Figuring out what to eat is complicated. What are you in the mood for? What do other people in your household want? What can you afford? What do you have time to prepare?
Add the ambient pressure of a culture that loudly celebrates certain foods, bodies and lifestyles as desirable while vilifying others, and the simple question of what to have for dinner becomes fraught.
Experts and “experts” have long hawked various restrictive diets as the solution: try cutting calories, carbs, gluten, white foods or any food that’s uncooked.
Recently, there has been renewed interest in an approach called “intuitive eating”, based on the idea that your body already knows exactly what it needs.
The term was popularized by the registered dietitian nutritionists Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch in their 1995 book Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach. The book has gained popularity in the past decade thanks to the body acceptance and anti-diet movements. The practice has more than a billion mentions on TikTok, and singer Demi Lovato has credited it with helping her recover from disordered eating habits.
What does eating intuitively entail? Is it for everyone? And does eating whatever you want mean only eating junk food for the rest of your life? We asked the experts.
What is intuitive eating?
Intuitive eating is an approach “that focuses on a person’s internal hunger and satiety cues”, says Whitney Linsenmeyer, assistant professor of nutrition at Saint Louis University and a spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.
The focus is on how someone is eating rather than what they’re eating, Linsenmeyer says. There is no eating plan, calorie counting or list of foods that are acceptable or off-limits. You just decide what you want to eat, when and how much.
The practice relies on the body to know what kinds of food and how much it needs to feel good. “It’s about trusting that I don’t need this meal plan to tell me what to eat,” says Linsenmeyer.
Is intuitive eating a diet?
No, says Christyna Johnson, a registered dietitian nutritionist, licensed dietitian and owner of the company Encouraging Nutrition. “It actually is actively working against diet culture,” she says.
Johnson and other experts emphasize that intuitive eating is not a weight-loss approach. It is occasionally presented that way on social media, though, says Michelle Allison, a registered dietitian in Canada.
“People will try to massage it into being about weight loss, because weight loss is something most people want,” she explains. “But that was never the spirit in which it was intended.”
When we eat according to our body’s needs, it may become bigger or smaller than before, or stay the same. Part of the practice of intuitive eating, says Johnson, is accepting the reality of body diversity – the fact that every body will look and function differently.
“We have a body hierarchy that says, these bodies are acceptable, they are desired, they are perfect,” she says. “And everyone that’s below this on the hierarchy – good luck.”
How does intuitive eating work?
Learning how to tune into one’s hunger and satiety cues can be challenging, especially for those who have spent years on restrictive, regimented diets.
“We now live in a world where ideas about food have become so divorced from your lived experience in your body,” Allison says.
Every person’s body and nutritional needs are different, but there are a few intuitive eating guidelines experts recommend. One of the most important is to eat at regular intervals. Allison recommends three meals and a couple of snacks a day, or eating something every three to four hours.
This consistency is important, Allison says, because it teaches our bodies that food will be available. This makes overeating less likely and allows one to feel hunger between meals in a way that is not stressful.
“Trust comes with being consistent, giving yourself food on a regular basis, and not withholding it capriciously or making up new rules along the way,” Allison says.
To learn how to tune into your body’s needs, Linsenmeyer suggests rating your hunger on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being “I’m not hungry at all” and 10 being “I’m very hungry”. She also recommends checking in on your hunger level before, during and after a meal; you should end a meal when “satisfied, but not uncomfortably full”.
If one does overeat and feel uncomfortably full, Allison says it’s important people show themselves grace.
“Everybody knows what it feels like to go too hard on a food you really love,” she says. “If you can trust yourself and let yourself have those experiences, you will eventually find your own limits with food without having an external source tell you what limits you should observe.”
Does intuitive eating mean ignoring your nutritional needs?
A common fear people have about intuitive eating, experts say, is that if they gave themselves permission to eat whatever they wanted, they would spend the rest of their lives eating Oreos and chocolate bars.
An article on the website of Harvard University’s TH Chan School of Public Health warns that intuitive eating “does not address the concept of food addiction from ‘hyper-palatable’ foods, which can lead to food cravings”. It explains that eating highly processed, calorie-dense, low-nutrient foods – like doughnuts – activates reward systems in the brain, which in turn can lead someone to eat a lot of such foods and crave them.
“Relying on intuition about what to eat may backfire if one has developed an ‘addiction’ to these types of foods,” the article says, though it also notes that “the notion of a food addiction is controversial”.
Linsenmeyer says that if one is truly eating intuitively, filling up on “hyper-palatable” foods won’t feel satisfying for long.
“Overeating or eating only junk food doesn’t feel good physically, and it doesn’t feel good mentally,” she says. Bodies desire nourishing food, she explains.
It is possible to take nutritional guidelines into account while practicing intuitive eating, Johnson says. But to get to a point where one can balance these guidelines with needs and desires, Johnson says individuals need to re-examine their internalized beliefs about food, bodies and health.
She recommends people ask themselves questions like: what does it mean for me to feel healthy? Am I taking into consideration my mental health, emotional health and relational health? Which of my beliefs come from accurate, scientific information – and which come from movies, TV shows or ads in magazines?
“The goal is to come back to the science [of nutrition] without the bias of: ‘I’m a good person because I ate whole grains,’” she says.
Given how emotional this work can be, experts recommend working with a professional when possible. Allison says it wasn’t until she started working with a dietitian that she was able to fully implement the practice.
“It’s tricky,” she says. “And I wish it weren’t, because it’s not accessible for all people to [work with a dietitian].”
What are the benefits of intuitive eating?
Some research suggests intuitive eating can improve people’s lipid levels and blood pressure, Linsenmeyer says.
More of its benefits may be psychological. According to one 2021 meta-analysis, intuitive eating is associated with positive body image, self-esteem and wellbeing. A longitudinal study published in 2022 found that individuals who practiced intuitive eating were less likely to engage in harmful behaviors like taking diet pills or binge eating.
Johnson says one of the major benefits is “more brain space”. When people aren’t spending so much time and energy worrying about what they are eating or not eating, they can spend more time investing in their hobbies, relationships and interests. Johnson says that clients working on their relationship with food often have a realization that something else in their life isn’t working for them – relationships with no boundaries, for example, or a job they actually hate – and feel more empowered to change it.
Simply being more in tune with your body can also have benefits, Allison says. If we’re hungry, sleepy or craving a sandwich or a walk, we can more easily identify and meet our own health needs. This can boost confidence as well as physiological wellbeing.
Can someone with dietary restrictions practice intuitive eating?
Even with dietary restrictions or medical conditions that require strict diets, it is possible to incorporate some aspects of intuitive eating.
There can be “flexibility within the constraints of a medical condition”, says Jessica Jones, a registered dietitian and co-founder and CEO of Diabetes Digital. Jones says that she uses intuitive-eating principles to help her clients manage their diabetes and pre-diabetes. This involves understanding how different foods affects blood sugar levels and overall health, while at the same time “tuning into a body’s hunger and fullness cues”.
Experts recommend that those who require a certain type of diet to manage a medical condition work with a professional to ensure they’re meeting their nutritional needs.
Is intuitive eating the same as mindful eating?
Although the terms “mindful eating” and “intuitive eating” are often used interchangeably, they’re not quite the same, says Allison.
Mindful eating is the practice of being present in the moment and noticing what sensations and emotions arise as you eat. This can be useful when it comes to noticing hunger and satiety levels, but Allison says that some people who have experienced restrictive eating disorders can sometimes be “too mindful”, and tuning into their bodies so intensely may feel distressing at first.
Is there anyone who should not practice intuitive eating?
Intuitive eating is generally not recommended for those with active eating disorders, Allison says. In the early stages of recovery, some people may benefit from a specific food plan assigned by a professional eating disorder specialist, “because the fear and anxiety can be too great”, she says.
Additionally, Linsenmeyer says that in her work, intuitive eating has felt overwhelming to some patients who aren’t ready for it, or “enjoy having numbers to look at”.
But, she adds, it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. A person using an eating plan can check in on their hunger and satiety cues, for example. “Different approaches are going to work better for different people,” she says.
Why do people have to relearn how to eat intuitively?
Intuitive eating aims to help someone figure out when they’re hungry and what for. But how do they lose touch with those signals in the first place?
Trauma can cause us to lose touch with those signals, Allison says, whether it’s major physical or psychological trauma, or the trauma that comes from corrosive systemic forces like racism, sexism, ableism or classism.
Chronic illness and injury can also contribute to a physical disconnect, due to avoidance of painful or distressing feelings. When people have to work long hours at demanding jobs, it can be difficult to prioritize their health, or eat whenever they’re hungry.
“Work stress separates people from their bodies, from their needs,” Allison says.
Johnson also notes that on social media, intuitive eating has become “synonymous with thin, white women and western food”. As a result, many of the clients she has worked with have felt like the practice wasn’t for them.
“They say: ‘I don’t know how this translates to my culture. I understand what intuitive eating looks like if it’s pizza and ice cream, but I don’t understand what it looks like if we’re talking about ramen or rice and beans,’” she says.
Giving yourself permission to eat what you want may involve wrestling with how your culture’s foods might have been villainized by mainstream, white American culture, Johnson explains.
This can require working on understanding that food from non-western cultures “is totally OK and fine” and “has been keeping people fed for a long time”, she says.
It’s important that people understand that intuitive eating is for everyone, Johnson says. Some “have marketed it as this elitist thing”, she says. “Imagine the idea that liberation is elitist.”
