10 Principles of Intuitive Eating (+ examples)
Have you ever woken up in cold sweat thinking, “I just can’t do this anymore? I can’t keep dieting; I can’t keep hating my body; I can’t keep spending so much time and energy thinking about what I should or shouldn’t eat or feeling guilty for having yet another out-of-control cheat day?”
If so, you’ve probably stumbled across Intuitive Eating in your late night “Google, what’s the best diet?” or "Why can’t I lose weight and keep it off?” searches. Or perhaps you’ve seen folks on Instagram talking about all the yummy, guilt-free benefits of breaking up with dieting and learning to eat intuitively, and you’re intrigued.
But what is Intuitive Eating really? How do you actually break up with diet culture and learn to listen to and trust your body, especially when that probably feels so far out of reach right now? And what do you DO with those 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating, anyway?
Keep reading for all these answers and more.
First, what is Intuitive Eating?
With very few exceptions, we’re all born intuitive eaters who follow gut instincts that tell us when we’re hungry and when we’re full, and a bit later, which foods and flavors we do and don’t like. Once upon a time, eating was simple and straightforward.
Unfortunately, as we grow, toxic diet culture infiltrates our lives. Far too many of us begin to feel pressure to eat and exercise a certain way as we attempt to “control” our weight, and we can end up losing touch with our internal eating wisdom.
The more we rely on external calorie targets, meal plans, or the scale to guide our eating—rather than our bodies themselves—the more disconnected we’re likely to become from our hunger and fullness or other eating cues. We may also experience guilt and shame about our food choices, learn to over-rely on food as a means of coping with emotions, or end up mistrusting ourselves with certain foods.
Intuitive Eating is a self-care eating framework, created by dietitians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch over 25 years ago, that can help you repair your relationship with food and heal from these all-too-common consequences of dieting. It’s an evidence-based, weight-neutral approach to food that focuses on the attunement and alignment of mind, body, and food to optimize overall health and wellbeing.
While not focused on weight loss, life looks dramatically different before and after Intuitive Eating.
There are 10 Principles in the Intuitive Eating framework. Let’s look at each one individually, and I’ll share some tips for how you can get started putting them into practice!
Principle #1: Reject the Diet Mentality
Believe it or not, dieting has been scientifically proven not to work. There’s a mountain of research that shows us dieting is terrible at producing long-term, sustainable weight loss for the vast majority of people.
Not only does dieting not work, but it can damage your relationship with food and disrupt trust between you and your body’s signals too.
There are many, many reasons why dieting doesn’t work, but let’s chat about a few of them.
Your body does not know the difference between intentional and unintentional caloric restriction, so when it perceives too few calories coming in, it thinks, “Trouble! Potential Starvation Ahead!” In response, it sets off a cascade of biological mechanisms designed to protect you from starvation, maintain your organ functioning, and keep you alive.
The psychological effects of restriction and deprivation are equally as profound. In short, we tend to crave and overeat the very foods we try to avoid! Perhaps your personal experience backs this up?
This Principle of Intuitive Eating involves learning the truth about dieting and coming to terms with the fact that you haven’t failed diets—diets have failed you.
You can begin by exploring your own dieting history and reevaluating with fresh eyes whether dieting has actually “worked” for you if it hasn’t led to long-term, sustainable weight loss. Also consider the toll that dieting has taken on various aspects of your life, including your relationship with food and your body, your social life, self confidence, and more.
Principle #2: Honor Your Hunger
The idea behind this Principle is relatively simple: Listen to your body when it tells you it needs fuel!
The feeling of hunger is your body’s way of meeting one of its most basic needs for survival. Food is very literally the energy your body needs to exist and complete its most basic and strenuous tasks. Think of food for humans just as gas is to a traditional car—essential.
As I tell my clients, however, simple does not necessarily mean easy to implement—especially if you’re used to counting and tracking calories, following prescriptive meal plans, or eating by the clock. You simply may not know or trust your hunger.
To begin working with this Principle, try to understand what hunger feels like in your body (including earlier and later signs of hunger) and then commit to honoring that hunger by eating at regular intervals throughout the day.
Principe #3: Make Peace with Food
Do you struggle with the vicious restrict-binge cycle?
This Principle of Intuitive Eating helps you stop swinging between restricting and overeating by showing you how to make peace with food so you can trust yourself to eat any food you want, without guilt, in a way that feels good.
This is often one of the scariest and most misunderstood elements of Intuitive Eating because it involves giving yourself unconditional permission to eat any food you like, without guilt or other compensatory behaviors (such as thinking you need to burn it off with exercise).
If that sounds nerve racking to you and you feel like you couldn’t possibly trust yourself around certain foods, you’re not alone. The only way to escape this feeling IS to practice giving yourself permission to eat and work on rebuilding trust with that food. In the beginning, you may overeat those foods to the point of discomfort.
While not ideal, this is often an important step on the path to food freedom. Over time, experience eating previously forbidden foods and full permission to enjoy them will take the power away from the food and put it back into your hands!
Want to dip your toes in? Choose a food you normally wouldn’t give yourself permission to eat and have some. Assure yourself you can have as much as you’d like without guilt. Practice staying mindful, tuning into all the flavors, textures, smells, and more. Enjoy the heck out of that food and see how it feels in your body!
Principle #4: Challenge the Food Police
You know those thoughts in your head that say you shouldn’t eat carbs, that fruit has too much sugar, not to eat after 7 p.m., or that dairy is ‘bad’ for you?
In Intuitive Eating we call those voices the Food Police, and they can be really stressful and rarely help you make feel-good food choices.
With this Principle, you learn to throw out the “rulebook” on healthy eating, push back on the food police, set boundaries with others, and sort out dieting myths from nutrition facts. Reframing these voices is a key step to ditching food and eating guilt—plus it frees your mind to pay attention to your body’s signs and signals instead.
You can start pushing back on the food police by noticing how many and how often food and dieting rules pop into your head. Then begin to ask yourself, are these rules true? Are they kind? Or helpful?
Remind yourself that you deserve to eat without guilt or moral dilemma. Ultimately, you’ll be able to make eating decisions from a more empowered and embodied place when you don’t have the food police shouting at you all day!
If you have no idea how to sort out the diet culture noise from nutrition facts so you can successfully challenge the food police, you may find it helpful to get the guidance and support of a certified Intuitive Eating counselor. Here’s what you can expect when you work with one.
You can also book a free Whole Health Strategy session with me here to learn more about how I can support you to stop dieting and start eating intuitively!
Principle #5: Discover the Satisfaction Factor
Satisfaction is the hub of Intuitive Eating because eating can and should be pleasurable.
Not only that, but when you choose foods you genuinely want to eat in an enjoyable environment, you’ll be much more likely to land on an amount of food that feels good in your body. We need to feel both physically full and emotionally satisfied with our meals.
With diets, we tend to ask, “what should I eat?” or “what am I supposed to eat?”
In contrast, with Intuitive Eating, ask yourself instead “What do I want to eat?” or “What sounds good?” Then, consider how you can build a meal around whatever that is in a way that will feel good and honor your health and wellbeing.
Principle #6: Feel Your Fullness
Have you ever felt like a charter member of the clean plate club?!
If so, don’t feel bad. Many of us have trouble recognizing that we are full until we are uncomfortably full. There are lots of reasons we may blow past our fullness cues, including not wanting to waste food, economic concerns, habits, rules we learned in childhood, or feeling deprived because of dieting.
Fortunately, just like with hunger, you can relearn how to honor your fullness cues, and the hunger-fullness scale can help. You can also download my free guide, 5 Ways to Get Better at Respecting Your Fullness Cues.
Principle #7: Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness
Eating is inherently emotional. Whether we’re talking about celebrations, holidays, funerals, traditions, or nostalgic childhood meals, in our culture food is used as more than just a way to satisfy hunger.
Eating yummy foods also releases serotonin and dopamine—the “feel good” hormones—in our brains. So it can sometimes bring us comfort or soothing when we need it, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that.
Still, food typically only provides a temporary fix without getting to the root of your emotional needs. Also, if it’s your only or primary way of coping with difficult emotions, your eating probably won't feel very good.
With this Principle we aim to normalize emotional eating, while also helping you build a robust self-care toolbox full of lots of other helpful ways of coping with your emotions beyond food.
Principle #8: Respect your Body
It’s nearly impossible for any of us to feel at peace in our bodies in the world we live in. There’s just so much pressure for our bodies to match diet culture’s impossibly narrow, thin ideals.
Imagine if society declared one shoe size to be the ideal standard for beauty… but you weren’t born with that size foot. This is the reality of what diet culture has ingrained into our minds with regards to weight, shape, and body size!
This Principle aims to help you respect your genetic blueprint and cultivate a positive relationship with your body.
You can commit to showing your body respect by eating when your body tells you you’re hungry, stopping when it signals it’s full, engaging in movement that feels good, speaking to yourself kindly, and participating in relaxing activities to give yourself well-deserved rest.
It takes lots of time and patience to fully heal your body image, and it may be easier with the support of an experienced practitioner. But one way to get started is to begin shifting your focus towards appreciating your body for the things it enables you to do and experience rather than how it looks.
Principle #9: Movement, Feel the Difference
Intuitive Eating can help you heal your relationship with movement too by helping you separate physical activity from the pursuit of weight loss.
Try shifting your mindset away from exercising as a chore or a punishment towards moving your body in ways that are enjoyable. This doesn’t have to be early morning HIIT classes or slogging on the elliptical for 30 minutes. It might mean going on a bike ride, playing with your kids or pet, or taking a walk through nature.
The goal is to focus on movement you find enjoyable.
10. Honor Your Health with Gentle Nutrition
We save this one for last because it’s critical to have a healthy relationship between your mind, body, and food before you begin trying to incorporate nutrition principles. Without all that other healing work, it would be way too easy to turn even the gentlest of nutrition guidance into yet another stressful dieting rule.
Generally, gentle nutrition is flexible, practical, and enjoyable. It’s far more likely to center around foods to ADD to your diet rather than foods to restrict, eliminate, or avoid. Although, of course, if you have an allergy, sensitivity, or medical reason to avoid certain foods, gentle nutrition honors that too. It’s individual to your unique body!
The 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating Work Together
As you can see, the Principles of Intuitive Eating work together to help you make food choices that honor your taste buds and your body’s cues, while also leaving you feeling happily nourished and energized.
They teach you to use a combination of instinct, emotion, and rational thought to choose foods that taste good, feel good, and honor your health and wellbeing in the way you’d like—in other words, to land on what I like to think of as your “forever” food solution!
I hope this brief overview has inspired you to explore the possibilities of Intuitive Eating. I encourage you to take it day by day, and to slowly integrate the principles into your life one small step at a time.
And of course, if you have any questions, concerns, or need guidance during this process, you can book a free Whole Health Strategy Session with me here to learn how I can support you to break up with dieting and become an Intuitive Eater!
This article was co-written with Maddie Okmin, dietetics intern at the University of Southern California.