Intuitive Eating

What is Intuitive Eating?

Your way towards a happy and healthy relationship with food and your body. Read more about the 10 principles.

Maybe you’ve heard of ‘intuitive eating’ before and you ended up on my website or maybe when you think of intuitive eating you think about cramming everything you feel like at that moment. To make the difference between the latter versus the version I mean you can read more here.

Intuitive Eating was developed in 1995 by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, two American dieticians. In their book ‘IIntuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach‘ they describe the 10 principles of intuitive eating, supported by scientific research.

Intuitive eating aims to normalize your relationship with food. The diet society in which we live sees a solution for almost everything in a diet and dietary rules. This is not intuitive eating. It consists of 10 principles, whereby principle 1 is called ‘reject the diet mentality’ for a reason.

It has been scientifically proven that diets do not help in the long term, they often cause even more problems than they provide a healthy diet and lifestyle in the long term. Intuitive eating is a framework consisting of 10 principles that help you become aware of your (eating) behavior, investigate where this comes from and provide tools to deal with it in other ways. All with the aim of no longer hopping from diet to diet, but rather to look for a sustainable way of taking care of yourself that suits you.

THE Definition

The definition provided by Evelyn and Elyse probably describes this best:

“Intuitive Eating is a self-care eating framework, which integrates instinct, emotion, and rational thought and was created by two dietitians, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch in 1995. Intuitive Eating is a weight-inclusive, evidence-based model with a validated assessment scale and over 100 studies to date.” 

The 10 principles

Intuitive eating consists of 10 principles that can be used to support your personal learning process. Where diets focus on certain rules that you have to follow, such as eating at certain times, sticking to fixed amounts, eating products that are good for you and leaving out products that are not.

The principles are not fixed rules that you have to adhere to at all costs. There is no right or wrong. The principles are there to support you in learning to recognize the signals and needs of your own body and also to investigate how you can respond to them.

1. Reject the Diet Mentality
2. Honor Your Hunger
3. Make Peace with Food
4. Challenge the Food Police
5. Discover the Satisfaction Factor
6. Feel Your Fullness
7. Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness
8. Respect Your Body
9. Movement—Feel the Difference
10. Honor Your Health—Gentle Nutrition

Books and coaching

The books written by Evelyn and Elyse are a good starting point to start with Intuitive Eating. The books provide a good basis for learning more about intuitive eating, with clear explanations and visual examples of clients they have guided.

In addition to the basic book, there is also a workbook, a workbook for teenagers and the book ‘Intuitive Food for Every Day’.

While counseling clients, I always recommend purchasing and reading the book. As in primary school, we learn best through repetition. This is also the added value of coaching in addition to reading the books and vice versa. They support each other and can facilitate the learning and change process.

Building a healthy relationship with food body and mind