Have you tried all the diets? Are you fed up with dieting and looking for a kinder approach to food and your body?

I’m Amy Slabaugh, a Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor. Here’s my quick intro to an anti-diet approach to eating: Intuitive Eating.

What Is Intuitive Eating?

Let’s lay the ground work here. First of all we have the world of typical dieting. This world should be very familiar to us all, right? Keto, Paleo, low-fat, calorie restricted, intermittent fasting, and on and on.

In the world of dieting the main goal is often weight loss. And how you get there is by following a set of specific rules for how, what and when to eat.

Now, Intuitive Eating is an anti-diet approach where weight loss is not the goal. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t, but either way, it’s not the main goal of Intuitive Eating. 

With Intuitive Eating the main goal is to:

• Repair your relationship with food
• Learn to listen to your body
• Be able to eat with confidence, peace and enjoyment

Learning to listen to your body is part of the anti-diet approach of Intuitive Eating. Diets often require you to tune out of your body’s own cues whereas with Intuitive Eating you are learning to tune in to those cues.

Some examples of ways that diets encourage us to tune out our cues:

Let’s look at intermittent fasting, you may be full but you’re eating window is closing so you keep eating because this will be your last chance for 16 hours – so you end up not respecting your body’s fullness cues.

Or if you’re on a calorie (or points) restricted diet you may be hungry but you’ve “used up” all of your calories or points for the day, so you don’t honor those feelings of hunger and maybe you choose to not eat at all.

With Intuitive Eating the goal is to lean in to those body cues, to hear them and respect them. Your body is a good guide for letting you know when, what and how much to eat.

Making peace with food is another key concept in Intuitive Eating.

This means:

• no longer having rigid food rules about which foods are allowed or not
• no longer having forbidden foods or cheat day foods
• no longer viewing food as a temptation to be avoided

This type of approach can seem a little scary at first. People worry that if they listen to their hunger they will never stop eating. Or that if they stop having “forbidden foods” they will only eat sugar forever and always.

And I completely understand those worries, but the good news is that your body is good and it is a better guide than you think. It is possible to turn down the volume from all of those external food rules and turn up the volume on your own cues. When you do this you will have a better relationship with food.

So, this is a very brief introduction to Intuitive Eating, just touching on a few of the core concepts. And if any of this has piqued your interest and you’re curious about trying an Intuitive Eating approach please reach out and let me know. 

And I want to add that you don’t have to be fully bought in to start an Intuitive Eating journey. Being fed up with dieting and being curious about a kinder approach to food and your body is enough of a starting place.