Who's afraid of intuitive eating?
Between fantasy and the examination of the self
When I first started writing about intuitive eating I ended up with something far too long and exhaustive about human appetite and its many dimensions and how the way our bodies work is for many of us incompatible with our modern food environment.
I wrote about hunger and hormones and learned behaviour, and I wanted to write about intuitive eating because I wanted very much to believe in this possibility that we can get back to how it was when we were kids, when eating wasn’t so fraught with guilt and shame. If you’ve been on some kind of diet for much of your life then the appeal of intuitive eating is immense: a promise of freedom.
Because it’s no wonder people are sick of diets; diets are for most of us ineffective in the long term, leading us to resent ourselves for our perceived gluttony, our lack of discipline. For some they are a gateway to eating disorders and for others they backfire, leading to a cycle of binging and restricting. I don’t think this is working—do you?
You can find a more comprehensive summary here but, in essence, intuitive eating is an anti-diet that calls for a gentler approach; to stop trying to rule our appetite with an iron fist and instead trust that our body knows what it needs. It claims to work by “removing the obstacles and disruptors to attunement,” meaning attunement to our hunger cues, obstacles that “usually come from the mind in the form of rules, beliefs, and thoughts.”
But to eat intuitively is to me something complicated posing as something simple—what we might call intuition is a tangle of hormones and neurotransmiters, wanting and liking, survival and pleasure. It has to do with our evolved biology and our invididual genetics, our upbringing, our socioeconomic status, our mental and physical health.
And our intuition lies to us constantly, or rather it is deceived easily enough. It’s sensitive to the influences of advertising and food availability, our transient emotional state and our stress levels. According to this recent review, hunger is “not under tight homeostatic control” but rather “easily overridden by the cognitive, social and environmental factors that influence what we eat.”
There’s nothing unnatural about this, nothing that makes it inferior to “real” homeostatic hunger. The rising prevalence of obesity is a case of our brain’s motivational mechanisms working exactly as they have evolved to, “a consequence of human motivation pushed to extremes by an obesogenic environment.”
The promise of the guiding hand of “intuition” is a willful disregard of the many factors, internal and external, that influence our behaviour in ways counter to our best interests—it would be a very different economic landscape were our intuition not so easy to manipulate.
There is an interesting overlap between intuitive eating and the Health at Every Size movement, considering that when it was published in 1995 Intuitive Eating was a diet book, in the sense that the promise was weight loss: “This book focuses on nurturing your body rather than on the biology of starvation, and encourages natural weight loss, helping you find the weight you were meant to be.” It’s the weight we were always meant to be—it’s the way we were all born eating, according to this New York Times article.
By promising that there is, given enough faith and perseverance, a way of eating that is innate and good and natural, intuitive eating manages to promise everything and nothing. It is fundamentally no different to the dull old mantra of “eat when hungry and stop when full” but it serves a far more important function. Intuitive eating is an absolution, a release from shame.
“Shame doesn’t work. Diets don’t work. Shame is a tool of oppression, not change. Fat people already are ashamed,” said Lindy West, the writer and comedian who inspired Shrill, in a 2011 article. I couldn’t agree more—the prevalence of weight stigma and its detrimental effects have been well-documented and intuitive eating would not exist if there wasn’t a legitimate need for it.
Shame is intimately tied to our identity and so dieting becomes something that we keep failing at, a sort of cultural trauma, a collective wound. And this is important to note: diets don’t work for you. For the diet industry, they work perfectly. Diets make of us perpetual customers—weight loss becomes a commodity and weight gain a moral failure and the loop continues, the Sisyphean back-and-forth of losing and gaining, of failing at another diet.
In certain circles it is thought that diets fail because of a built-in mechanism that actively regulates body weight toward a predetermined set point, and people who try their hand at eating intuitively are advised to expect an adjustment period marked by extreme hunger and rebound eating as their long-suppressed hunger returns with a vengeance.
Hunger, for chronic dieters, is something to be conquered. For followers of intuitive eating, hunger is something to submit to. Hunger becomes personified, deified—it’s an authority to defer to, a primeval force lying in wait to bring us back to where we started.
Through that lens, the inarguable fact that dieting usually does not result in lasting change morphs into the idea that any effort to meddle with that authority must be inherently harmful, motivated ultimately by some latent self-hatred, and in that case it’s preferable to eschew change altogether. Crash diets become conflated with the torturous drudgery of gradually changing our habits over a long period of time, an undertaking which isn’t just difficult, it’s worse—it’s boring, and it doesn’t sell.
Total avoidance is in fact easier than asking the difficult questions of why we diet in the first place, what emotions we try to dull when we overeat or when we starve, what methods we use to distract and comfort and numb ourselves; than asking why we compare ourselves to others and who taught us that we must look and act a certain way to deserve a place in this world.
I understand now how comforting this rhetoric is, this idea that we don’t have a choice, that we’re powerless, our efforts doomed from the start. I do not find it empowering. I do not find it hopeful. I am not interested any more in magical solutions dressed in psychobabble—I want to choose.
I have found comfort in the simple practice of understanding what matters to me and trying to act in ways that serve my pleasure and my well-being in equal measure. My values don’t have to be the same as your values. My values will conflict with each other and change over time and I’ll fail and stumble over and over again, and that’s fine. To hell with avoidance—I want to care for myself on purpose.
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