The New York Times Tackles Intuitive Eating

It’s January, and you know what that means. Practically every person on the planet who hasn’t been dieting is now on a New Year’s Resolution diet. Except the people who deliberately don’t diet anymore. Like me. For the last six months, intuitive eating, or at least the principles of “Intuitive Eating,” has been guiding my eating habits.

Last week, the New York Times caught up with authors Elyse Resch and Evelyn Tribole, who wrote “Intuitive Eating” almost 30 years ago. The book, largely credited with launching the anti-diet movement, has since been revised multiple times. The latest edition was released June 2020, so the timing of the article presumably is because it’s January, and the New York Times is seeking a new angle to the annual madness. 

The profile begins with Resch and Tribole at at a West Los Angeles Italian gastro pub, digging into whatever sounds good, including a few bites of dessert. It then launches into Resch and Tribole’s extensive experience in nutrition, where intuitive eating is today, and how it’s been adopted in mainstream culture (alongside the Health at Every Size movement), credited with healing celebrities with eating disorders and even co-opted by celebrities into their own movements. Most crucially, though, it explores how intuitive eating has still largely not been embraced by the medical community. 

As the subhead says, Resch and Tribole’s method of intuitive eating was once considered radical. While it may be the cornerstone of the anti-diet movement, it is still a long way from mainstream. First, let’s acknowledge there are many people in America — too many people — who don’t have plentiful access to food and a multitude of food choices. For these people, intuitive eating isn’t an option. For those of us who do have access to food — particularly my demographic (white, educated, middle-age and female), most of us are still on the never-ending hamster wheel of dieting and our endless quest to fit into an acceptable size.

Also, the health-obsessed among us, as well as much of the medical community, still largely believe you cannot be fit or healthy if you’re overweight, even with evidence to the contrary. As Americans, what does it tell us if we’re some of the fattest people on the planet and yet we’re always on a diet? Something isn’t working. The research tells us that dieting over and over is causing us to get fatter. And yet, most of us continue down this path because of the stigma of being heavier in a thin-obsessed world.

Two things struck me as I read the article. One was how much intuitive eating, from this vantage point, sounded like just another diet. Two was how much Resch and Tribole’s comments felt like a defense.

Intuitive eating is meant to be a framework for eating as naturally as humanly possible. New York Times writer Michelle Ruiz does a good job of outlining its primary tenets:

This includes satiating hunger rather than trying to suppress or outsmart it; feeling your fullness (and pausing mid-meal to assess it); and savoring, even seeking pleasure from, food. Among the other principles are addressing emotional eating, emphasizing movement over “militant exercise” and practicing “gentle nutrition” — minding moderation and balance in one’s diet, but not too harshly.

For those of us who have spent our entire lives on the hamster wheel of dieting and restriction, the core focus is unlearning everything we’ve been taught up until now and then learning to attune to our bodies’ needs. It’s easy to see how this “deprogramming” would be incredibly difficult for most of us, if that’s all that happened. But then you throw in the big unknown — what will happen to my body when I stop dieting? — and you can see how the process becomes even more daunting. (For most people who have been living a life of restriction, there is weight gain at least initially.)

In the article, Tribole says intuitive eating isn’t just “not dieting” and suggests those who aren’t getting it are most likely not practicing all of the principles. To me, that message undermines the complexity of the issues so many of us have with eating, body size and body acceptance. And if intuitive eating is merely a set of “principles” — let’s just call them rules — we have to follow to find food and body happiness, is it not just another diet?

Much of my struggle with intuitive eating in the first six months has been around this. If I’m militantly “feeling my fullness” and checking in with myself throughout my meal and then supposed to stop when I find it, that’s its own form of madness.

I stopped doing it a couple of months ago, thanks to another intuitive eating book, the “F*ck It Diet: Eating Should Be Easy” by Caroline Dooner. I realized that while trying to eat intuitively, what was still driving my behavior was

Getting to 'F*ck It'

this quest to eat only the minimum needed to satisfy my hunger cues. Because I didn’t want to gain weight, which is 100% understandable, but had to be overcome. And that was still keeping me trapped in the diet mentality. 

I suspect this is where a lot of people get tripped up in intuitive eating. We are so programmed to diet, to not trust ourselves. And then for those of us who have been living a life of restriction, we have the added bonus of weight gain, which — let’s face it — sucks, even if it’s temporary (and we don’t really know if it will be temporary). 

One of the biggest challenges that comes from just reading “Intuitive Eating” and not getting additional support (like finding a certified therapist or nutritionist to help guide you or reading the “F*ck It Diet”) is it doesn’t acknowledge just how incredibly hard making this transition is — mentally, emotionally, physically. It’s why I have trouble calling what I’ve been doing “eating intuitively” (I swear, I’m going to find a better name for it). For those of us who have let diets, and the mind games of dieting, rule our lives, letting it all go is incredibly difficult.

I knew it would take me months and realistically years to fully make that transition, which is why I decided to chronicle my experience. I wanted to be able to look back and see my progress and what I was thinking at different stages. For the record, I am feeling my hunger and satiety now, and am much more in tune with those signals and how I feel, but I am not stressing about it every time I eat. And I wouldn’t have gotten to that place just by reading the “Intuitive Eating” book alone, although it has brought me to a greater place of self-acceptance and empowerment.

The struggle is far from over, from a personal standpoint with intuitive eating and from society at large. I am still not sure how best to counter society’s stigma against larger body sizes, other than working on my own biases, seeking out practitioners of Health at Every Size and being an advocate myself.