Intuitive Eating FAQ's

This post is one in a series on the topic of intuitive eating. Where Intuitive Eating is capitalized and italicized, it refers to the text Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. Where intuitive eating is in plain text, it refers to a more generalized non-diet nutrition framework or style of eating. 

And my standard disclaimer: This post is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not a substitute for individualized medical or mental health care. It does not constitute a patient-provider relationship. The content of this post might not feel useful to you right now—please take the information that serves you and leave the rest.

I asked Chat GPT for some of the most common questions about Intuitive Eating. Here are a few of my favorites:

Does intuitive eating mean eating whatever I want, whenever I want?

Yes! But . . . it’s not quite that simple. Unconditional permission to eat is a key point in Principle Three of Intuitive Eating: Make Peace with Food. But backlash behaviors are not intuitive eating! Backlash eating shows up in lots of different ways.

There can be long cycles of restriction and backlash: A month’s long diet followed by a period of f*ck it eating.

Or rapid pendulation from restriction to backlash: Starting the day with a “super clean” breakfast and lunch but being totally derailed by an afternoon cookie that leads to take out and a pint of ice cream for dinner.  

In cases of backlash eating, “eating whatever you want” is highly influenced by a sense of restriction. Of course you want a pint of ice cream if you’re ravenously hungry and already promising yourself this will be the only time you have ice cream this week. Unconditional permission to eat says this food is not restricted, you can always have more of it later – later tonight, tomorrow, and again the next day if you want. This process takes time and requires building trust with your hunger, fullness, and satisfaction cues.  

How do I know when I’m truly hungry vs when I’m eating for emotional reasons?

Great question! Early in your intuitive eating journey it may be difficult to separate hunger from emotional eating. This is because hunger, especially prolonged mild to moderate hunger, causes stress. Maybe you’ve had a busy day at work, rushed through your meals, and missed your afternoon snack. By the time you get home you’re so frazzled you don’t even clock that you’re hungry, all you’re feeling is the accumulated stress of the day. You reach for your favorite snack and slowly start to relax. Is this emotional eating? Maybe - after all it is soothing your emotions. But if the emotion is stress, and the stress is partially caused by hunger, you’re also honoring your hunger cues by eating.

Most folks overestimate how often they eat for emotional reasons. I recommend building adequacy and consistency into your routine first. After establishing a foundation of regular, sufficient, satisfying intake it’s much easier to recognize and address eating for emotional reasons.

What if I don’t feel full cues or they’re unreliable?

Yup, this is a common concern. First and foremost, it’s important to honor the interplay between hunger and fullness. If you’re overly hungry when you sit down for a meal, your fullness cues will be harder to access. Let’s say you’ve skipped lunch and now you’re out for dinner with friends. Your body needs two meals worth of food at this point. But the stretch receptors in your stomach that indicate fullness will start to activate before you’ve eaten enough to make up for that skipped lunch. Now you have competing cues – yes, you are experiencing a degree of fullness, but your drive to continue eating is still strong.

Adequate, consistent, satisfying intake is a prerequisite for honoring fullness cues. One you’ve built some structure into your nourishment plan, you can begin using mindfulness tools to tune into fullness more reliably. You may check in halfway through your meal to assess fullness and consider how much more you’d like to eat.

Or reflect on how you’d like to feel after the meal:

“I want to enjoy this meal and leave feeling satisfied but not overly full or uncomfortable.”

You might use the Last Bite Threshold tool once you recognize you’re full:

“Ok, I’m full. I’ll have one more bite of my burger and two more fries, then I’m done.”

How do I handle cravings without feeling out of control?

Do. The. Work. I can’t stress this enough. I know that the social media version of intuitive eating seems unstructured – just eat whatever, whenever. But the Intuitive Eating book and workbook are loaded with tools to help you establish when and if you’re ready to habituate to certain foods. One of my favorites is the “Are you ready to make peace with food?” inventory. I’ll often work through these questions when a client is considering adding in a food that previously felt like an out-of-control food.

Let’s say you love brownies. In the past, when you’ve had brownies around you’ve found yourself obsessing over them, going back for more, feeling guilty, and out of control. With intuitive eating, brownies are no longer restricted. You can eat them and enjoy them without guilt! But if you jump into a tray of brownies with no preparation, you’re going to feel out of control. The “Are you ready to make peace with food?” inventory includes key evaluations of your readiness for brownies:

Can you identify key vulnerabilities such as being too tired, too stressed out, or too hungry?

Can you distinguish between being hungry for a meal versus hungry for a snack?

Can you recognize feelings of discomfort related to food guilt as separate from your biological fullness cues?

What if I want to eat for comfort? Is that bad?

Nope. Eating is a great way to soothe ourselves! It can calm us down, energize us, signal to our bodies that our day is beginning or that it’s winding down. Eating is always an emotional experience because it stimulates the part of our nervous system responsible for digestion. (You’ve heard of “fight or flight”? We also have a “rest and digest” branch of our nervous system.)

Most folks use eating as a coping tool in one way or another. But as with all coping tools, eating can become maladaptive in certain contexts. How is your comfort eating serving you? Perhaps it’s distracting or soothing. Maybe it helps you numb out or calm down when overwhelmed. And what are the downsides of comfort eating? Lots of folks feel better while they’re eating but much worse after – that’s hardly a useful strategy. And if you’re eating to numb out, you may be masking a bigger issue that could be worth working through.

What questions do you have about intuitive eating? Where are you getting tripped up? Let me know in the comments. And remember, it's ok to need help. Some folks have a tougher time with intuitive eating. Support is always available.

With compassion,

Stephanie