Tired of food rules and mixed messages about what and how much to eat? Discover how to eat intuitively by listening to your body’s internal cues.
Watch any baby or toddler as they eat and you’ll see intuitive eating at work.
When hungry, they’ll cry — or, once they’re old enough, will ask for food. They’ll request what they’re craving and stop when they’re full.
Dietitians Evelyn Tribole, RDN, and Elyse Resch, RDN, coined the term “intuitive eating” in their bestselling 1995 book, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach. The philosophy in this book, now in its fourth edition, has become one of the most popular ways for dietitians — and, more importantly, the eaters they consult — to quiet the chatter of the diet craze du jour.
Kara Lydon, RD, LDN, a Boston-based registered dietitian nutritionist, certified intuitive eating counselor, and owner of Kara Lydon Nutrition, tells DailyOM, “Intuitive eating is a journey of getting back to the way we were born to eat. When we were young, we ate when hungry and stopped when full; something we innately felt by listening to our body’s cues. We were not born measuring portions, tracking macros, or counting calories, and we did not pay attention to any external forces telling us what we should or shouldn’t do to be healthy or thin. The drive to eat, or stop eating, was fully intuitive. Finding a way back to those internal cues is a large part of the intuitive eating practice.”
Read on to learn about the 10 principles that are designed to teach us how to eat intuitively, the pros and cons of intuitive eating, and how to get more information about this lifestyle if you decide it’s right for you.
What Is Intuitive Eating?
As we mentioned, our bodies have an innate ability to feel our hunger and judge how much we need to eat. Alissa Rumsey, RD, author of Unapologetic Eating and owner of Alissa Rumsey Nutrition and Wellness, a virtual nutrition counseling practice, tells DailyOM that many adults have become disconnected from these signals — often due to all of the many food rules and mixed messages that diet culture conditions us to believe we need to follow.
Those diet culture messages sneak into our consciousness in subtle yet impactful ways: the tabloid at the supermarket that’s judging a celeb’s weight gain, the juice cleanse ad you see while scrolling through Facebook, even the Instagram “What I eat in a day” post by an influencer that is all too easy to view as THE way to eat.
“Over time, these external messages teach us not to trust our internal cues, and begin to value what others tell us is ‘right’ instead,” Katy Gaston, RD, a non-diet dietitian nutritionist in San Francisco, explains to DailyOM. “We learn not to listen to things like feelings of hunger, fullness, and satisfaction. Then we often begin placing moral judgment on these cues.”
For example, we might start to link hunger or fullness to being “strong” or “gluttonous.”
“Intuitive eating allows people to eat a wide variety of foods, without restriction or guilt, in the amount that their bodies need at any given time,” says Rumsey. “Intuitive eating approaches nutrition from a place of self-care and nourishing our bodies, as opposed to restriction and deprivation.”
Interested in learning more? Check out From Emotional Eating to a Happy, Healthy Life
Is Intuitive Eating the Same as Mindful Eating?
Intuitive eaters allow internal body cues to have a say in what, when, and how much they eat. Without external food rules or a set of limiting diet practices — such as counting calories, measuring or weighing food, restricting certain foods or food groups, and labeling foods as “good” or “bad” — you can listen to what and how much your body wants to consume.
Sometimes people equate intuitive eating with “mindful eating,” which is all about checking in with yourself as you eat and slowing down to be fully present while eating. True, this is one component of intuitive eating, but this lifestyle is about so much more than that, confirms Courtney Vickery, RD, LD, a registered dietitian and certified intuitive eating counselor at Vickery Wellness in Athens, Georgia. When asked, “What is intuitive eating?”, Vickery told DailyOM she likes to refer to it as a self-care eating framework that “helps us not only listen to our hunger and fullness cues, but to truly ‘unlearn’ all of the things that diet culture has taught us. Most people are shocked when they try this process and realize they actually are not ‘addicted’ to certain foods. They were really just restricting the food, which we know leads to overeating that same food — essentially, the ‘last supper’ mentality, which comes from a scarcity mindset.”
The 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating
“Intuitive eating is about listening to what our bodies are trying to tell us through the lens of curiosity and compassion. So that way, we can balance things like eating when we are hungry and stopping when we are full, but also things like eating just for the enjoyment and pleasure of the food,” Gaston says.
Tribole and Resch created the 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating to guide people through this process. In the book, the authors advise that these intuitive eating principles aren’t intended to be followed “as another rigid set of rules.” Hence why these are “principles” and not “laws.”
Here’s a brief summary of the 10 principles.
1. Reject the Diet Mentality: You aren’t a failure if those typical diets and detoxes didn’t work. They’re not designed to — their goal is to keep you coming back to use them time and time again.
2. Honor Your Hunger: Feed your body with enough calories and a mix of all of the macronutrients to build trust in your appetite. Try not to let yourself get excessively hungry, as this might lead to overeating (understandably!).
3. Make Peace with Food: Give yourself 100 percent permission to eat what you want, even foods you previously viewed as “forbidden,” and work to let go of defining foods as “good” or “bad.” Instead, eat what you’re in the mood for. You may even discover some of those formerly forbidden foods aren’t as exciting now that you’ve given yourself the okay to have them if and when you want them.
4. Challenge the Food Police: Try to remove morality from food — in other words, don’t declare a food “good,” “clean,” or “bad” — and don’t allow others to tell you that you’re consuming too much, too little, or the wrong things.
5. Discover the Satisfaction Factor: It’s totally normal — and part of the process of feeling satisfied and content — to allow yourself to feel pleasure in eating. Allowing yourself to experience said pleasure will help you enjoy your meal or snack and be able to tune into when you’ve had enough.
6. Feel Your Fullness: Listen to your body as it tells you when you’re not experiencing hunger anymore.
7. Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness: Food won’t fix feelings of anxiety, stress, loneliness, or boredom. Aim to dive into the source of the emotion itself and seek out kind ways to comfort, distract, or resolve these feelings.
8. Respect Your Body: Not all bodies look the same, and that’s okay. Your body deserves dignity, not comparison to others.
9. Movement — Feel the Difference: Rather than exercising to “work off” what you eat or to punish your body, move in ways that feel energizing, empowering, and/or fun.
10. Honor Your Health — Gentle Nutrition: Try to eat intuitively at meals and snacks by making food choices that honor both your taste buds and your health. That said, know that you don’t have to eat “perfectly” in tune with your body to be a healthy human. Practice makes progress, not perfection.
The Health Benefits of Intuitive Eating
Here’s one of the most compelling pieces of evidence to support the fact that intuitive eating is aligned with our natural eating style: A 2014 meta-analysis in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics found that 92 percent of people stuck with their non-diet behaviors. Compare that to 14 of the most popular diets in America, which admittedly might offer short-term benefits in terms of weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol. All of those benefits disappeared by 12 months, however, per a 2020 study in the British Medical Journal — likely due to the fact that these restrictive plans are unsustainable.
There is a growing body of scientific studies that have found physiological and psychological benefits of intuitive eating, including having more satisfaction with life, decreased cortisol production, lower BMI, increased well-being, improved body image and self-esteem, lower rates of disordered eating and eating disorders, and healthier eating behaviors overall.
“Intuitive eating can really be applied to any lifestyle, and even for those with medical conditions that require them to eat or avoid eating certain foods,” Vickery adds.
The Potential Drawbacks of Intuitive Eating
Still, intuitive eating isn’t for everyone. It certainly is a position of privilege to have more than enough food and time to think of how to approach it. The whole idea of having food freedom assumes you have an abundant amount of food to feel free around.
“For those with limited access to food, not every aspect of intuitive eating might be possible,” Gaston admits, such as honoring your hunger or moving for fun. “I do think the intuitive eating principles can be worked into an overall lifestyle and that the framework can be modified to fit what is realistic for each person.”
Besides access to food, you also need to have access to your brain-body connection to participate in intuitive eating. “Some people with neurodivergence struggle with ‘interoception,’ meaning they may find the ‘listen to your body’ part of intuitive eating challenging. These people may need some external reminders or tools when deciding when to eat,” Rumsey says.
Another intuitive eating criticism is related to the fact that it’s a common prescription for those with a history of eating disorders. While this has been proven by research to work well for many people who have disordered eating tendencies, for some individuals, “the eating disorder might be too strong at the moment and they can’t quite listen to the hunger and fullness cues yet,” Gaston says. “But over time, it is definitely something that we can work toward.”
Beyond these cases, some believe intuitive eating allows for too much wiggle room for emotional eating. (Translation: leaning into certain cravings or quantities more when you’re stressed, depressed, or feeling some other strong emotion.)
True, that doesn’t fall perfectly in line with intuitive eating principle #6 (Feel Your Fullness). But the dietitians we spoke to asked: What’s so bad about that every so often? These are goals and suggestions, after all, not hard and fast guidelines.
“Cooking, baking, and eating are all ways in which we connect with others and care for ourselves and for the people we love. So it makes so much sense that we’d turn to food when trying to soothe ourselves. It can be a great coping tool,” Rumsey says.
Vickery tells her clients that eating can be one of several tools in their toolbox for emotional regulation — just not the only one. “There’s no need to feel guilty about using food for comfort, because it will just lead to more of a guilt-and-shame cycle,” she says. “Know that eating related to emotions is an option, while you also brainstorm ideas of realistic alternatives for how to address these feelings long term.”
The Bottom Line
“Intuitive eating is a framework that can be helpful to every person in some way, though not every principle might be applicable to all,” Rumsey says. “I think of it as one tool that can be used to help people make food choices from a place of care and body respect, rather than trying to control one’s body size.”
If intuitive eating sounds of interest and you’d like personalized guidance, there are plenty of registered dietitians and resources to help you get started.
