How Intuitive Eating Fails

Is intuitive eating really the answer—or can it actually make things worse?

In this episode, Julia explores why intuitive eating fails, especially for those struggling with inflammation, hormone imbalance, digestive issues, or years of dieting. We will discuss how to repair the disconnect so you can once again trust your body and be body led with food. 

You'll learn:

• Why years of dieting and food rules can distort body awareness
• How inflammation and metabolic dysfunction interfere with hunger signals
• The connection between hormones, cravings, and appetite regulation
• Why a period of nutritional restoration is often necessary before intuitive eating can work
• A practical three-step process to rebuild trust in your body's wisdom

Discover how to move beyond food rules and reconnect with the remarkable intelligence your body already possesses.

Transcript

Hi everyone. Welcome back to the Jolie Life podcast. This is Julia and today we're going to talk about intuitive eating. The focus of this podcast is why intuitive eating fails. And this came to my attention, or I started thinking about this because I was working with a client who was trying to intuitively eat when she came to me and the intuitive eating had basically led her to undernourish herself because she was skipping meals, she was eating as little as possible. She was basically undernourishing herself. And as we dug deeper, we realized that intuitive eating, she wasn't at a space where she could intuitively eat because of years of ignoring her body signals. The body signals had become so distorted and had become so quiet that what she was doing was listening to programming that she wasn't even aware of. And so it caused a problem where intuitive eating was actually working against her because it really wasn't truly intuitive eating.
(01:36)
So today we are going to talk about where intuitive eating fails, why it fails, and how to rebuild this internal wisdom which we all have that will allow true intuitive eating to emerge. So at its core, intuitive eating is a beautiful idea. It's an idea that I love. It's something that I practice and it is true freedom with food, which is what I desire for every individual. The human body, your body, you are born with the most amazing technology inside you. You have systems for regulating hunger. You have systems that regulate fullness. Your body is able to sense and manage energy needs. Your body's able to sense and manage hydration levels, salt levels, and nutrient intake. Your body has a very sophisticated system of sensing the nutrient intake of your food as it leaves the stomach and preparing itself for what there is. When you eat too much food, your body has a mechanism for storing that energy.
(02:57)
When there's not enough, your body has a mechanism for releasing that energy. When you don't have all the components that the body needs, the body has countless workarounds so it can continue to function. You are an amazing, amazing wonder of nature. A healthy child naturally eats more when they're growing. They eat less when they're not hungry and they generally maintain a very healthy body composition without counting calories, without being told what to eat, without worry. A child is naturally attuned to this magnificent programming and has not had the technology distorted yet. And your body possesses this remarkable intelligence. Everybody possesses this remarkable intelligence, but the problem arises is that over time we can no longer hear that intelligence clearly and we become disconnected to that programming or that programming becomes distorted. And unfortunately, a lot of us begin to lose this connection to our factory setting that would guide us in intuitive eating very early on.
(04:28)
And part of it is we lose the ability to hear the signals. Part of it is that we lose trust in our body and part of it is that the signals can become distorted or muffled or the signals get crossed. And so how does this happen? This begins happening early when we're taught well meaningly we're taught to clean our plates. We're taught that calories are everything. We're taught that fat makes you fat. We're taught that we need to eat less, particularly as women eat less, eat less, eat less. We're taught to ignore hunger signals. We skip meals. We earn our dessert. We are good when we're eating in a certain way and we're bad when we're eating in another way. We have all of these things that we're taught sometimes directly by our parents, sometimes indirectly of a magazine article or a podcast or something like that or a friend or someone judging you at the lunch table like, "Are you going to really eat all that?
(05:40)
" And then you're like, "Oh my gosh, I'm eating too much." So we have all these ways that we're taught these rules of what we're supposed to do, how we're supposed to be around food. And food becomes tied to morality. It becomes tied to reward, to punishment, to societal norms, to the norms of the people we hang out with, to the norms of our families. And so much becomes layered on top of our eating habits and how we eat that over time we stop listening to the internal signals, internal signals and we begin listening to external rules. And the longer we do that, the quieter and quieter these signals become. And eventually we get to the state where we don't even know what true hunger feels like. What does it feel like to be hungry?
(06:46)
If you don't know that, it's opportunity to learn. We don't know what fullness feels like. We might know what overstuffed feels like, but we may not know what fullness feels like where that sweet spot of food consumption feels like. What does satisfaction feels like? What does nourishment feel like? What does a true craving feel like? So sometimes we are so disconnected that we can't answer those questions and we only know what we've been told or how we've been reprogrammed by our family, our friends, ourselves, our self-taught. Sometimes we are our worst enemy and we can't read our signals. There's another challenge, inflammation. It changes the conversation you have with your body. The body's signaling system can become distorted, which is what we touched on in the beginning. And one of the ways that it becomes distorted is through chronic inflammation. When we spend years eating foods that create inflammation, that create blood sugar instability, that create digestive dysfunction, that create hormone imbalance, the body's communication network becomes noisy.
(08:20)
It becomes a cacophony of sound and because it's so noisy, guess what? It's hard to receive clear signals. It's hard to receive clear messages. And instead we get mixed messages because our signaling is off. It's like when you get to a light that's broken and maybe it's blinking all the colors, yellow, green, and red and you just don't know what to do, this is what happens in your inflamed body. So you may think I'm hungry when in actuality you're dehydrated or perhaps you're sleep deprived or perhaps you're experiencing a blood sugar crash. You might have a nutrient deficiency. It might be you're not hungry but your body really needs some extra protein or your body really needs some extra fiber. You might be stressed. A man does not live by food alone. I think is the basis of that. Is there other things that sometimes we need but we interpret it as I'm hungry?
(09:33)
You might be seeking a dopamine hit.
(09:38)
Your body is speaking, but sometimes when we're in an inflamed state, we don't have the tools to interpret the message. And so we just hear one thing, "I'm hungry." We don't hear, "I'm dehydrated. Let me get a glass of water." We don't hear, "I'm stressed. Let me take a deep breath." We don't hear, "I'm seeking dopamine, so maybe I need to take a 10-minute break and go for a walk outside and then return to what I'm doing." Sometimes we're bored and we're hungry. So oftentimes we don't get a clear message because we're receiving very mixed signals. The other reason why intuitive eating often fails us during weight gain or metabolic dysfunction is because when we're actively struggling with metabolic dysfunction, our appetite regulation systems are likely already impaired. So if we have experienced a sudden weight gain or over time the five pounds a year just has kept adding up.
(10:58)
If we're in a state of insulin resistance, if we're perimenopausal, if we have chronic inflammation, if we have digestive dysfunction, meaning our stomach is super sensitive or we have leaky gut or we have an inflamed bowel, these are all signals that our appetite regulation system is impaired. If we struggle with emotional eating, our appetite regulation system is impaired. So the part of our technology and our bodies that regulates our appetite is not working, is not fully online because we're struggling with some underlying issues like weight gain, insulin resistance, hormone imbalance. And when this happens, the hormones involved in hunger and satiety like leptin, like insulin, like cortisol, like GLP-1, which is endogenous to your body, by the way, by peptide YY, which helps as it relates to protein and energy regulation, ghrelin, which makes you hungry, these hormones are no longer functioning optimally. Part of it is because our appetite regulation system is off, but part of it is because when other hormones are off due to inflammation, perimenopause, insulin resistance, emotions, when those hormones are off, they affect these hormones too that regulate your appetite.
(12:49)
And if I leave you with anything, and this is something I stress all the time, all hormones are related. There's no such thing as addressing one hormone without impacting the others. So when we find dysfunction at the root, we know that our appetite control is also going to be affected by this. So this is one of the reasons why when we're depressed, we eat more because depression impacts our appetite control system and it kind of takes it offline. Or for some people, they don't eat at all because your appetite regulation system is offline. They don't know that they're hungry. So remember that when we are in a state of hormone dysregulation, appetite regulation suffers and it's not completely broken, but it just needs time for recalibration, which brings us to the missing step. So this is where I believe many intuitive eating conversations miss something very important.
(14:08)
Before intuitive eating can fully work, you need a period of restoration. You need a period of creating conditions where your body's wisdom can be heard again, where you can hear it, where the signals become uncross, where the signals become clear. And for most people, this means eating according to a structured anti-inflammatory framework. And this, I want you to see this interim step as a three to six month process. It's long enough, three to six months to restore balance. And after you restore balance, you can go onto the next step. So for this period, before you go into intuitive eating, the focus becomes making sure you're having adequate micronutrient density so that the food that you're eating is filled with nutrition. So this is where we get rid of empty calorie food like pretzels and we replace them with nutrient dense foods like blueberries. We work on blood sugar stability.
(15:24)
We work on lowering the amount of sugar in our diet, whether that sugar comes through simple carbohydrates like white rice or bread or oatmeal or cereal. We begin to decrease that so that our blood sugar becomes more stable. We begin to increase our fiber intake. We begin to increase our protein intake. We make sure that we are eating with healthy fats, fats that aren't disrupting our microbiome. So we're going away from the seed oils and we're going toward the olive oils and the avocado and nuts and seeds if our body tolerates those things. We are doubling down in our fiber because our fiber is very healing for our gut, which therefore impacts our inflammation. So we're going down hard on the fiber and you're getting fiber from fruits and vegetables. You're getting fiber from a banana, from an apple with the skin, from some kale, from a tomato, from a cucumber, from a carrot.
(16:36)
That's where you're getting your fiber. You are addressing your gut health and primary here is you're taking out the crap. The crap is the processed foods, the fake oils, the emollients, the gour gums of the world. You're taking those out and you're giving your gut real food that doesn't irritate it. So also in this state, if we notice we're irritated by something, let's say you get the runs when you have eggs, for instance, when we're doing this recalibration, you're taking out the eggs by the way. So we're doing the things that we know are hurting our gut health. We're having a little extra yogurt. We are giving ourselves some kimchi or some pickles to help boost our microbiome. We're reducing our inflammatory burden and we're doing this by doing all the things above, blood sugar stability, extra fiber, addressing our gut health, making sure our fats are healthy, taking out the processed foods and we are going to eat the appropriate calories for our goal.
(17:46)
So for some of you listening to this, that might be that you're eating more than you're used to and for others, you're eating less. But for this period, our goal is restoration. And since our compass is off, we're going to set goals outside of our body to get our compass back to reregulate ourselves and we're going to return to our natural set point. So after several months, three to six, a remarkable thing is going to begin to happen. Your inflammation will begin to decrease. Your blood sugar will become more stable, your digestion will get better, your energy will improve, your hormones will become more balanced, your cravings will become quieter. The body begins to return to a healthier operating system. And this is exciting because when this happens, guess what else happens? You begin to hear your body again. You begin to hear your satiety signals, your hunger signals, you begin to hear your true cravings again.
(19:05)
This is where you've done the reprogramming, you've done the restoration and now you are ready to relearn body awareness. And this is where I encourage clients to rebuild their intuitive eating at this stage because they can trust their body. You've gotten out all the crap, you've lowered your inflammation, you've balanced your hormones, you can trust yoursel. And so stage one is we begin to work on fullness and we begin to learn to recognize comfortable fullness over fullness and I'm still hungry. These are three things that it is vital that you learn to feel in your body. Most people never get here. So you're going into new territory here. So you practice at the end of each meal. Am I over full? Am I still hungry? Am I comfortable full? And you just observe. There's no gentleman here. We're observing and we're learning. So maybe if we're over full next time we eat a little bit less, leave two, three bites.
(20:15)
Still hungry? Next time we give ourselves a litle bit more. Give yourself a little bit more fiber, a little bit more protein, a litle bit more avocado.
(20:25)
Stage two, we work on thirst and the older you are, the more important the stage is because as we get older, guess what? Our thirst signaling decreases. And what I want you to do here because we worked on fullness is when you're hungry, first ask yourself, "Am I thirsty?" Because many hunger signals are in actuality hydration signals. So we are going to practice learning the difference. And the way we do this is we feel hungry, we drink first. We give ourselves water first and then we see how we feel. If we are fine, we learn, okay, that kind of hunger signal is actually a hydration signal and we begin to practice that. There will be different hunger signals where you'll drink water and you're still hungry. That is hunger, that is food, that is chewing. And so then we learn to go there, but we begin first with figuring out, okay, is this hydration or is this food versus when we're a little bit not operating the right way we think food first and hydration may not even come into the picture.
(21:39)
Stage three are cravings and this is where intuitive eating becomes amazingly powerful because once our compulsive eating or pre-programmed eating is finished with and our blood sugar chaos has been reduced, our cravings become more informative. So now that we have the noise out of the way, we can notice a desire for red meat after intense training. I noticed this in myself. Sometimes I went through a whole period of not eating very much red meat and my body would get this intense craving for red meat and I would eat an entire steak and it would be as if the moment it entered my mouth, my body sucked it up. That's because my body was craving what was in it. My body needed it. I was able to listen and give my body responded with more energy later. We might understand that we have a carbohydrate craving.
(22:43)
You might begin to notice, gee, three days before my cycle starts, I really crave carbohydrates. Eat them. Yo body's giving you information, you eat them, but now we can trust that it's not a compulsive signal, but it's really our body telling us something. We might begin to notice that sometimes we desire lighter foods after an indulgence. So we have a fantastic meal. We might wake up the next morning and we just are like, "Gee, I'm not hungry." That's intuitive eating because your body's still feeding on last night. Or you might say, "I think I just want a green juice this morning. I think I just want an apple this morning. I'm not going to have my regular breakfast because you can now hear the signal. You can hear your body say, I'm not ready for more yet." And this is when your body begins communicating again.
(23:44)
And so this is where we enter into this beautiful state where intuitive eating is not eating whatever sounds good in the moment. It's our ability to accurately hear and respond to our body's wisdom because we put our body's wisdom back online. We have put our body's wisdom in a space where we can hear it and where the signals can be read clearly and then you have incredible freedom. So I encourage you to go back over this and begin your road toward intuitive eating. Notice the pre-programming that we need to erase, notice the information that needs to decrease and notice your restoration period, begin your restoration period. And once you've done that and maybe you're already there, you begin stage one of noticing fullness, stage two of beginning to notice thirst and stage three of learning to follow your cravings. And then you have entered a whole new world of food freedom.
(24:57)
That's it for today. If you have any questions, contact me at julia@thejolielife and you can find us at thejolife.com. We have amazing programs that help your whole body balance your gut, your hormones, your immune system, your energy regulation, your blood sugar. And it's a wonderful way to really help your body to regain balance and to maintain balance. So if you're interested, go to thejolife.com and check us out and lots of love. See you next week. I hope you enjoyed this podcast, the Jolie Life Podcast. And if this podcast helped you in any way, I invite you to share it with your friends and your family and whoever you come across that you think might be helped for this podcast. I would love to hear your comments and you can contact me at julia@thejolielife.com. And please follow us on Instagram, the Jolie Life. Our website is thejolife.com and it would be lovely if you would subscribe and if you would rate this podcast and go back and share this with someone.
(26:18)
Let the ripple effect happen. Let the Jolie life be the beautiful life that keeps on giving. By beauty, lots of love.