An Intuitive Eating Dietitian specializes in helping clients break free from diet culture, recognize and honor their body's hunger and fullness cues, and develop a more balanced and sustainable approach to nourishment. An intuitive eating dietitian goes beyond simply providing meal plans; they delve into the emotional and psychological aspects of eating, helping clients uncover and address the root causes of their challenges with food.
Working with an intuitive eating nutritionist or dietitian ensures clients receive targeted, expert guidance in their journey toward a more mindful and compassionate relationship with food. These professionals have extensive knowledge and experience in this area, enabling them to create personalized strategies that empower clients to trust their body's innate wisdom and cultivate self-acceptance.
What Does an Intuitive Eating Dietitian Do?
An intuitive eating dietitian incorporates the principles of intuitive eating into their practice. This may include unlearning diet culture beliefs and practices, reconnecting with one's body cues, eliminating food rules, and incorporating nutrition science via gentle nutrition.
Ultimately, the goal is for individuals to heal their relationships, and find peace with, food and their bodies. This can be done together with other strategies intended to improve health. Intuitive eating dietitians also incorporate medical nutrition therapy as part of the process as needed for particular health circumstances.
In general, dietitians play many roles in health improvement, so whether you’re looking to improve your general health, a specific health condition, or navigate an unfamiliar life stage via nutrition, a dietitian can help.
What is Intuitive Eating?
Intuitive eating is a non-diet, weight-inclusive approach to nutrition that emphasizes listening to internal cues vs. external diet rules. Intuitive eating is all about honoring your health while understanding that mental health is as important as physical health. Any food plan/diet that impacts your mental health is not making you any healthier. It's having a strong understanding of how to best nourish your body without a side of guilt or shame because YOU are the expert on your body. Based on a book written by registered dietitians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, Intuitive Eating is based on 10 principles to help guide individuals find a healthy relationship with food. Intuitive eating is not a diet but rather a way of eating as there are no rules associated with it making it incredibly adaptable and individualized for each person.
Does Intuitive Eating Work?
Since the program was developed, studies have been carried out to look at its effects. Much of this research focuses on the psychological benefits, and intuitive eating has performed well against restrictive dieting. However, studies looking at the food choices of intuitive eaters have also found that they are more likely to consume a wider variety of foods. This is good because it means consuming a wider range of nutrients.
Although weight loss is not the focus of intuitive eating, a recent review of about 25 studies also showed that people following this approach generally weigh less than those following restrictive diets. This is promising, but it’s still not conclusive, as the studies are generally small and focus on specific groups of people – so we don’t know whether they’d apply to everyone.
If you want to try intuitive eating, be aware that it won’t come with recipes, meal plans, or strict instructions, so it might seem daunting to begin with, especially if you’re used to following restrictive diets. It’s a process of re-learning your relationship with food, so it will take time.
For it to work, it’s important to embrace all 10 principles. This can mean there is some trial and error as you not only start to eat what you want but also recognize hunger and fullness and begin to understand how to make the right choices for your body. Whether you try intuitive eating or not, it’s worth remembering its first principle. Long-term health means a long-term approach to healthy eating, not short-term diets.
What is the Difference Between Mindful Eating and Intuitive Eating?
Mindful eating is all about awareness and intention. The core of this healthy eating strategy is to slow down and be fully in tune with all the tastes, smells, and textures of the food in front of you. While, intuitive eating is a weight-inclusive, self-care-focused eating framework that includes ten principles ranging from rejecting a diet mentality to respecting your body to exercising enjoyably. Intuitive eating, more than mindful eating, encourages us to challenge the rules we may have in our minds around food so that we can develop interoceptive awareness—basically, the ability to listen and respond successfully to our bodies’ actual needs.
What are the Cons of Intuitive Eating?
One disadvantage is that intuitive eating can be confusing at the beginning as it does not come with specific recipes, diet plans, or strict instructions. Therefore, it is important to recognize your hunger and satiety, as well as to know which food is good for your health. In simple words, intuitive eating is a process of establishing a healthy relationship between your body and food.
Can You Lose Weight with Intuitive Eating?
Yes. Intuitive eating weight loss can happen. However, you could also gain weight or simply maintain your weight. What happens to your body depends on your “starting point” and its relation to something called your set point weight.
A set point weight is the weight that your body wants to be. The weight where it functions optimally and feels it’s best mentally & physically. Some people are below their set weight (maybe they have a history of restricting food and aren’t giving their body enough), some may be at their set weight, and some may be above their set weight (maybe they experience the restrict-binge cycle or emotional eating). So, if someone is above their set weight, sure, they may end up losing weight overall. But that’s not the GOAL. And we can’t know what the set weight number is exactly. It gets especially confusing when you’ve been dieting for so long and have been so far removed from eating intuitively.
With that being said I do want to make it clear that even if you’re above your set weight that doesn’t mean you start to lose weight right off the bat. One study found that those who were put on a diet initially gained weight from their pre-starvation (i.e. dieting) states, however after having no food rules (eating intuitively) they came within 5% of their set point weights (the weights they were at before ever dieting).
Brief History of Intuitive Eating
Intuitive eating was coined by 2 registered dietitians, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. After working in private practice with eating disorders and also counseling clients in weight management, they noticed that their clients continued to regain the weight they had lost from following traditional weight loss methods.
They started to feel a desire to help their clients in a different way – a way that created a positive, non-stressful relationship with food and moved away from the dieting mentality. Not only did they want this to help their weight management clients, but they hoped it would help with their eating disorder clients as well and potentially prevent the onset of eating disorders.
10 Principles of Intuitive Eating
Intuitive eating has 10 principles in total. These principles all work together to help create a healthy, sustainable, easy relationship with food that (should) improve both physical and mental health. Here are the ten principles of intuitive eating:
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
Stages of Intuitive Eating
Being an intuitive eater isn’t necessarily something you can just wake up one day and decide to start doing. Intuitive eating is a process, and with processes come different stages. Here are the stages of intuitive eating that Tribole and Resch discuss in their book.
1. Readiness
The first stage of intuitive eating involves hitting diet rock bottom. People aren’t looking for a completely different approach unless they are exhausted, drained, and defeated from decades of another approach. It’s unfortunate, but kind of a necessary step in the process.
2. Exploration
This is where we start to discover all the things about yourself that dieting held you back from how you’re feeling, what you like to eat, what makes you (as an individual) feel good, what your biology is telling you, and more. The exploration phase involves hyper-awareness so we can truly learn what we need to know about what makes you.
3. Crystallization
This is where the conscious shifts into the subconscious, and what used to take active energy and hyper-awareness now becomes second nature. Food doesn’t feel like a threat, your brain is quiet, and you’re able to separate emotional eating from physical hunger.
4. Intuitive Eater Awakening
This is where it all comes together and your new skills are working in constant harmony, creating a symphony of choosing nutrient-dense foods while still enjoying fun, energy-dense foods in moderation. You crave moving your body, and no longer feel a pang of guilt every 5 minutes for remembering how you look or what you ate last week. You’re able to make nourishing choices while being free from the food-related stress that diet culture has bogged you down with.
Benefits of Working with an Intuitive Eating Dietitian
Intuitive eating dietitians recognize that traditional approaches to health typically don’t last in life-long changes and permanent results. Intuitive eating isn’t something you do once before moving on to the next diet. It’s something you learn, and if applied correctly, will stick with you for a lifetime. It becomes second nature. Here are some of the benefits of working as an intuitive eating dietitian:
1. Improved self-esteem
2. Better overall quality of life and life satisfaction
10. Fewer disordered eating tendencies and decreased risk of developing an eating disorder
How to Start Intuitive Eating
If you’ve decided intuitive eating is the next step for you, but you aren’t sure where to go from here – keep reading for how to start intuitive eating.
1. Start Learning About Intuitive Eating
You’ll want to snag a copy of intuitive eating so that you can properly learn all 10 principles.
2. Get Rid of Diet Books and Other Diet Resources
In your quest to become an intuitive eater, it’s extremely important to approach it from as much of a blank slate as you can. That means getting rid of all the diet books, apps, and other tools used for restricting your food intake. You may also want to consider putting the scale away for a time, if not getting rid of it altogether.
3. Seek Out Support
If there’s one thing that is bound to lead to failure when it comes to intuitive eating, it’s trying to do it all on your own. Find a group of like-minded people who are on a similar journey as you with intuitive eating so you can discuss the process and troubleshoot things together.
4. Get Professional Help from an Intuitive Eating Dietitian
Intuitive eating is confusing. You’re going to have questions, feel unsure, and maybe even stuck at times. Having a professional walk you through the process is crucial, and even more so having a registered dietitian with a background in eating disorders and a master's in health psychology to make sure your relationship with food and your nutrition choices are best serving you and your health goals in addition to your mindset.
What to Expect from Your First Appointment with an Intuitive Eating Dietitian
During your first consultation, you and your dietitian will explore your experience with food and eating and how you feel about your body. They will take a look at your current relationship with food and body and help you understand why any past dieting, calorie restriction or counting, or anything you might have tried to help manage your weight is actually part of the problem and not the solution.
Together, you will discuss what intuitive eating is and give you a good sense of what is involved in the process. You will be provided with some valuable tools and resources to start you on your journey to healing your relationship with food and body and becoming an intuitive eater. For many, the process starts with appetite work and a challenging diet mentality (how you’ve been taught to think about food).
During the review consultations, you and your dietitian will work through the intuitive eating principles (this includes nutrition), explore the power of self-compassion, start to address your body image concerns, and tackle each struggle you face. The number of sessions a person needs varies from one or two too many, however, most people have at least 5-6 sessions in the first 2-3 months.
How to Find an Intuitive Eating Dietitian Near Me
Your best bet at finding an intuitive eating dietitian near you is to check out the certified intuitive eating counselor directory and enter your location. This way, you know they are legit and have the appropriate training.
There are also different dietitian directories online in which you can search through numerous dietitian profiles and see who may be the best fit for you. They will typically state if they are intuitive eating dietitians in their bio.
You can also check out the different dietitian colleges or regulatory boards specific to your location.
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