You're listening to Food is Food, the podcast that will support you to ditch diet culture, break free from food rules, and debunk nutrition misinformation. I'm your host, Talia Chiquelli, specialist eating disorder dietitian and founder of the TC Nutrition Clinic. If you would like to learn more about our one-to-one nutrition support and group program, or download your free portioning guide, head to wwwtaliachely.com. Each week we will cover topics that delve deeper into nutrition, intuitive eating, psychology, diet culture, and the consequences of under eating. Our relationship with food is so complex and is influenced by our thoughts, emotions, and life experiences. Which is why healing from disordered eating is about more than just food. Welcome back to Food Is Food. Welcome back to Food is Food. I'm your host Talia Chekelli, and today we are going to be talking about intuitive eating, what it is, what it isn't, and how you might know that you're ready to really lean into those intuitive eating principles. To start with, one of the main myths that I hear about intuitive eating is that intuitive eating is just eating whatever you want, whenever you want, and that it might lead to you having a poorly balanced diet and that you've sort of given up on nourishing your body well. That is absolutely not the case. And I think that this misconception maybe comes from a place of misunderstanding when people hear the words intuitive eating, they often only associate that with eating when you're hungry and stopping when you're full. And discount that there's another eight principles that are part of the intuitive eating framework. So please, if you have heard that intuitive eating is just eating whatever, whenever, that is not what intuitive eating is. It's also really important to share that intuitive eating might not be the end goal for everyone when they're healing their relationship with food. It is definitely one of the most common goals for people that I work with in clinic. However, when we think about everyone coming on their disordered eating recovery journey, they have different life experiences and different things that might shape their ability to eat intuitively from a textbook sense. So, for example, someone might may be neurodivergent and therefore may not be able to tune in to those hunger and fullness cues as someone who is neurotypical. Different medications can also interfere with our ability to respond to hunger and fullness cues. There are circumstances where maybe someone is an athlete and performing, and therefore they need to eat even in the absence of hunger or eat when they're full. So when we think about just those two principles of intuitive eating that are looking at hunger and fullness, they may not apply to every person or in different contexts or circumstances. And this is very much connected to the discussion I had with Shane Jeffrey when I interviewed him about the rave's eating model, is that at the end of the phased approach of rave, so phase one being regularity and adequacy, phase two, variety, eating socially and spontaneity, phase three was what he referred to as natural eating practices. So that could be intuitive eating for some, or it might look different for someone else. So I just wanted to share that before I get stuck into talking about what exactly intuitive eating is, just to share that it may not be appropriate for you, and that's absolutely okay. So intuitive eating, it is an anti-diet approach to nutrition, health, and well-being. So not just nutrition, as some people might believe. It is a compassionate self-care framework that treats all bodies with respect and dignity, and it consists of a set of 10 principles. So intuitive eating was designed by two dietitians in the States in the 1990s, Elise Resch and Evelyn Triboli. And they have written an incredible book and also have a workbook alongside it that goes through what the 10 principles are and different tools and resources that can help you to work on achieving or moving towards each of the 10 principles. Now, intuitive eating is heavily researched. There are over 100 different research papers supporting the benefits of eating intuitively or following the intuitive eating principles, including improvements in mental health, increased fruit and vegetable intake, reduced weight and shape concern, reduced depressive symptoms, improved self-esteem, improved body image, a reduction in binge eating, and a greater motivator for exercise. If you are interested in looking at any of the research, it is listed on the intuitive eating website, which I'll add into the show notes. So let's break down each of the 10 intuitive eating principles. So the first one is reject the diet mentality. So what reject the diet mentality is all about is rejecting diet culture. So this might be unfollowing diet culture accounts online. It might be throwing out old diet programs and notes or notepads where you've written your food intake and calculated calories. It could be throwing out different articles, the scales, measuring tape, small clothes that no longer serve you, a whole bunch of things because these give false hope and are misleading in regards to your health and the way that you want to live. So when we think about rejecting the diet mentality and being on a pathway to healing your relationship with food, how we can apply rejecting the diet mentality might come through myth busting. So looking at myths such as carbohydrates are bad, fats are bad, ultra-processed foods are bad, I can only eat at certain times or eat particular foods. All of these things are rejecting diet culture and the myths surrounding nutrition. We can also learn more about intuitive eating and the health at every size framework. We can also look at challenging certain beauty or culture ideals within this principle and challenging food rules, one of my favorite things. So that's very much linked to myth busting and rejecting that diet mentality. So, for example, having full fat or normal yogurt instead of diet varieties, because diet varieties have been created and the messaging surrounding them is that the normal version is bad and it's very much driven to that wellness diet beauty culture. The second principle is honor your hunger. Now, this is one of the principles that I want to put to the side a little bit, but I will tell you what it is, and then at the end I'll talk about this principle and one of the others and why I want to put it to the side just for a second. So when we think about honoring your hunger, this principle is all about learning to honor your biological hunger, to improve your nutritional well-being, to be well-nourished with adequate energy and macronutrients, carbohydrates, protein and fats. And this helps to set the stage for rebuilding your trust in yourself and in food and your approach to food again. So, how we can honor our hunger is by eating at regular times. And this is really the first sort of phase of raves, leaning into the second, where we're eating at regular times and we may need to be following some sort of a meal framework or meal plan to help us guide how much to eat during this phase. And as we're further in our recovery, honoring our hunger might be learning to lean into and trust those hunger signals and experiment in different portions of food, eating outside of the times that we used to eat, and also learning to separate our physical hunger with our emotional hunger. So if a person really struggles with eating because they're bored or eating because they're lonely or sad, that's where honoring our hunger, we can approach it from different angles by honoring that yes, emotional eating is normal, and sometimes we eat when we're sad. And then also there's going to be times that we can acknowledge, yes, I'm feeling sad. However, I don't need to eat at this time. The third principle is making peace with food. So this is really approaching and challenging food labels or the moral values that are placed on food, such as good and bad, healthy, unhealthy, treat, junk, clean, detox, all of these food labels that give food different powers and put certain foods up on a pedestal. What we're really wanting to do within this principle is to practice food neutrality and with time to give yourself unconditional permission to eat a wide range of foods. So overcoming those food rules and food fears in order to support that principle of making peace with food. The fourth principle is challenging the food police. The food police is not your dietitian, as we're often turned out to be. We're not, we're not the food police. But it is that inner critic, it is that eating disorder self, it is that disordered eating self that tells you that you are good or bad for having eaten a certain way or approaching food in a certain way. So for example, it's that inner critic saying, You're such a failure, you've eaten more than you should, you know, should be really guilty about that, you didn't need the chocolate, and the list goes on. So that is what what this principle is referring to when we think about the food police. So how we can apply this principle is by challenging those binary beliefs, those black and white views about nutrition, so that good and bad foods, and accepting that there is flexibility and context and nuance are all really important when we think about what normal eating looks like and how to approach nutrition within that sort of more spontaneous and flexible framework. Then we have the satisfaction factor. So the principle is discover the satisfaction factor. And this principle refers to allowing pleasure and enjoyment in the eating experience to help with satisfaction. So how we can apply this and work towards this in recovery and overcoming disordered eating is to reintroduce those foods that may have been avoided or that we deemed as bad, not good for us, foods that we had to earn through activity or dietary restriction. So bring them back into our diet, bring back social eating, reintegrate into eating with different people in different environments, and also having balanced meals. So if you have downloaded the portioning guide from my website, the satisfaction factor or building satisfaction into the meal is one of the steps that I include in there. So when we think about building a balanced plate, we of course have our key macronutrients the protein, carbohydrates, fats. We have fiber. That's what we call a balanced meal. But what's also important is the fifth part of that, and that is adding enjoyment or satisfaction, because that is going to help with the overall experience and help to feel us feeling full and satisfied for longer. What that satisfaction factor might look like is adding something to our meal or our snacks that help to enhance the texture or flavor of food. It might be adding condiments, herbs, spices, a bit of crunch through nuts or seeds. It might be adding that second source of fat because it makes the food taste good. So challenging this belief that there's only one type of fat or one type of carbohydrate allowed in a meal. So an example of that is having a salad with avocado and feta cheese because the combination makes the food more enjoyable. So that is what discover the satisfaction factor is all about. It's bringing that enjoyment and flavor back to meals again. And then we have the principle that I'm also going to put to the side a little bit, but that is feel your fullness. So this is trusting that you will give yourself the foods that you need and that you're able to listen to your body and the signals that it is giving you. Part of feeling your fullness in terms of the application of it might be putting into practice mindful eating. So mindful eating is not intuitive eating. The two often get mixed up as well. So it's important that I clarify that mindful eating is a part of intuitive eating. It is being present during the meal and bringing mindfulness and awareness to the environment and the food that you're eating by slowing down and paying attention to the food. But mindful eating is not intuitive eating. So how we feel our fullness and what I help people to do in clinic is to learn what those interoceptive cues are in the body of hunger and fullness. So interoception is the ability to connect with those signals that our body gives us on a daily basis. So, for example, knowing when we need to go to the bathroom, that's interoception. So it's being able to connect with our body, feeling our heart beat, feeling our body temperature change. This is all awareness of our body. And so part of my work when I'm supporting someone towards those steps of eating normally, intuitively, flexibly, is to help them start to build that trust back in their body again. And we do that through appetite awareness training. So learning to notice the different signals from both the body and the brain in terms of what signs indicate that I'm hungry, which signs indicate that I'm getting full, and making healthy self-values-based decisions around when to eat, when not to eat, and at what stage in that fullness process to stop eating as well. Then our next principle is coping with emotions, with kindness, and this is a huge one. And this is where both dietetic support and therapy can come in, become really helpful when we're overcoming disordered eating. So within this principle, we are finding ways to nurture, finding ways to connect, to distract and resolve emotional issues or emotional dysregulation without food or without relying on food as the main coping mechanism. It's acknowledging that difficult emotions are a part of life and food won't fix these feelings in the long term. So we know for a lot of people, especially those engaging in actually both restrictive eating and binge eating behaviors, is that food can be used to numb emotions, escape from feeling really hard emotions, and dissociate and withdraw from them. So learning to eat without food being used as a coping mechanism is really important as part of eating intuitively. How we can start to apply this principle or the sort of tools that we can do is learning to label our emotions and feel the full spectrum or rainbow of emotions that come with existing in a human body, and also building other coping mechanisms that aren't connected to either restriction or overeating or binge eating. Then we have the principle respect your body. So this is accepting your natural genetic blueprint and the body shape and size that you're in. And it's also respecting it through self-care, and part of self-care is nourishing your body well. Part of respecting your body might include some body image work either with your dietitian or with a therapist. It will involve challenging certain beauty ideals and body ideals, also challenging internalized fat phobia and weight stigma, and acknowledging and accepting that human bodies come in a diverse range of sizes and that you can be healthy at many sizes. The ninth principle, we're almost there, is movement. So feel the difference. So what we are referring to in this principle of intuitive eating is the shift from punishing movement to movement that feels good and energizing. So on the pathway of overcoming disordered eating, this will involve an integration of movement and embodiment work at a time and place that works for you as an individual. And the last principle is honor your health through gentle nutrition. And what this principle is all about is making food choices that honor your health and your taste buds, and knowing that eating is flexible, it's nuanced, it's relevant to the context of which a person eats. And it's learning that eating is not perfect. We do not eat the same everyday normal eaters, intuitive eaters, we make mistakes in eating all the time. And that's just part of being a human being an intuitive eater, is that sometimes we don't eat enough and we make up for it. Sometimes we eat too much and we adjust and we adapt and we're constantly just taking each meal and snack as it comes. So why I put two of those 10 principles to the side, your hunger and feel your fullness, is that these are two of the principles that you might not be able to really lean into if you are engaging in a high level of compensatory behaviors or a high degree of restrictive eating because of the impact that weight suppression and underating have on so many different body systems from a physiological point of view, in that there may be a time period where we can't trust those hunger and fullness cues because they're not firing off, because the body is conserving energy, our hypothalamus might be downregulated, all enzymes, gut hormones, gut microbes may have sort of shifted and adapted to being undernourished. And so the body does need time to move through nutritional rehabilitation for all of those energy systems to be plugged in and work towards being fully charged before we can really start to honor our hunger and fullness cues. So with treatment from an eating disorder or disordered eating, there may be a time that you do need to eat more prescriptively. It's what we call mechanical eating or time-based eating, where some people might be on a meal plan or being recommended to eat every two to three hours, for example. And that's because if we left it up to the body in terms of just eating when you're hungry and stopping when you're full, it would result in people continuing to be undernourished because either their hunger cues are absent or they're feeling full all the time, or the hunger cues are there, but the eating disorder is interfering with being able to respect and honor them in a way that aligns with those intuitive eating principles. I used to be of the opinion that you could only start working on the intuitive eating principles when you were sort of towards the end of your nutritional rehabilitation pathway or journey. And it's something that I used to say to people is that it was very much that step-by-step approach, you would get to a place that we would start to look at intuitive eating. But my stance on this now is that you can absolutely start to make change within at least eight of the 10 key principles, hunger and fullness aside, for some people. It may not be that you can fully embrace the intuitive eating principles, but we have to start from somewhere. And even the principles at the very beginning that I spoke about, which was challenging the food police, challenging diet culture. They're all things that you can do from day one, as soon as you decide that you're going to start challenging and improving your relationship with food. So I am a believer that we can start implementing some of the tools that are aligned with the principles of intuitive eating from very early on. It's just the honoring your hunger and feeling your fullness that we might have to sort of bring in down the line from a different angle. So knowing about the 10 principles of intuitive eating is well and good. Where a lot of people that I support really struggle in understanding is how do you know when you're ready to eat intuitively? And I think what they're really referring to here are those principles of eating when you're hungry and stopping when you're full. The flexibility of moving away from time-based or mechanical eating and moving away from a meal plan if you are on one. So I think when people say when can I start to eat intuitively, what they're really referring to is when can I start to be more flexible with eating? Because knowing the steps that someone goes through through nutritional rehabilitation, you are already applying some of those intuitive eating principles just by challenging the eating disorder or diet culture. When I think about some of the indicators of when a person might be ready to move into the more flexible eating practices that are aligned with the intuitive eating principles, one of the first ones, indicators that I think of is. Biological restoration and balance. So what this means is, have you returned to your genetic blueprint? So have you restored weight if you have had to? Have you reversed weight suppression if you've had to? And from a bulimia nervosa binge eating, emotional eating, chaotic eating point of view, I'd also be interested and curious around have you moved away from chaotic eating and implemented a regular eating pattern? Because that's really important to helping those hunger and fullness cues return to their more natural rhythm as well. If you're eating chaotically and you're engaging in compensatory behaviors such as purging, laxative use or overexercise, and there's binge eating in the picture, it's very chaotic and confusing for the body. So establishing that foundational work of regular eating is really important to then being able to apply some of these intuitive eating principles in more depth. The other is learning to accept the eating disorder as a coping mechanism. And part of this really connects back to the emotional kindness when we think about the principle of you know separating that emotional approach to food, food being a coping mechanism, to food being something that nourishes you. So eating needs to move back into the realm of a self-care principle, really, that we're eating to care for our body from a place of respect rather than punishment. And there's not a constant battle or a fight to defend the eating disorder's existence. So that's what I mean by accepting the eating disorder as a coping mechanism, not something that you're engaging in behaviors to protect the eating disorder's existence. Connected to that, another indicator that I often share is the ability to recognize and manage feelings. So it's very closely connected because when you have those other coping tools, there's less of a need for the eating disorder. So that's really important. Another that I would like to offer as a suggestion when we're thinking about readiness is the ability to take risks and experiment. So there is safety in meal plans, and there is safety in following portion guidelines, eating at specific times. In order to move towards flexible eating, honoring hunger and feeling fullness, you have to be at a place that eating more or eating less from a healthy place is not going to trigger a lapse in eating behaviors such as restriction and compensatory. So you need to be at a better place, both physical and psychologically, so that you can start to engage in what we call behavior experiments that challenge eating disorder thoughts and beliefs. Another indicator is this willingness to give up diet culture, because even the slightest part or presence of restrictive eating or dieting behaviors can lead to a lapse in disordered eating. So you need to be at a place that you are strong enough to fight the eating disorder and keep it held at arm's length and have the tools to be able to do that. Because where I see people run before they can walk, and of course, I totally get it. So many people that I work with, their goal is food freedom, their goal is intuitive eating. So I understand that you want to try and get there straight away. However, we have to put the training in. So it's as if I said to you, okay, the Olympics is in four years, start training the day before you compete in whichever event you're part of. This takes time to build the skills to be able to challenge the eating disorder, build the skills to challenge and repeat and learn that flexibility is okay and build that trust. So it's important to view that intuitive eating is not something that happens quickly, it happens with time and with training if we use that sort of analogy. And then lastly, it's really important for people to be able to identify their wants and their needs and communicate this not through the eating disorder. Because we know that eating disorders have a function and a lot of the time it's in communicating or coping. So in order to start to lean into those intuitive eating principles on a deeper level, we want you to be able to communicate and not use the eating disorder as a coping mechanism. If you can say yes, yes, yes, I'm there, then what I would really encourage you to do is to lean into changes slowly, make them sustainable. And how I like to approach it with my clients is to view it as an experiment. And it's also really important that if leaning into this step and trusting your body is really difficult for you, it's okay to reach out for dietetic support at this stage. In my clinic, we love supporting people who have come so far on their eating disorder journey or recovering from disordered eating, and they reach out to us just to help them learn those intuitive eating principles, the appetite awareness training. This is something that we help with in clinic all the time. So there's no shame in coming to us for wanting to learn and have support through this stage of recovery because it is scary. We're building trust, we're we're listening to our body again. And that requires so much courage and bravery. And it is a big experiment. There's many weeks and months of trial and error and learning about your body again. It can be really exciting for some people. Once they've gotten there, they're like, yes, let's just see it as an experiment and acknowledge that this it's not going to be perfect. There's going to be things that don't go well, and these are all learning opportunities. So please don't feel that you need to do that alone. And also to just reinforce that intuitive eating is there as an end goal for a lot of people. However, if you're someone that just doesn't feel like it connects with you, that's okay as well. What's really important is that we individualize the treatment goals and the end goal of what natural eating practices look like for every individual. Thank you so much for tuning in today. And I hope that has been able to give you a bit of clarity on what intuitive eating is, what it involves, and clear up any miscommunications around what intuitive eating is and isn't. And one note just to end on with that is that when you do eat intuitively and when you approach nutrition from a place of self-care, and this is one of the biggest fears that I see people have is this fear of if I let go of that control, I'm going to overeat and I'm going to eat a high amount of maybe less nourishing foods. Coming back to that principle of gentle nutrition and seeing nutrition as a form of self-care, that fear or that prediction just doesn't align with eating in a way that nourishes your body to enhance your nutritional well-being and your nutrition status for the rest of your life. So that's just a little bit of, I guess, extra information for you to challenge those fears of if I let go of control, I'm just going to eat really quote unquote unhealthily. The reality is, and what I see in clinic is that just does not happen. There might be a short-term period where because people are giving themselves full permission to eat a different variety of foods, there may be a shorter period where people do eat more maybe high sugar, high fat, high energy foods, but that's a natural reaction to coming out of restriction. We just need to trust the process and trust the body, knowing that it's gone through this before. It's within that biology, it's within that genetic blueprint. So my final word to you is trust the process. Please seek help if you need support in diving deeper into this part of overcoming disordered eating. And I can't wait for you to tune in next week. Thank you for tuning in to Food Is Food. If you found the episode nourishing, hit subscribe so you don't miss our weekly episodes. And just before we wrap up, a little reminder that the discussions in each episode are for informational purposes and don't replace individualized advice. Because every recovery journey is so unique. Please consult your healthcare provider for support. That's all for today. Stay nourished and see you next time.