Intuitive Eating: An 'Anti-Diet' That Works

By: Rita Jenkins

Copyright 2005 Daily News Central

Stop hating your body, stop counting calories and stop using
food for purposes other than to satisfy hunger, and you'll be
healthier and slimmer. That, in a nutshell, is the argument in
favor of "intuitive eating," or letting your body tell you when,
what and how much to eat.

"The basic premise of intuitive eating is, rather than
manipulate what we eat in terms of prescribed diets -- how many
calories a food has, how many grams of fat, specific food
combinations or anything like that -- we should take internal
cues, try to recognize what our body wants and then regulate how
much we eat based on hunger and satiety," says professor of
health science Steven Hawks, lead researcher of an
intuitive-eating study at Brigham Young University.

The findings are reported in the American Journal of Health
Education.

Hawks, who adopted an intuitive-eating lifestyle himself several
years ago and lost 50 pounds as a result, says that "normal"
dieting in the United States doesn't result in long-term weight
loss and contributes to food anxiety and unhealthy eating
practices, and can even lead to eating disorders.

All Diets Work Against Human Biology

Hawks and colleagues Hala Madanat, Jaylyn Hawks and Ashley
Harris identified a handful of college students who were
naturally intuitive eaters and compared them with other students
who were not. Participants then were tested to evaluate their
health.

As measured by the Intuitive Eating Scale, developed by Hawks
and others to measure the degree to which a person is an
intuitive eater, the researchers found that intuitive eating
correlated significantly with lower body mass index (BMI), lower
triglyceride levels, higher levels of high density lipoproteins
and decreased risk of cardiovascular disease.

Approximately one-third of the variance in body mass index was
accounted for by intuitive eating scores, while 17 to 19 percent
of the variance in blood lipid profiles and cardiovascular risk
was accounted for by intuitive eating.

"The findings provide support for intuitive eating as a positive
approach to healthy weight management," says Hawks, who plans to
do a large-scale study of intuitive eating across several
cultures.

"In less developed countries in Asia, people are primarily
intuitive eaters," notes Hawks.

"They haven't been conditioned to artificially structure their
relationship with food like we have in the United States.
They've been conditioned to believe that the purpose of food is
to enjoy, to nurture. You eat when you're hungry, you stop when
you're not hungry any more. They have a much healthier
relationship with food, far fewer eating disorders, and
interestingly, far less obesity," he points out.

"What makes intuitive eating different from a diet, is that all
diets work against human biology, whereas intuitive eating
teaches people to work with their own biology, to work with
their bodies, to understand their bodies," Hawks explains.

"Rather than a prescriptive diet, it's really about increasing
awareness and understanding of your body. It's a nurturing
approach to nutrition, health and fitness as opposed to a
regulated, coercive, restrictive approach. That's why diets
fail, and that's why intuitive eating has a better chance of
being successful in the long term," he maintains.

Two Attitudes, Two Behaviors

To become an intuitive eater, a person has to adopt two
attitudes and two behaviors. The first attitude is body
acceptance.

"It's an extremely difficult attitude adjustment for many people
to make, but they have to come to a conscious decision that
personal worth is not a function of body size," says Hawks.
"Rather than having an adversarial relationship with my body,
where I have to control it, and force it to submit to my will so
that I can make it thin, I'm going to value my body because it
allows me to accomplish some higher good with my life."

The second attitude is that dieting is harmful.

"Dieting does not lead to the results that people think it will
lead to, and so I try to help people foster an anti-dieting
attitude," says Hawks. "You have to say to yourself, 'I will not
base my food intake on diet plans, food-based rules, good and
bad foods, all of that kind of thing.' For people who are deep
into dietary restraint and dietary rules, again, that's a very
difficult attitude adjustment to make, to give up all those
rules."

The first behavior is learning how to not eat for emotional,
environmental or social reasons.

"Socially we eat all the time in our culture. We go out to eat
ice cream if we break up with our boyfriend, we eat to
celebrate, we eat when we're lonely, we eat when we're sad, we
eat when we're stressed out," says Hawks. "Being able to
recognize all the emotional, environmental and cultural
relationships we have with food and finding better ways to
manage our emotions is part of the process."

The second behavior is learning how to interpret body signals,
cravings and hunger, and how to respond in a healthy, positive,
nurturing way.

Learning the body's signals can be difficult at first, but Hawks
suggests thinking about hunger and satiety on a 10-point scale,
where "10" is eating until one is sick and "1" is starving.

Intuitive eaters keep themselves at or around a "5." If they
feel they are getting hungry, they eat until they are back at a
"5" or "6." They stop eating when they're satisfied, even if
that means leaving food on the plate.

No Food Is Taboo

One part of intuitive eating that may be counterintuitive to
people conditioned to restrictive dieting is the concept that
with intuitive eating there is a place for every food. In other
words, there is no food that's ever taboo. There's no food you
can't ever have.

"Part of adopting an anti-dieting attitude is the recognition
that you have unconditional permission to eat any kind of food
that you want," says Hawks. "And that's scary for people who
say, 'If I abandon my diet rules, then I'll fill a pillowcase
full of M&M's, dive into it and never come up again. That's what
I crave, I know that's what I crave, that's all I will always
crave.' But that's not the reality. The reality is that our
bodies crave good nutrition."

It is dieting that creates psychological and physiological urges
to binge on taboo foods. While people may experience some binges
when they first start eating intuitively, they eventually will
learn to trust themselves and that behavior will disappear,
Hawks maintains.

One technique he suggests is having an abundance of previously
taboo foods on hand. Once the foods are no longer forbidden, a
person quickly loses interest in them.

"If people are committed to recognizing what their bodies really
want, the vast majority of people will say that they very
quickly overcame cravings," Hawks says, opening an office desk
drawer filled with untouched junk food. "It certainly has worked
for me."

About the author:
Rita Jenkins is a health journalist for Daily News Central, an
online publication that delivers breaking news and reliable
health information to consumers, healthcare providers and
industry professionals: http://www.dailynewscentral.com

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