What Is Intuitive Eating?

As the holiday season approaches, individuals in eating disorder recovery may experience stress, anxiety, and tension around eating and food. Intuitive eating is a mindful food practice that can help ease food-related anxiety and help you navigate the holiday season.

By: Julianna Frank

What is Intuitive Eating? 

Intuitive eating helps heal from the harmful side effects of dieting and diet culture. An intuitive eater makes food choices without experiencing guilt, honors their hunger, respects their fullness, and finds pleasure in eating. Intuitive eating can be especially helpful as an eating disorder recovery goal. 

For many who have an eating disorder, hunger, and fullness cues are altered. Therefore, it is important to remember that intuitive eating is an end goal in recovery, not a place to start. Healing takes time.

Pros of Practicing Intuitive Eating 

Intuitive Eaters have lower 

  • Internalized cultural thin ideal 

  • Triglycerides 

  • Disordered eating 

  • Emotional eating 

  • Self-silencing

Intuitive Eaters have higher 

  • Self-esteem 

  • Wellbeing and optimism

  • Intake of food variety 

  • Body acceptance 

  • HDL or good cholesterol 

  • Interoceptive awareness 

  • Pleasure with eating 

  • Proactive coping 

  • Psychological hardiness

Intuitive Eating Principles

To embrace intuitive eating, it is important to understand the ten core principles. It is important to note that these are principles, not rules, and they can be implemented in any order. Utilizing intuitive eating principles can help you break the eating disorder cycle and find peace and joy with food.

  1. Reject the Diet Mentality - learn to identify and reject diet culture’s messaging in your everyday life. 

  2. Honor Your Hunger - listen when your body signals that it is hungry, and honor it by feeding yourself. 

  3. Make Peace with Food - move forward with the mindset that no foods are off-limits. 

  4. Challenge the “Food Police” - confront, question, and challenge internal or external messaging about the morality of different foods. 

  5. Respect Your Fullness - listen to your fullness cues just as you listen to your hunger cues. 

  6. Discover the Satisfaction Factor - begin choosing foods that are satisfying as well as nourishing. 

  7. Honor Your Feelings Without Using Food - develop healthy coping mechanisms 

  8. Respect Your Body - understand that biologically, your body will fall within a certain size range. Do not try to force it to exist outside of that range. 

  9. Movement: Feel the Difference   

  10. Honor Your Health

Intuitive eating is an excellent goal for those in recovery from an eating disorder. While it may be difficult when you first start, with a solid foundation in recovery, intuitive eating can be a long-lasting framework that you can use to redefine your relationship with food and movement. 

At BALANCE eating disorder treatment center™, our compassionate, highly skilled team of clinicians is trained in diagnosing and treating the spectrum of eating disorders, including anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, compulsive overeating, and other disordered eating behaviors and body image issues. We encourage you to check out our Exploring Intuitive Eating: What You Need to Know Webinar on our YouTube channel. During this webinar, you will explore how intuitive eating can benefit your recovery journey, discover practical tools to apply intuitive eating to your life, and more.  Click here to watch the webinar!

Our admissions team would be happy to answer any questions you may have about our programs and services. Book a free consultation call below, or read more about our philosophy here.

This post was written by BALANCE Admissions Intern Julianna Frank (she/her).

Julianna is a Clinical Social Work Intern at BALANCE eating disorder treatment center™ and a second-year graduate student at the NYU Silver School of Social Work. Julianna is passionate about de-stigmatizing eating disorders and intuitive eating practice, which was sparked by her recovery journey. She is interested in somatic therapy and how our bodies are affected by trauma. In her free time, Julianna loves to read on the beach in the summer, go on walks with friends, watch movies on rainy days, and travel to new places. 

References

“10 Principles of Intuitive Eating.” Intuitive Eating, 19 Dec. 2019, www.intuitiveeating.org/10-principles-of-intuitive-eating/.

Ekern, Baxter. “Intuitive Eating in Eating Disorder Recovery.” Eating Disorder Hope, 16 Feb. 2023, www.eatingdisorderhope.com/blog/intuitive-eating-eating-disorder-recovery-how-use-it.

Eating Disorders, Intuitive EatingAmanda Nussbaumeating disorder, eating disorder recovery, mental health, intuitive eating principles, Intuitive Eating, eating intuitively