Intuitive Eating Criticism: What You Need to Know
A couple of years ago, Jillian Michaels set off an Internet firestorm when she released a YouTube video vehemently criticizing Intuitive Eating. The backlash against her comments from those in the Intuitive Eating world was fierce—and to be honest, well deserved since she openly admitted that she’d never read the book and thus didn’t know anything about the framework. The fact that she didn’t understand it was painfully obvious to anyone with an understanding of Intuitive Eating, the intention behind it, or how the approach works in practice. So, if you happen across them, take Jillian’s comments with an enormous grain of salt!
And yet, if you’re considering an Intuitive Eating approach to nutrition and health, you have a right to know what the criticisms are—so you can make an informed decision as to whether this approach makes sense for you.
In that spirit, I’ve pulled together some of the most common criticisms of Intuitive Eating and want to break them down for you. Many of them are essentially misunderstandings of the framework, but they’re still very much worth exploring.
But first, a quick refresher…
What Is Intuitive Eating?
Intuitive Eating is a self-care eating framework that was created by two dietitians, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, in the late 1990s. There are 10 principles designed to help people heal their relationship with food, focus on building healthful behaviors, and prioritize their nutrition.
Evelyn and Elyse noticed that the traditional calorie-driven diets and prescriptive meal plans they were trained to teach as dietitians weren’t working for many of their clients in the long-term. People had a hard time sticking to even moderate diets over time, and they tended to regain whatever weight they would initially lose. Many of them became preoccupied with food and their eating, blamed themselves, and felt demoralized when their diets failed.
In short, focusing on weight loss was leading many folks to have negative and unhealthy relationships with food and themselves and the diets weren’t “working” anyway.
Evelyn and Elyse explored the popular dieting literature and dug into scientific studies on eating behaviors, the psychology of food restriction, and related concepts. They were intrigued and influenced by the work of some early anti-diet advocates, but they didn’t think those models included enough emphasis on health and nutrition.
To bridge the gap, they developed their principles of Intuitive Eating—and created an anti-diet, weight-neutral approach to prioritizing healthful self-care, promoting pleasurable eating, and teaching helpful nutrition practices.
Now that you understand what it is, let’s unpack some of the criticism of Intuitive Eating.
Intuitive Eating Criticism #1: How Can It Be Healthy? Intuitive Eating Encourages You to Eat Whatever You Want Whenever You Want
Indeed, one of the principles of Intuitive Eating, Make Peace with Food, encourages you to give yourself unconditional permission to eat and enjoy foods that you like, guilt-free. It’s founded on the research regarding the psychological effects of deprivation, restrained eating, and food habituation.
Food restriction and deprivation has been shown to trigger food cravings, overeating, or bingeing. Some call this rebound overeating. Conversely, allowing ourselves plenty of repeated access to delicious foods (even pizza and ice cream) has been shown to help people become habituated to them. Essentially, this means that the food loses its heightened sense of power and excitement over us and becomes just any other food that we sometimes will want, and other times won’t.
Not only do those who criticize this principle not understand the underlying research and psychological effects of deprivation, but they also fail to grasp what unconditional permission to eat really means. Intuitive Eating doesn’t actually advocate or encourage eating whatever you want whenever you want with no regard for anything else.
The goal is to have plenty of access and permission to eat foods you enjoy—while respecting your hunger and fullness cues AND honoring evidence-based nutrition guidelines AND honoring your personal values for how you’d like to care for your body and look after your health.
Make Peace With Food is just one of the 10 principles of Intuitive Eating; they’re meant to work synergistically together so pulling just one principle out of context undermines the entire framework.
Intuitive Eating Criticism #2: It’s a Glorified Hunger-Fullness Diet
Two principles of Intuitive Eating involve respecting your hunger and fullness cues. Indeed, those are your body’s innate eating signals, and our bodies are equipped to self-regulate our eating. As infants, with very few exceptions, most of us cry when we’re hungry and stop eating when we’re full. We naturally eat in attunement with our bodies’ needs, providing we have ready access to food and attentive caregivers.
Unfortunately, lots and lots of people lose touch with this sense of body connection and ability to tune into and trust their hunger and fullness cues. There are all sorts of reasons why this happens, including messages we may get about food and eating in childhood. For example, some of us may be taught to clean our plates, told we can’t be hungry yet, or we may learn to over rely on soothing our emotions with food. While most of these messages are usually well-intended, they can have the unintended consequence of teaching us to override our hunger and fullness cues.
Similarly, due to its hyper-focus on calorie counting, meal plans, and food measuring, dieting does the same thing. Instead of listening to their bodies, dieters are told to listen to the “rules.” Over time, it becomes harder and harder to trust (or even recognize) those innate eating cues.
Once again, there are 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating designed to work together as a whole. Respecting hunger and fullness is only one small part of eating intuitively.
Likewise, as I explained above Intuitive Eating is not intended to be a weight-loss-driven diet. Here’s what you can expect to happen with your weight with Intuitive Eating.
Intuitive Eating Criticism #3: It’s Not About Nutrition
People hear Intuitive Eating dietitians and proponents talking about permission to eat and enjoy all foods and think that means they’re ignoring nutrition.
That couldn’t be further from the truth. All foods INCLUDES lots and lots of nutrient dense foods, not just fun foods. Also, there’s an entire Principle of Intuitive Eating devoted to honoring your health with gentle nutrition!
Intuitive Eating Criticism #4: It Can’t Be Healthy Since It Doesn’t Focus On Weight Loss
Somewhere along the way, our culture has wrongly come to equate weight with health. When we visit the doctor’s office, the first thing they do is weigh us and tell us our body mass index (BMI), even though it’s a deeply flawed and unreliable proxy for health.
Not only does BMI not consider key factors like muscle mass, gender, ethnicity, distribution of fat, or bone density, but the raw data likely don’t even show what you’d expect. For example, there’s a large body of research that shows the BMI category classified as “underweight” is linked with the highest risk of mortality, while being classified as “overweight” may be protective for longevity. Yes, you really did read that correctly!
Other research has found that roughly 30% of people labeled as “obese” by BMI are metabolically healthy (meaning their blood pressure, cholesterol, triglycerides, blood glucose, and c-reactive protein—a marker of inflammation—are within normal ranges). Similarly, around 30% of those labeled as “normal” weight by BMI were found to be metabolically unhealthy.
This is a complex subject with way more to unpack than we can spend time on in this one article. But suffice it to say that weight and health are not the same thing. Healthy bodies can and do come in all shapes and sizes.
Importantly, other research (as well as my clinical experience) has shown that people can and do see improvements in their health markers with changes in health behaviors, regardless of whether those changes result in weight loss.
There are close to 200 research studies on Intuitive Eating, and it’s linked with many health benefits, including:
improvements in blood pressure, blood glucose, triglycerides, HDL cholesterol
greater psychological wellbeing
less disordered eating
higher overall life satisfaction
proactive coping skills
better body image
less binge-eating
higher psychological hardiness
greater variety of nutrient dense foods eaten
and many others
The simplest way to understand a weight-neutral approach to health is this: healthy behaviors may or may not result in weight loss—but they’re still health-promoting!
Weight isn’t a choice—diet and exercise are just two out of many factors that influence a person’s weight including many that are outside of our individual control, including genetics, environment, hormones, microbiome, cultural background, medical conditions, medications, and others.
Intuitive Eating invites you to explore the idea of de-emphasizing weight in your approach to health and putting your energy and attention instead into your health behaviors (such as what’s on your plate, how much you exercise, how you manage your stress, your sleep quantity and quality, your alcohol intake, and more), along with your relationship with food and your body.
It invites you to zoom out and look at health through a much wider lens to include your physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing (what I like to call whole health).
Intuitive Eating Criticism #5: It Can’t Work If You Have a Food Addiction
This is another topic of controversy and debate in the nutrition world. Some say that food lights up the same neuropathways as addictive substances like drugs or alcohol. But the truth is there are lots of other factors that could explain some of this brain imaging research.
Also, there are no definitive studies that show food addiction is real. Much of the existing research has been done on animals, which doesn’t necessarily translate to humans, and importantly, most of it does not account for the effects of prior food restriction.
As I shared above, we know that dieting, restriction, and deprivation can trigger food cravings, overeating, and bingeing behaviors. So, if these things aren’t properly controlled for in the research studies (and they’re usually not), there’s no way to accurately tell if people are in fact “addicted” to the food or if they’re just responding to the well-known psychological effects of restriction and deprivation.
I can tell you without a doubt that I’ve worked with many people who felt addicted to food, but as we’ve worked through the 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating, replaced restriction with unconditional permission to eat, healed their relationship with food, and built a robust self-care toolbox, they’ve been able to make peace with food and regain their sense of control over their eating.
In my experience, permission removes the power from food and puts it firmly back in the eaters’ hands over time and with repeated practice and support.
Intuitive Eating Criticism #6: It’s Not Appropriate for People with a Medical Condition
When some folks hear that Intuitive Eating doesn’t focus on intentional weight loss or encourages an all-foods-fit approach to nutrition, they think it must not be appropriate if you have a medical condition.
That couldn’t be further from the truth. When we say that all foods are welcome in an Intuitive Eating approach to food, we’re not talking about foods that you are allergic to or ones you have a medical reason to avoid.
Even if you have a food-related medical condition, you can still learn how to eat intuitively and practice supportive gentle nutrition behaviors and adjustments to your plate. Sometimes, avoiding certain foods isn’t restriction; it’s an act of healthful self-care. Intuitive Eating can help you sort out and embrace the difference.
At its core, Intuitive Eating supports a whole person approach to healthful self-care. The bottom line is that will look different for everyone because every body and every person has unique needs.
Is Intuitive Eating Right for You?
People often ask, who is Intuitive Eating for? Since it’s about having a happy, healthy relationship with food and supportive nutrtion and self-care, in my opinion, it’s appropriate for nearly everyone.
That said, it’s especially helpful if you know you:
have an unhealthy relationship with food or exercise
experience a lot of food and eating guilt
swing between eating extremes (alternating between restricting and overeating)
have lots and lots of “rules” about your eating that make it hard to enjoy your food or take up a lot of space in your mind
spend lots and lots of energy worrying about your weight
are confused by all the conflicting dieting information out there
have all-or-nothing food or exercise behaviors
struggle with emotional, stress, or boredom eating
have trouble trusting your hunger and fullness cues
rely on calories, points, or macro targets to guide your eating and can’t imagine how you’d keep yourself “in check” without them
struggle with poor body image
are endlessly jumping in and out of diets or experiencing yo-yo weight gain and loss
If you relate to many of these hurdles, I encourage you to look into what you can expect before and after Intuitive Eating. It’s a tremendously healing and empowering way to approach food, exercise, and healthful activities so you can promote your whole—physical, mental, and emotional—health and wellbeing!
If you’d like to learn more about what to expect when you work with an Intuitive Eating counselor or would like discuss your individual circumstances and nutrition or health goals, please feel free to reach out and book a free Whole Health Strategy call with me. I’d love to talk with you!