From skwigg's journal:
I listened to the first two RD Real Talk podcasts on intuitive eating. Here are a few highlights and random thoughts:
Interoceptive awareness is the ability to recognize signals from your body - hunger, tiredness, full bladder. If you’re at war with your body, if you don’t trust your body, if you hate your body, it puts you at a huge disadvantage. Mind body practices like yoga, meditation, and intuitive eating improve interoceptive awareness. Interrupters to it are negative thoughts and diet rules.
If you take supreme pride in what you eat, there’s a problem there. Clean eating implies that you need to absolve shame. Elyse, the coauthor of Intuitive Eating tells people she’s a dirty eater. I love that!
For professionals, you can’t take a person any further than you’ve taken yourself. Ethically, dietitians and fitness professionals need to work out their stuff before they advise others. If you have work to do, don’t give up or think you’re not cut out for it. There’s a special level of wisdom and compassion that comes from having been there yourself.
People don't understand the depth of intuitive eating, or that it's a ten-point, evidence-based protocol in use at hospitals and public health agencies. They think it means "eat when you're hungry, stop when you're full," but those are only two of the principles; there are eight more. Many also take it to mean eating whatever you want with no regard for health or wellbeing, which is not the case at all. A lot of the criticism of intuitive eating comes from people who aren't familiar with it, so they're criticizing "the hunger and fullness diet" or the "eat all the sugar you want plan" or the "I don't care about my health approach." They have no idea that intuitive eating involves exercise and gentle nutrition.
People may understand that diets don’t work long term, but they don’t understand the harm that dieting causes physically, socially, psychologically, and behaviorally. There’s an extremely strong correlation between dieting and binge eating. Dieting is the gateway.
Fat overshooting is the thing where dieters gain back more than when they started. Diets don’t equal weight loss. They often equal weight gain or weight cycling.
They were talking about how people believe that if they eat intuitively, they will only want sugar, or french fries, or pizza. One of them shared a story about when she was a kid. There was a friend of her mom whose kids complained about her cooking and wanted pizza every night. The woman said, "Ok, you want pizza? We'll have pizza." She ordered it every night for about a week and they ate the leftovers for breakfast and lunch every day. Soon pizza held no special appeal for that family. That made me LOL. That's me once I'd been baking for awhile. I can have a whole cake, a couple of pies, and seven pints of ice cream on hand, and think, "Meh, maybe later." It's just not that exciting. I'd rather have something else, generally, but that sure was not the case when I was restricting my food. Anything I considered "bad" or didn't allow myself to eat often was super exciting!
There was a great discussion of diet mentality disguised as healthy eating habits. Some examples:
- Claiming you have a sweet tooth as a justification for restricting sugar.
- Eating small frequent meals with an emphasis on small. Yes, you're eating often but still underfeeding yourself.
- Protein with breakfast somehow morphs into protein FOR breakfast.
- The idea that you should balance out your day. "I had this for lunch because I had that for breakfast." Don't eat for past/future. Deal in what will satisfy right now.
For me personally, there were SO many of those that I latched onto as healthy common sense ideas at the time: 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight per day, vegetables at every meal, protein at every meal, turning my plate into some kind of chart, palm and fist sized portions of protein and carbs, no snacking, eating every 2-3 hours, intermittent fasting, saturated fat is bad, fat is a miracle food, post-workout feeding windows, pre-workout snacks, fasted morning cardio, no food after 7pm, no food before noon, big ass salads every day, green smoothies every day, only eat starchy carbs post-workout, cheat day, free meals, Zone blocks, calorie counting, macro tracking, authorized food lists, number of meals per day, low-carb, low-fat, low-food. On and on!
Some of those concepts can be useful some of the time. It's when they are enforced like rules, regardless of your needs and preferences, that they become counterproductive.