If you’ve been on the internet lately, you may have heard of a new eating trend called intuitive eating. In the muddle of seemingly never-ending diet fads and quick ways to get skinny, it can be challenging to tell which eating habits are actually good for you. Studies on intuitive eating have shown that it can improve self-esteem and well-being. Intuitive eaters in the studies also had body mass indexes. Can this be the new miracle for obsessive dieters and unhealthy relationships with food?
Intuitive eating can be described as a “non-diet approach to health and wellness.” The goal of intuitive eating is to break common unhealthy eating habits, such as binge eating, starvation, using food as a reward and withholding or eliminating certain foods. It is meant to help you develop a healthy relationship with food in a way that is not restricting or unhealthy and stop the dieting cycle. Intuitive eating itself is not meant to necessarily be a “diet,” but instead a long-term mindset to eating based off one’s needs and health goals. Intuitive eating is meant to help you make peace with food and allow yourself to give into hunger. It is about listening to your body, not the restrictive diet you’ve been following.
Rather than eliminating unhealthy foods from your diet and counting calories, intuitive eating is eating foods that you crave so that you do not binge later. For example, if you’re craving a cheeseburger, you can eat a cheeseburger. You don’t try to find healthier versions of a cheeseburger or restrict yourself from eating them. The mindset is that if you give into this craving and eat the cheeseburger, you won’t develop an unhealthy habit with cheeseburgers (and other unhealthy foods) and eat multiple cheeseburgers later.
While this style of unstructured eating could help break your unhealthy dieting habits, some structure isn’t bad. If you try intuitive eating and notice you have been eating a lot of unhealthy foods, working some healthy foods into your diet is beneficial. It should be a balance and you should listen to what your body needs for healthy functioning. You should also be careful when you choose to eat an unhealthy food. Are you eating it because you want to eat it, or is it because you want to eat the unhealthy food to cope with emotions? Some diet structure isn’t bad, but you shouldn’t obsess over it. You should still make sure to eat foods that meet your nutritional needs and make you feel good, you just shouldn’t be obsessing over calories. Exercise is also an important part of this style of eating. Instead of finding the workouts that will burn the most fat and calories, you should be finding activities that you love doing. Working out shouldn’t be an intolerable chore, you should have fun and enjoy whatever it is you love doing to stay healthy.
Intuitive eating is also meant to eliminate guilt. When you’re surrounded with advertisements for fad diets immediately followed by fast food advertisements, it’s no wonder so many people have unhealthy relationships with food and exercise today. When you don’t feel guilty or obsessive about your eating habits, it helps remove feelings of stress, anxiety and failure when you aren’t eating completely healthy. It is common to turn to food to cope with emotions or use it as a reward system. When you stop using food to deal with stress and eat what you want to eat when you want to, it can help improve your relationship with food.
Eating should be enjoyable and make you feel good. You need food to survive and sometimes you really want that cookie. Intuitive eating is the idea that while you should prioritize healthy eating and workouts you love. You should pay more attention to how you feel and focus on health habits that make you happy.