Guest Post: Heather Rudalavage, RD on Intuitive Eating
Heather is a registered dietician and owns the company, Intuitive Nutrition, where she counsels clients on how they can begin to tune into their own inner wisdom. She has kindly offered to share her knowledge and experience in making the transition to Intuitive Eating. Please welcome Heather!
How to get started with IE
If you are currently dieting, or have tried dieting in the past you most likely know that diets are usually a short term solution, at least for 95 % of the people that go on a diet. As a matter of fact, if you are on a diet now, itʼs probably because you have been on a diet before! Did you know that every time you go on a diet it is harder to lose the weight and easier to gain it back?
If you want to lose weight what else are you going to do though, right? Wrong. There is another way, and that way is known as intuitive eating.
Intuitive Eating is not a diet, it is actually the opposite of a diet. The definition of Intuitive Eating according to Wikipedia is: a nutrition philosophy based on the premise that becoming more attuned to the body’s natural hunger signals is a more effective way to attain a healthy weight; rather than keeping track of the amounts of energy and fats in foods.
It’s a process that is intended to create a healthy relationship with food, mind, and body. Intuitive Eating, goes by many names, including non-dieting or non-diet approach, normal eating, wisdom eating, conscious eating and more.
With a diet, you are “told” what to eat, when to eat it and how much of it to eat. Even with a plan such as Weight Watchers (the best diet out there) point system, someone is telling you how many “points”, based on grams of carbohydrate, you can have every day. The problem with this is that most people donʼt want to spend the rest of their lives weighing and measuring food. It just isnʼt realistic!
The thought of going off a diet can be very scary for most people. To some, it feels like throwing in the towel and to others it seems like it would be impossible to eat what you want and lose weight, especially if you are used to being told what to eat. Remember, itʼs your past dieting mentality that has led you to believe you canʼt trust yourself. You have the ability to eat intuitively, everybody does. When you were an infant you ate when you were hungry and stopped when you got full, even as a toddler you most likely were known to eat a half of a cookie or 3 bites of your dinner. You used to eat intuitively,but somewhere down the line you stopped listening to your body. When did that happen?
If you are ready to jump off the dieting cycle or are at the bottom of your dieting rope and are ready to try relearning how to eat intuitively, here are some tips to get you started. First, I highly recommend reading Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole RD and Elyse Resch RD, they are the original intuitive eaters! Currently, the book Women Food,and God by Geneen Roth is a NY Times bestseller, I think she does an excellent job at helping you find out the reasons you overeat to begin with. Honestly, if you just start eating whatever you want, without figuring out why you are eating, you arenʼt going to lose weight-sorry!
Once you do a little reading on IE, youʼll have to be willing to give up the notion that if you just found the right diet…You would be thin and happy forever! It would be one thing if diets were a pain but worked, but people, listen to me, “THEY DONʼT WORK” at least not long term for the majority of people. Even “pseudo-dieting” such as following a raw food diet or choosing to become vegetarian just for the sake of losing weight, will prevent you from listening to your own body, your own true inner wisdom.
Once you are on board with realizing dieting is not the answer you seek, and you have thrown away all your diet books and maybe even your scale then comes the hard part, beginning to ask yourself, “am I hungry?” and if I am than what do I really want right now. You can go slowly with this and use the “am I hungry” speed-bump every time you catch yourself reaching for something to eat. Just recognizing how often you reach for food without being hungry is progress! At this stage, you are just exploring why and when you reach for food. At this early stage, you may decide to eat even though your answer to “am I hungry” is no. Thatʼs OK, you wonʼt be at this place forever.
After you begin to realize that eating only solves hunger, not boredom, loneliness, anger, stress or any other emotion, then you can begin to eat slowly and try to tune into your satisfaction and satiety. Every few bites, pause and ask, “am I still hungry? Does this food still taste good?” You might be surprised by the answer! Gone are the days where you would eat birthday cake so fast you didnʼt even taste it, now you are slowing down and beginning to notice that bakery cake icing kind of tastes oily or greasy and you might decide to just eat the cake part. Or, maybe stealing cold fries off of your childʼs plate is disgusting and you prefer to order your own fries and eat a few while they are still hot- concept! LOL!
I know I am not going in depth enough to really give you an A-Ha! moment, but if you do some experimenting yourself and begin to slow down and savor your food, youʼll realize you need less of it to feel satisfied! There is so much more to IE than just food, it really does go to a much deeper level. This is challenging for some, we of the human race prefer to stuff our feelings down, often with food, instead of facing those feelings head on. Maybe you donʼt really want to bring up those feelings, maybe you think you will die if you had to face those feelings, how much power are you giving to those feelings? Are you living in the past and letting those stories control you today? Whose voice is telling you that chocolate is bad or that leaving food on your plate is wasteful?
IE is not, as some claim, eating whatever you want, whenever you want. Rather, it is learning to love yourself enough to want to take care of your body by providing it with healthy nutritious food that nourishes your body and your soul! Your body is amazing, beautiful and deserves respect! Many people treat their pets better than their own bodies, they provide their pets with love and exercise, fresh air and adequate food. Do you treat your pets better than you treat yourself? Your pets deserve love, so do you.
I am just scratching the surface in this post, maybe Iʼll be invited to guest post again and we can discuss IE in more detail. For now, if you would like more information on IE, please visit the site www.intuitiveeating.org, there you will find links to more sites, resources and a list of IE counselors listed by state. I also have many postings on my own site www.intuitive-nutrition.com that discuss many of the different pieces of learning to eat intuitively.
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What are your thoughts on Intuitive Eating? Is it something that you’d like to transition into or are you more comfortable staying on a specific weight loss/maintenance plan?
Questions? Email me! aloserforlife@gmail.com
17 comments
I LOVED this post. I started eating intuitively about 1.5 months ago. Since then the weight has come off slowly- only about 3 pounds, but what I am finding is that I am happy and healthy. I know that as I get more intuined I will lose the weight. I still eat more than I need to of foods I really love (like bread!) and don’t stop when my body is telling me to stop, which is what I am currently working on. However, I find IE to be freeing and the best thing for me. I know that eventually the rest of the weight will come off.
Heather, I love this statement you make in your post: Rather, it is learning to love yourself enough to want to take care of your body by providing it with healthy nutritious food that nourishes your body and your soul!
That is so true, and so often women do not allow themselves the time or the energy it takes to do just that. I tell my yoga students this all the time about their health and fitness–that they have to think they are important enough to deserve it. To all of you wonderful mothers, wives, significant others out there–you teach the people in your lives how to think about you. If they see a strong, healthy, happy woman, then your girls will learn how to emulate those things, and the men in your life will learn how to respect women for those things.
Thank you, Heather. Your post is inspirational, and I am very interested in reading the books you suggested.
Thank you so much for this post, I really needed this!! When I started eating healthy foods 3 months ago I also started IE at the same time. I lost 15 pounds with IE, but I have been at a plateau for over a month. I think I need to re -evaluate what I’m doing because I KNOW I’m not doing IE correctly. I will have to check out those websites and books. I still have 28 pounds to go.
I can’t trust myself, I’d eat every minute:), I am never hungry or never full. It drives my husband crazy. I am not sure why. I have no regulation. I had my Gall Bladder out 15 years ago, not sure if that has an effect on it or what.
I read Evelyn Tribole’s book a couple of years ago, and I, like a lot of people, thought it meant eating whatever you want when you want, and the time, the food that I wanted was not what my body needed. When it didn’t work, I went back to calorie counting.
In the past few months, I’ve adopted the real meaning of IE by giving my body nutritious food and exercise and water and listening to my hunger signals and working through whatever emotions I’m going through instead of eating.
It’s only been a few weeks, and even though I–like the above poster–have only lost about three pounds, I can already feel a difference. My skin is clearer. I have more energy. Fewer digestive problems. One of the biggest things to come out of all of this, as I’ve slowly progressed into the IE experience, is related to my PCOS (Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome). I am having a menstrual cycle on my own, without medicine to induce it, again! And even on an almost regular basis. This is monumental because I’ve had to rely on medication for the past few years to make my period happen because my body wouldn’t make it happen on its own.
It does get frustrating at times when the weight very slowly drops off, but it’s not about that anymore. It’s just about taking care of myself the way I take care of others. Choosing health over an ideal number. Not giving myself a timeline anymore.
I’m learning how to cook healthy foods, enjoy healthy foods, actually wanting to exercise, and it’s all because I’m finally listening to what my body really wants instead of ignoring it and forcing it to do things the way I want to do them.
Evelyn’s book is wonderful. I highly recommend it. And though I haven’t read Geneen Roth’s newest book, her others are very similar and have helped me overcome a lot of the reasons I was overeating in the first place.
This post was wonderful! That you for sharing it with us. I am scared of intuitive eating, I won’t lie. I desperately want to be able to do it though. I need to do some research!
Great post and so timely for me. I read Geneen Roth’s book Women Food and God and I have been trying to incorporate her rules for eating. I can’t help but count WW points since I have done it for so many years, it is just second nature. I have changed a great deal however in my thinking regarding food. I don’t have a all or nothing thinking any more. No food is off limits is I want it I can have it with out guilt and that in itself has taken away the appeal of the before “forbidden fruit” foods that could lead me to binge.
It is a learning curve and I don’t think intuitive eating happens over night, so I am being patient with myself and working on it.
I still don’t know why I turn to food but I hope to figure it out soon so I can move past it for good.
Marisa thank you for having this guest post and sharing this awesome information.
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Excellent Guest Post! Thank you to you both for this. It couldn’t come at a better time for me.
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Thanks for this post. I do WW right now. I think it’s a great plan to learn how to eat healthy. Then at some point, I would love to start learning IE. I am intrigued when Marisa started trying this out. I’ve tried something similar in the past. Eventually I failed. But I never really “studied” about it. I’ll have to check out the book suggestions. Thanks!
Great post and I’m going to read the books you suggested – Thanks
Excellent post. Thank you!
I have always been interested in this as it makes sense to me intuitively, I just haven’t really gotten there 100% because I know at times I eat when not hungry still
Very interesting. yes, I’d love to eventually be an intuitive eater. Working on it. I can’t imagine counting calories for the rest of my life.
Oh, Marisa! I got my card for my free Subway breakfast! I’m going to use it this week. I’ll toast my coffee to you.
Thanks so much.
Thanks for all of your comments, they really warm my heart! Intuitive Eating is challenging in that it does take patience, for those of you who are starting your journey or are early into it, just remember- sometimes IE is 2 steps forward and 1 step back and that is OK, your next meal is a chance to begin again! If you have individual ?? please feel free to email me. Thanks Marissa for inviting me to be a guest on your site!
Great post! I actually wrote a similar post a couple days ago debunking the misconceptions of intuitive eating. There are so many people who think that intutive eating is permission to just eat all day and it isn’t. So thanks for continuing to spread this message.
Intuitive eating has completely salvaged my relationship with food as well as turned into my career. As a holistic health coach, I am coaching my clients to tune into their bodies and practice the principles of intuitive eating, it is such rewarding work to help people untangle the messages we get from society and even our own thoughts about dieting.