Intuitive Eating 101 Series - Principle #1: Reject The Diet Mentality

Learn why diets don't work and set you up to fail. 

**Disclaimer: Please note that the information in this or any other blog posts on this site may not be suitable or apply to you, depending on where you’re at in your mental health and/or eating disorder/diet recovery journey. This information is for educational purposes only and not meant to be a substitute for medical or psychiatric advice. Please consult your healthcare practitioner before making any changes. See full disclaimer here.

Welcome to the first post in a ten part series about Intuitive Eating!

**Please note that this 10-part blog series was based on the 3rd Edition of Intuitive Eating, and there is now a 4th Edition out (June 2020), where some changes have been made. However the information in this series is still very much relevant to learning and applying the Intuitive Eating principles.   

If you’re curious about what Intuitive Eating is or you’re wondering how you can eat normally again, make peace with your body and food, and leave the dieting and guilt behind, this series is for you! Intuitive Eating has ten principles, but before I dive into the first principle, here’s a brief overview of what Intuitive Eating actually is.

History and Research 

Intuitive Eating is a non-diet, research-based model of eating and health, developed by registered dietitians, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch in the mid-90s. Like most dietitians at the time, they were focused mostly on helping people lose weight by following meal plans or point systems. Even though their patients would lose some weight initially, they were often not able to sustain any significant weight loss, nor continue to follow a meal plan. Moreover they noticed these patients felt like failures and ashamed that they were not able to keep up with their diet plans. In short, giving their patients diet or weight-loss plans started to feel like a dis-service, causing more harm than good. They thought that there must be another way...
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So Intuitive Eating was born and they wrote the first edition in 1995. However it didn’t really start to get much international recognition until ten years later, when researchers picked up the model and started finding positive results. There have since been over 90 studies to date on Intuitive Eating, most of which you can find here.  In general, the research on Intuitive Eating has shown the following: People that practice Intuitive Eating have higher: self-esteem, well-being and optimism, variation of foods eaten, body appreciation and acceptance, HDL (a.k.a. good cholesterol), interoceptive awareness, pleasure from eating, proactive coping, psychological hardiness and unconditional self-regard. Also, intuitive eaters tend to have lower BMI index (though BMI is not necessarily a good indicator of health), triglycerides, disordered eating, emotional eating, internalized culturally thin ideal, and self-silencing (suppressing one’s thoughts, feelings and needs) (Tribole & Resch, 2012, p. 290).
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OK great, but what exactly is Intuitive Eating?

Intuitive Eating Definition and Principles

Tribole and Resch (2017) define their model as follows: “Intuitive Eating is a dynamic mind-body integration of instinct, emotion, and rational thought. It is a personal process of honoring your health by paying attention to the messages of your body and meeting your physical and emotional needs. It is an inner journey of discovery that puts you front and center; you are the expert of your own body...” (p. 1). It is a true holistic way of health that integrates food, nutrition, mind, body and emotion. It is not based on systematic steps or rigid rules, but guided by Ten Principles. You can read briefly about each one here. Or click on the Principle below to read my in-depth post about it. 

Principle #1: Reject The Diet Mentality (in this post, scroll down)

Principle #2: Honor Your Hunger

Principle #3: Make Peace With Food

Principle #4: Challenge The Food Police

Principle #5: Feel Your Fullness

Principle #6: Discover The Satisfaction Factor

Principle #7: Cope With Your Emotions Without Using Food

Principle #8: Respect Your Body

Principle #9: Exercise - Feel The Difference

Principle #10: Honor Your Health With Gentle Nutrition

Please note, even though each principle is numbered, you do not have to practice them in any particular order. And most likely, some principles will feel easier than others to practice, while some may take longer to grasp. Where someone starts will depend on their dieting history, their current challenges with food, and what they’re willing to try right now. But for the sake of simplicity, I’m going to go through each Principle as they are ordered in the book.

So today is all about Principle #1: Reject The Diet Mentality. 

What is the Diet Mentality? It’s believing that being thin will make you happier and healthier, and that dieting is the way to become thin. And by dieting, I mean the act of restricting your food intake or following a set of rules, for the purpose of weight-loss or weight-management. But isn’t eating less the only way to really lose weight? Maybe you’ve heard something like, weight loss is 10% exercise and 90% what you eat. And maybe there’s some truth to this. In fact you could probably find a research study to support any diet and see that people did lose some weight - initially. BUT, and this is a BIG but, there is no research to date that show people sustain significant weight-loss from diets in the long run! Moreover, not only do diets just not work in the long-run, they are actually associated with physical and psychological harm, including: increased weight gain and abdominal fat, decreased metabolism, increased binges, cravings and preoccupation with food, increased risk of premature death and heart disease, increased risk of developing an eating disorder, increased stress and feelings of failure, lowered self-esteem, social anxiety and loss of control over eating.

Why? It seems so simple- just eat less and you’ll lose weight, right? But why doesn’t that work?

I won’t get into all the science behind it, but basically our body and mind doesn’t like to be in a restricted food state. Physically restricting your food intake has a cascade of hormonal effects that basically make it harder for your body to release fat and easier to hold onto it over time, especially with repeated cycles of weight loss and gain. Our body has a weight range it’s most comfortable being at, and if you try to go out of the that range by chronic dieting, it will do everything it can to try to keep you in that range and make it even harder to lose weight the next time you go on a diet. This is called Set Point Theory (see this Ted talk that explains Set Point Theory in a nutshell).

Psychologically restricting your food intake makes certain foods “forbidden”, thereby creating the “forbidden fruit” effect: You think about the forbidden foods even more, crave them and ultimately end up overeating or binging on them. This leads to feelings of loss of control and guilt, which leads to a renewed intention to restrict the forbidden foods again and “do better next time”. And the dieting cycle continues. And as long as you try to diet in order to be thin (because you believe that being thin will make you happier and healthier), you will stay in this vicious cycle. The only way to get out of this cycle is to call bullsh#t on the Diet Mentality and see dieting for what it really is: An ineffective and possibly more harmful way of eating and thinking about food, that is perpetuated by the myth that thinness equals happiness and health (see Resources below that back up these claims).
 
This is why Intuitive Eating is what’s called a “non-diet” or “weight-neutral” approach to health. This means that the intention of Intuitive Eating is not about the pursuit of weight-loss, but about the pursuit of health and joy through learning to listen and respect your body’s needs and wants, whatever weight or body shape you are. Following diets, rules and meal plans are all external ways of trying to control your food and weight. The more you break these rules or don’t see the results you wanted in following the rules, the less you trust your body and the more you ignore and get out of touch with what you actually need and want.

BE AWARE- Any health “guru” that promotes Intuitive Eating as a weight-loss system is not really teaching Intuitive Eating. It is just another diet with rules. You cannot truly practice Intuitive Eating and actively pursue weight-loss at the same time. Because pursuing weight-loss comes with rules (i.e. I can’t or can eat this), and ALL food rules interfere with your ability to turn inwards - to truly listen to and respect your hunger and fullness cues, and your psychological and emotional needs around food. Now, how your body might change once you become an Intuitive Eater will depend on many factors, like how far below or above your set-point weight range you’re in, your genetics, and your health and dieting history. Some people lose weight or gain weight or maybe stay the same, and that is all OK. Generally, by practicing Intuitive Eating overtime, your body will most likely settle in it’s set-point weight range, where it feels best naturally. Again, it’s not about changing your weight, but about increasing health-promoting behaviours and your confidence in your food choices, and making peace with your body and food, whatever weight or size you are. 

OK, so how do you actually start practicing Reject The Diet Mentality?

Dieting, diet talk, and the pursuit of thinness, is so rampant in our culture, it can feel foreign and even uncomfortable to believe there may be another way to eat and think about food. In the latest edition of Intuitive Eating, Tribole and Resch (2012) outline four steps to get you started on rejecting the diet mentality:

Step 1: Recognize and Acknowledge the Damage that Dieting Causes
I already mentioned above what the research says about the long-term ineffectiveness of weight-loss diets as well as the physical and psychological harms associated with them. If you really want to dig deeper into the science and learn more, I highly encourage you to check out the resources listed at the end of this post. But also, I invite you to just think about your own or someone else’s experience with dieting and weight-loss:

Has it really “worked”?
Did you lose the weight you wanted and was able to sustain the weight-loss long-term?
Are you happy while dieting or at your “ideal” weight?

It’s often not difficult to acknowledge on an intellectual level that dieting doesn’t work, as most people’s experience is that they “failed” at dieting in some way. But really, it’s diets that fail you. Biologically and psychologically, diets are set up to fail. Yet, the fitness and health industry will have you believe that “if only” you try this new diet, you will succeed and finally get the results you want. But the research just doesn’t back that up. And if dieting really worked, then there wouldn’t be a $66 billion industry for it. So start getting informed and shift the blame from yourself to the diet industry for making you feel like a failure and less than. Acknowledge the belief that “ but this diet will be THE one that will work” is just an illusion and will only keep you stuck in the diet mentality.

Step 2: Be Aware of Diet Mentality Traits and Thinking
Even if you can acknowledge that diets don’t work, diet mentality traits and thinking often seep into our thought and behaviours around food. I talked about this in another blog post here. In the Intuitive Eating book, diet traits and thinking generally fall into three categories: willpower, obedience and failure.

Willpower implies that you strongly resist a natural desire or urge. How many times have you heard, “I had no willpower, I ate the piece of cake!” or “I caved into my cravings, I couldn’t resist!” By trying to impose willpower onto your food behaviours, you’re essentially trying to ignore your body’s needs and imposing an external rule onto your eating a.k.a. Dieting.

Obedience is a more obvious way to impose external rules on your eating behaviours and usually sounds like “I should or shouldn’t eat that”, or “I can or can’t eat that” or “that’s healthy or unhealthy” or “that’s good or bad to eat”. This way of talking about food insinuates a moral stance about food and thereby increases feelings of guilt and shame if you’re not obedient.

Finally, if you feel like you “failed” at eating a certain way, you’re most likely still in the diet mentality. Unlike dieting, there is no way to fail at Intuitive Eating. In fact, it embraces imperfection and that getting to a place of normal eating is a practice and process of building health-promoting skills. It can take time and patience, and trial and error. It discourages black and white thinking and rigidity and instead invites you on a path of deep inner discovery with lots of shades of grey and colour. This can feel scary and uncomfortable at first, but can be so much more rewarding in the long run. I encourage you to start becoming aware of how the ideas of willpower, obedience and failure may be seeping into your thinking about food and how they might be keeping you stuck in the rigidity of diet mentality.

Step 3: Get Rid of the Dieter’s Tools
Dieting always involves external ways to try and control your eating, such as calorie, macro, or points counting and meal plans, as well as external ways to measure progress, namely the scale.

First of all, counting calories, macros, or points, or following a meal plan, all interfere with your ability to listen and respect your body’s natural hunger and fullness cues and psychological needs. No diet or meal plan can truly accommodate what you really need and want, because only you can know that. Unlike diets, Intuitive Eating empowers you to become your own expert on what, how much and when to eat. 

Now I could write a whole other blog post on the scale, but for now, just understand that your scale weight is just a number and doesn’t give you the full picture of your health or body composition. And the problem with using the scale as a marker of whether you’ve been “good” or “bad” is that again, you’re letting an external force determine your feelings, thoughts and behaviours about food. And that leads to more body dis-trust and feelings of failure.

Step 4: Be Compassionate Towards Yourself
This is a really important step as you practice Reject the Diet Mentality as well as Intuitive Eating in general. Dieting and the pursuit of thinness has been ingrained in our culture for decades, often being passed down from generation to generation. Everyday we are bombarded by the messages that “diets work” or “thin equals health and happiness” so it can feel like a losing battle to try to believe otherwise. Or even once you do acknowledge that dieting doesn’t work, you may feel angry or disappointed or frustrated- feeling like you’ve wasted your time all these years trying to “fix” your body with ineffective weight-loss diets that maybe even caused more harm. That’s OK and a common response.

It’s OK to get angry and let some of that anger fuel your drive to try the non-diet approach. The anger I feel when I see people beat themselves up for “failing” again at another diet is what fuels my passion in helping people get off the diet train. So anger is not a bad thing. But getting angry with yourself for not being a “good” Intuitive Eater or for thinking or saying something that enables diet mentality is just not necessary.

For years I was steeped in the diet mentality and didn’t really know it. And even though I really try to call out the diet mentality when I see it, whether in myself or others, I don’t always catch it, for sure! And that’s OK. Even armed with the research and education about the epic failures of dieting, the false promise that you’re able lose weight by manipulating your body and food intake is still very much out there and won’t be going away anytime soon. So be kind and compassionate towards yourself and others as you start to reject the diet mentality. 

If you want to learn more about the science of why dieting doesn’t work and how it can cause more harm, please see the resources listed below. Getting informed and reflecting on your own dieting experiences and beliefs about food, sets the foundation for becoming an Intuitive Eater.

Next - Read about the second principle of Intuitive Eating: Honor Your Hunger.
       
References 
Tribole, E. & Resch, E. (2012) Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press
Tribole, E. & Resch E. (2017) The Intuitive Eating Workbook Oakland, CA:New Harbinger Publications, Inc.

Resources:

Intuitive Eating

• The Intuitive Eating Program and Workbook
• Intuitive Eating Research Studies

Research on The Ineffectiveness and Harm of Diets

• My blog post on the Health At Every Size® Principles here
• Research papers here, here and here.
• Health At Every Size by L. Bacon
• Body Respect by L. Bacon & L. Aphramor​​

Are you struggling with eating and body image concerns?
​Learn more about my psychotherapy & counselling services, and how I can help you here.

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