear that had driven my need for a smaller body size; honoring my appetite came from a place of love and, for me, was the truest act of self-care.

If you, too, have become weary of being ruled by food, you can take some baby steps now toward honoring your hunger and eating more intuitively:

1. Make a delicious meal for yourself. Make sure there is enough of everything for seconds if you want them. Before the meal, give yourself full permission to eat as much as you desire…which may or may not include second helpings. Stop to occasionally check in with your gut – do you feel satisfied? Hungry for more? Be curious, not judgmental, with yourself in this exercise.
2. Stock one of the foods you are afraid of overeating in your cupboards. Buy enough that you feel confident you won’t run out and then give yourself permission to eat as much of that food whenever you want. People have expressed disbelief to me over this one; they think they will never be able to stop eating that food. Trust me, you might eat a lot at first, but even the best ice cream gets tired very quickly.
3. Try using the hunger scale to assess your readiness to eat and to explore your satisfaction point. I love this one from Green Mountain at Fox Run. Aim for 3 to start eating and 7 to stop.

Eating what you want and as much as you want may feel scary at first. As your body adjusts, that fear may turn to comfort as you realize you are taking care of yourself and your needs and you no longer have to fear your own bottomless pit.

*Sufferers of Prader-Willi Syndrome excepted.

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I’ll admit I’m a little behind on new diet fads. I just heard about a “new” one which has been around for about a year now.

The book I Quit Sugar by Sarah Wilson (no link here due to selling of weight loss) debuted last year but appears to be finally gaining some real momentum in the blogosphere. I haven’t read the book but I did spend some time on Ms. Wilson’s website on which she shares her sugar-quitting origin story. Long story short: Ms. Wilson has Hashimoto’s disease, an autoimmune disorder in which the body attacks the thyroid gland, and after she quit eating sugar (emphasis appears to be on fructose) her symptoms improved and she felt better. She also lost the weight she had gained with the onset of the disease (weight gain is a common symptom of Hashimoto’s). She then wrote a book about it inviting others to take her 8-week challenge to quit sugar to “lose weight; boost energy; and improve your looks, mood, and overall health” according to the Amazon description.

If Ms. Wilson’s condition improved because of changes she made in her diet, I think that is awesome. Perhaps this information could also help others with similar problems, although I don’t believe there is much reliable evidence at this time to show how completely eliminating sugar from one’s diet vastly improves various diseases or conditions (in fact we’ve found that even diabetics can incorporate some sugar into their diets while still maintaining good blood sugar control). I am aware, however, that people are highly individual and that some dietary changes will work for some and not for others. Often it is a matter of experimentation on the part of the individual to find out what works best.

What bothers me about this sugar-quitting trend is the emphasis on weight loss. In fact, the short Amazon blurb refers to weight or weight loss no less than three times. So is this diet about feeling better or getting thinner? Those two things don’t always run hand-in-hand. While I’ll never deny that quitting sugar could make some people feel better, its chances of producing long-term weight loss are no better than any other diet – 5% of people will succeed, 95% will fail. There is no evidence that it will do better than this for long-term results.

All of this reminds me of the time I quit sugar. Twenty years ago I had just moved to a big city and worked at a small company that had no problems abusing my time and good work ethic, and I frequently worked 10-12 hours a day. I was living in my aunt and uncle’s basement temporarily and I wasn’t cooking as much as I normally did so I wouldn’t disturb them. More than once I remember eating three cookies for dinner before passing out early for bed. In general I was super-stressed and tired and my diet was lacking. After a few months of this, I started to develop a few unpleasant symptoms that, after numerous visits to the doctor, seemed to have no apparent medical cause.

I turned to alternative medicine to find relief. Based on some books I read, I thought eliminating the sugar in my diet was worth a try. I managed it easily for about a month. I also tried to limit refined grains. Some of my symptoms improved. Some of them lingered longer but eventually went away after a few months. And yes, I inadvertently lost 5 pounds.

Other things changed too. I got faster at my job and didn’t have to spend quite so many hours there. I got my own apartment and cooked for myself more often. I relaxed more. I made more friends and had more fun. Six months later, my original symptoms resolved (and I gained the 5 pounds back). Despite the fact that I was no longer restricting sugar as much, I was convinced sugar had been responsible for my symptoms. And I was secretly thrilled I’d found another way to tip the scales in the downward direction if needed.

Unfortunately, a by-product of eliminating sugar was an intense desire for sweets whenever they were available. In the initial sugar-quitting stages I did not crave sugar at all, but within a month or so, if a sugary treat showed up in my office (as it often did), you can bet I wanted as much of that thing as I could get. Avoiding sugar became a full-time job of fighting my cravings. Because you know what? I like sugar! Maybe not all the time…but yeah, once in a while a well-placed Oreo cookie hits the spot. Eliminating sugar was my first real foray into restricting specific foods, and it would only get worse from there.

I’ve never been able to completely eliminate sugar (or any other food group) for more than a month at a time and luckily I’ve never had to for medical reasons (during my darkest dieting days, I sometimes turned to quitting sugar short term to lose weight). Years later I’ve discovered that those unpleasant symptoms arise when I am – surprise! – really stressed out and exhausted. It turns out I needed more than just a diet intervention – I needed a whole lifestyle intervention! I no longer eliminate any foods, and because of this I don’t overeat on any type of food. I aim for a diet balanced between healthy and pleasurable. I’m under no illusion that sugar is a health food – I am a dietitian after all – but completely eliminating foods I enjoy was not a sustainable action for me in the absence of serious health problems and ultimately lead to worse eating behaviors.

I tell this story to illustrate a point: Sometimes diet interventions help improve health issues. Sometimes focusing on food masks deeper problems. Sometimes eliminating foods results in an inadvertent weight loss (and usually that weight comes back). Of course I’m going to say it: sometimes food elimination ends up being just another diet to lose weight intentionally. And we know about the effectiveness of weight loss diets.

I hope for anyone with a medical problem or health issue that your experimentation with food elimination is fruitful and brings relief. For the rest of us just thinking about weight loss, stop and ask yourself if food elimination is a practical, sustainable model for you and know that one more disguised diet might not bring you any closer to your dream weight or to a healthy relationship with eating.

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I want to tell you my diet story to give you some context for why I am such a supporter of Health at Every Size®. I’ve met enough people now to know that my story, while not completely typical, is also not that unique among people who have lost or attempted to lose weight.

I walked into my first Weight Watchers meeting at age 22. I’d never officially dieted before, though occasionally I casually ate the way I thought a dieting person should, giving up or eating more of this food or that but never with much conviction. Now and again I’d furiously do leg lifts or aerobic workouts and once I did so many squats I strained my quads bad enough that I couldn’t sit or stand without help for a week. But I never really dieted officially and I had never lost any weight. I was a chubby girl, but at the time I definitely thought of myself as fat. Sometimes even too fat.

When I joined Weight Watchers, I didn’t have the greatest of diet habits, the origins of which I’ve discussed here. I overate often, I ate when I was bored or anxious or sad or happy, I ate large quantities of very rich food when I wasn’t hungry, and I didn’t have a clue what hungry or satisfied meant in terms of eating. I was gaining weight and outgrowing all my clothes rapidly. Most importantly, there was a lot of turmoil in my life at the time: my mother was dying, I was unemployed, and I still felt utterly lost in adulthood two years after college. I kinda just needed something to make me feel better. Weight Watchers, I thought, could be the answer.

Within 6 months, I had lost 30 pounds nearly effortlessly. It had felt so easy. I know now my experience truly wasn’t typical of most dieters. I was eating better, that’s certain. For the first time in my life I was giving myself structured, regular meals, eating more vegetables, cooking for myself and not overeating to bursting after each meal. Basically, it was what we like to think of as “good nutrition.” On top of all that, I had found something in my life I felt I could control while everything else seemed to spin wildly out of control.

I believe now that I lost the weight so easily because I started out with such a dysfunctional, disordered way of overeating. I sometimes speculate that had I been given some basic nutrition guidelines, a few recipes and taught to eat intuitively, I might have lost weight anyway. It’s not a useful speculation now but one I engage in ruefully now and again. I kept the weight off for 8 years without too much work.

Here’s the problem: even though I developed some good nutrition habits, I also learned to be a dieter. I learned that restriction, no matter how easy, was what got me results.  Even though I mostly ate foods I wanted to, I still felt guilty about many of them. Even as I hadn’t needed to diet very rigorously, I felt dieting was my way of life. I didn’t know I was one of the very few people who lose weight by dieting and are able to keep it off longer than 5 years so I became the biggest advocate of weight loss dieting I knew.

Eventually I decided that after 8 years of maintaining a steady weight without too much effort (but always with a diet mindset), it was time to finally lose “those last 10 pounds.” I had become, once again, dissatisfied with the way I looked, even though I looked exactly the way after my initial weight loss. Somehow, though, my body just wasn’t right. That’s what dieting teaches us: our bodies are wrong and they can be fixed by changing size. The action needed was obvious: more dieting. I was always good at losing weight, I thought. How should anything be different this time? I’ll just be really serious about it now.

Diet I did. I rejoined Weight Watchers. Here’s where my results do become typical. Within six months, my eating became extremely disordered as I pushed my body to new limits. I eventually developed binge-eating tendencies after such severe restriction. I simultaneously lusted after food and feared it. I became preoccupied with thoughts of food 24/7. I was unhappy all the time, with what I couldn’t eat and with my body’s resistance to losing a measly 10 pounds. Worst of all, I couldn’t maintain this “lifestyle” at all. I struggled for 3 years but eventually regained the 10 pounds and a lot more in the years to come.

My dieting started out easily and innocently. But dieting and the goal of weight loss makes what we are never enough. It makes food more than it needs to be. I wish I had known about and Intuitive Eating at age 22. My guess is that I would have lost some weight but most importantly I would have kept my self-esteem intact while still learning some good eating habits and self care. I would have learned that good nutrition is eating well AND enjoying food AND loving myself.

It’s okay because that’s how it is for me now. If you’ve struggled with diets like I have, I hope you know this is how it can be for you too.

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I sometimes reflect on the path that led me to dieting. I had been a chubby child and a pudgy teen and then finally a somewhat fat young adult. I started my first official diet at age 22. That’s the beginning and end of the story.

Except, really, it isn’t.

Lingering a bit longer on the tale, I look back on my childhood and the way I grew up eating. After my parents broke up, family meal time transitioned from the dining room to the living room (hey, it was the 70s). At the very same time that I ate with alternating anxiety and abandon by myself in front of the TV, my mother experimented with the “egg” diet (I have no idea, but it involved a lot of hard cooked eggs), drank Diet Pepsi and TAB, and ate mostly the scraps left over from my meals stealthily in the kitchen.

Only years later would I put it all together – my mother’s incredibly complicated relationship to food and her body and how it affected her ability to feed me. Stacked like a flip-it book, photos of my mother throughout my childhood would show her body undulating from thin-to-thick over and over again (in one picture, she bears a sad resemblance to an anorexic Karen Carpenter). She had been a naturally slim person most of her young life, yet she doggedly pursued ever elusive holy grails of lower body weights well into her middle years with varying degrees of success. Without fully understanding her experience, I would do the same years later.

Looking even further back, I realize now that my grandmother – Gram – had been just as avid a dieter most of her life. Gram was an old-school glamor gal. She had flashy clothes and loved putting her make-up and high heels on before my Granddad would get home from work. She idolized Hollywood stars and keeping “her figure” was paramount. In glamor shots of her from the 40s, she was gorgeous.

But she was also what they called in those days a little “full-figured” and photos of her over the years show a weight trajectory similar to my mother’s: average sized, thinner, a little heavier, thin again, very thin, fat. I remember that she only picked at meals but ate yogurt like a fiend standing up over the kitchen sink. When she stayed with us for a week every year at Christmas, I never saw her eat a full meal, even though by that time she was very fat. My mother said that for years, Gram always had the latest diet pills in her bathroom cabinet. Her crowded spare bedroom housed all manner of “exercise machines” from the 1950s through the 1970s: a contraption with a massive belt that was supposed to shake the fat from your midsection, an exercise bike, and a hand roller that was supposed to help with push-ups (or so I guessed). She dieted and dieted and only ended up fatter and fatter. Worst of all, she constantly referred disparagingly to herself as a fat old lady, even though my five-year-old self saw only the beautiful, funny, and fabulous creature she was.

Speaking of rollers and contraptions, my mother had a few of her own. Her middle-aged version of exercise was to stand in front of the television while “rolling” her stomach with a rolling pin. Lord knows that thing was never used to actually bake anything. She explained to me that this would rid her stomach of its excess fat. She wore girdles to bed as a “slimming” technique, and in one hilarious moment, devised a “chin strap” to help lift her middle-aged wattle back into a youthful chin (she wore it only once, it was so uncomfortable). I laughed, but I don’t think any of this was particularly fun for her, nor did it seem to make her happier about herself.

A lifetime of dieting left my mother no love of cooking and like many children, I was a picky eater of the meals she made. To supplement what she felt was my in my lack of intake, she allowed me to eat whatever and whenever I wanted. Cookies for breakfast? Sure! A big bowl of ice cream right before dinner? No problem! Mealtimes were unstructured and meal choices were largely up to me (This doesn’t work well for kids. More on this in the future). I know now from comments she made that this was in reaction to how she had suffered on diets and that much of the time she was eating vicariously through me. My mother clearly had no idea how to feed herself or a child, and my body became the reflection of that. I grew outward faster than upward and soon turned into a chubby child with her own complicated relationship to food.

I’ll credit Mom with this: she never, ever put me on a diet. Of the things she might have gotten wrong, this was not one of them. She new that children shouldn’t be put on restrictive food regimens. She became alarmed if I ever mentioned dieting as a teenager and worried that I could become “anorexic” (now I understand why). Despite this warning,  “Do as I say and not as I do” didn’t work for me in the long run and I became a dieter too.

Dieting put down deep roots in my family. I was merely the stem poking above the ground with my measly dieting efforts. I escaped the cycle of restriction and body self-hatred but not without scars. Dieting leaves that kind of legacy wherever it goes.

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Hold on to your hats, folks!  I’m about to say some pretty wild stuff (at least for a dietitian): I don’t think what we eat is all that important.

This is not what I thought for a long time. I once thought food was the most important aspect of our health. I thought if I could just eat virtuously enough, organic enough, local enough, free-range-pastured enough, enough vegetables, fruit and fiber and low enough fat…that I could live forever. Or at least I could live long enough that the end would always remain just safely out of view and I would remain disease free and looking like the age of 33 until the ripe old age of 110.

That was incredibly naïve, of course. It eventually became clear to me that all the good nutrition (or exercise) in the world wasn’t going to prevent the osteoarthritis I was developing in both my big toe joints, nor the near-debilitating ache I felt in my back. Good nutrition wasn’t going to fix troubled relationships or mediocre jobs, and it wouldn’t stop me from turning a year older every single year. The truth of it was that food was actually preventing me from living a healthy life because it was all I focused on.

Because what is health? Is it just eating enough fruits and vegetables? Of course not. Health is comprised of many components: genetics, environment, spiritual life, socioeconomic status, education, stress, relationships, access to health care. Nutrition and exercise are a small part of a big picture. What good is a diet filled with wholesome foods but a life filled with chronic stress? What good is all the exercise in the world if it excludes time to build nurturing relationships? What good is a near-perfect diet when you can’t enjoy it without overwhelming guilt when it isn’t perfect?

(There is a time when food is the most important, however, and it’s when you don’t have enough. People struggling with food insecurity will likely find that food–affording, finding, preparing and eating it–is their number one priority.)

So here’s how I think food and nutrition are important: I think we need to enjoy our food. I think it’s important to have a relaxed attitude toward eating. I know that dieting is not working for us. I think that eating fruits and vegetables can help ward off, but are not guaranteed to prevent, some diseases. I think most of this can be achieved with a non-diet lifestyle. And I think it is equally important to feed our souls with good relationships, feed our minds with knowledge, ease our stress by treating ourselves kindly. Food is a part of our lives, but it cannot be the only part.

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It’s not a diet

Maybe you’re a dieter who wants to give up restrictive eating because you just…can’t…do it…anymore. Or maybe you’re someone who has struggled with overeating for some time. Either way, you’re wondering how you can eat healthier while still feeling relaxed around food. The answer: Intuitive Eating!

Intuitive Eating is a book by registered dietitians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch that teaches the reader how to stop dieting and start looking within for guidance around eating. The 10 principles of Intuitive Eating are:

1. Reject the Diet Mentality
2. Honor Your Hunger
3. Make Peace with Food
4. Challenge the Food Police
5. Respect Your Fullness
6. Discover the Satisfaction Factor
7. Honor Your Feelings Without Using Food
8. Respect Your Body
9. Exercise–Feel the Difference
10. Honor Your Health

Reject Dieting

In my opinion, rejecting dieting mentality and honoring your internal hunger and fullness cues are the core elements of Intuitive Eating. Within the this framework, I believe there is a lot of flexibility (it’s intuitive, after all!) to suit anyone’s needs. Long-time restrictive eaters might benefit more from “demand feeding” – eating whenever you feel hungry for food, even if it is not on a schedule. Some may enjoy a more structured approach, such as having regular breakfast, lunch, dinner and snack times, but within that structure, giving yourself food that you really love and eating as much as you want while honoring hunger and fullness signals.

Others might find yet different ways to eat intuitively. The main point is to not get to that overly hungry, starved place before a meal – the feeling I like to call hangry (yeah, you know it, hungry-angry) – which usually results in eating way too much. The other key is finding that magic stopping point, the one where your stomach says to you, in a very rational voice (which I imagine to sound a lot like KITT, the car from Knight Rider), “That was delicious, and even though I’m not stuffed yet, I really think I’ve had enough.” It sounds easy, but if you’ve been dieting a long time, these are skills you may have to re-learn (we know how to do this as babies). Depending on how long you’ve been ignoring these internal cues, it could take a while to become skillful at eating intuitively again, but rest assured it is way easier and a lot more enjoyable than counting calories.

What Intuitive Eating is not: Emotional eating. Eating to self-medicate. Eating to meet someone else’s idea of what you should eat. “Letting yourself go.”

The results of Intuitive Eating

What is the result of Intuitive Eating? Well, this is how it has worked for many of my clients

• They can eat whatever they want without feeling instantly guilty.
• They start to eat more variety.
• They enjoy what they eat.
• They stop overeating or bingeing.
• They sometimes leave food on their plates because they are satisfied.
• They can savor a meal at a restaurant without first eating the entire bread basket.
• They enjoy sweets in normal and enjoyable amounts.
• They don’t think about food all day long.
• They can enjoy meals with friends.
• They forget about the ice cream in the freezer.

In other words, they are free from the hold food had on them. And then they are free to live the other aspects of life fully.

I am a certified Intuitive Eating Counselor, so if you want to feel free of the power food has over you, schedule a 30 minute free call and we’ll see what could help.

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So far I’ve talked about not dieting. You might be thinking, well, if diets don’t work, what should I do to be healthy?

While there are many factors that affect health, many of them not entirely within our control, I like to focus on the factors we can influence, namely eating and exercise. The Health at Every Size (HAES®) philosophy helps us to do that. Here are the principles of HAES® from the Association for Size Diversity and Health’s website (sizediversityandhealth.org):

1. Weight Inclusivity: Accept and respect the inherent diversity of body shapes and sizes and reject the idealizing or pathologizing of specific weights.
2. Health Enhancement: Support health policies that improve and equalize access to information and services, and personal practices that improve human well-being, including attention to individual physical, economic, social, spiritual, emotional, and other needs.
3. Respectful Care: Acknowledge our biases, and work to end weight discrimination, weight stigma, and weight bias. Provide information and services from an understanding that socio-economic status, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, and other identities impact weight stigma, and support environments that address these inequities.
4. Eating for Well-being: Promote flexible, individualized eating based on hunger, satiety, nutritional needs, and pleasure, rather than any externally regulated eating plan focused on weight control.
5. Life-Enhancing Movement: Support physical activities that allow people of all sizes, abilities, and interests to engage in enjoyable movement, to the degree that they choose.

If you’ve been living with a diet mindset, this can be a lot to digest (pun intended. Dietitian humor is the worst!). As a long-time dieter, my first reaction was “What?! Not eat for weight control? No way.” As it happens, I was pretty hungry the whole time I was learning about this and I think that’s probably what put the nail in the coffin of my dieting mentality. “You’re right!” I thought. “I don’t have to be hungry to be healthy!” I stopped my self-imposed famine then and there and have been feeding my appetite ever since.

The bottom line here is that HAES® takes the focus away from manipulating weight and puts it on behaviors that support health.

I have met some folks who want to know if they can incorporate HAES® into a weight-loss strategy. The answer is a resounding…no. HAES® and intentional weight loss efforts are mutually exclusive. Weight loss may happen as a result of a HAES® approach as your body seeks its way to a more natural weight for you, but making weight loss a focus of health changes will prevent you from finding peace with eating and self-image. In short, you’ll never get to a non-diet life if you keep focusing on your weight.

While HAES® is the overarching non-diet philosophy, I sometimes feel it doesn’t tell you exactly how to get there if you’ve been floundering in Dietland for a long time. This is where Intuitive Eating (also called attuned eating or normalized eating) comes in. I’ll talk about that in my next post!

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