Intuitive eating

“I’ve been dieting for ages – I lose 5 kilos and gain 3 back.” “I track everything I eat and drink in an app on my phone, but somehow I still can’t eat properly.” “I’ve cut out carbs, but I’m dying for some baklava.”

If you find yourself saying things like this, intuitive eating is for you!

Intuitive eating means noticing the hunger and fullness signals your body gives you, and eating according to its needs. At its core it is the opposite of a traditional diet. The basic idea is to eat when you are hungry and stop when you are full. That is easier said than done – most of us want a nice dessert after a good meal, right? So how do we decide whether to trust our intuition and eat, or not?

Recognising your hunger

There are two types of hunger: physical and emotional.

Physical hunger is a biological drive. It sends signals: your blood sugar drops, your stomach rumbles and you feel tired. Just as we cannot decide to breathe less because we have “breathed too much today”, we cannot refuse food when we are physically hungry. Getting hungry and eating is a basic need, just like breathing.

Emotional hunger is driven by emotional needs. Sadness, stress, loneliness, trauma – and sometimes joy – can all trigger cravings. Eating is often followed by guilt, or by a feeling of well-being that does not last.

Once you can recognise which hunger you are feeling, intuitive eating makes it much easier to respond to it.

Making peace with food

Lately, catchy but wrong and absolute statements in the media – “carbohydrates are harmful”, “never drink full-fat milk” – have filled our heads with misinformation about nutrition. But the foods that have kept humankind going for centuries are not our enemies.

To eat intuitively, you need to make peace with food. No food should be labelled as bad, unhealthy, dirty or clean. Eating is an enjoyable activity for all of us, and if we really open our senses and listen to our bodies, we can read their messages much better – and enjoy food without regret.

The most important part of intuitive eating is letting go of unhelpful eating habits and making peace with food. Remember that “I must never eat carbs” is the voice of the diet police, and it feeds black-and-white thinking. Life is a rainbow of colours and emotions – there should be room for grey, too.

Feeling your fullness

Another lesson on this path is learning to feel when you are full. If you grew up being told to finish everything on your plate, you will soon notice how much this goes against intuitive eating. It can make us ignore our sense of fullness – a very simple physiological response – and clear the plate just for the sake of it.

Another unhelpful habit is eating too much out of fear of getting hungry, or eating so fast that the fullness hormone has no time to kick in. To support intuitive eating, pause now and then during a meal and ask yourself: How do I feel right now? How does this taste? Do I want to keep eating?

Emotional eating

Emotional eating is clearly a little harder to change than learning to notice physical fullness, because we first have to learn to deal with our emotions without using food. Food may comfort us at first or help us forget sadness and worry, but it is not a lasting solution. If you cannot solve the problem in that moment, listening to music, going for a walk, talking to a friend or meditating can help you relax and keep you from eating on impulse.

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Intuitive eating was first described by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch in 1995, and in recent years it has become a popular research topic – perhaps because modern life has distanced us from ourselves. I don’t know what future research will reveal about its effects and benefits, but as a dietitian, it has certainly helped me decide whether to have dessert after dinner.