Dispelling: Intuitive eating

I don't often talk about diets, because it's a dirty word that has all the wrong meanings associated with it, especially for people who are overweight or obese. To many people a diet is a fad or a crash course to losing weight fast before they go right back to eating how they always did – and thus put the weight back on. What it really should mean is a lifestyle change in our eating patterns. It doesn't even necessarily mean changing what you eat, only how much of it you eat on any given day.

Intuitive eating is something thrown around a lot, especially in the healthy at every size movement. But is it really so simple as 'eat when you're hungry'?

No, it's not. We wouldn't be fat if it was that simple. 70% of American people wouldn't be overweight or obese. Fat wouldn't be the average if intuitive eating was intuitive. 

For some people intuitive eating works. Their stomach tells them they're hungry, their brain gets that message and they eat a normal portion of food and feel satiated for a number of hours.

If you are overweight or obese, then you are not one of these people. If you were one of these people you would not be overweight or obese in the first place. Whether it's because we have an unhealthy relationship with food, an inability to recognize what a proper portion looks like or a medication that makes us feel like blackholes ready to suck down the entirety of the grocery store, intuitive eating does not work if there are barriers of any kind.

This is where weighing food with a food scale and logging it in a calorie diary comes into play. This will help you achieve accurate serving sizes and begin to visualize what a real serving size is compared to what you used to be eating. I've discovered what I used to eat about 2 times a serving size, sometimes more.

As you lose weight (you will lose weight if you are eating normal portion sizes) and your mind adjusts to what portion sizes really look like, you may begin to be one of those people who can eat intuitively. But complacency, stopping weighing food too soon, stopping logging it too soon, can lead to serious backslides as you add just a bit more because 'it's only a little bit'. You could backslide yourself right back into your old weight if you stop being vigilant.

For the majority of us intuitive eating does not work. Rely on your brain instead; it's why we have one.