Intuitive Eating for the Holidays

A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach

Savor your food! Eat when hungry. Stop when full. Unsplash: Pablo Merchan Montes

What if you could eat whatever you want this holiday season without guilt? Just follow the guidelines provided in the 4th edition of Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach by Evelyn Tribole, MS, RDN, and Elyse Resch, MS, RDN, which can be summarized as eat when you are hungry, and stop when you are full. Seems too good to be true, but the first chapter covers dozens of research studies that have been done since the 1st edition in 1995 showing that there are many good reasons to follow this approach.

The book was recommended to me by a psychotherapist who took an online EFT class from me where I mentioned using tapping for weight loss and suggested I might be promoting “anti-fat bias” that could cause “harm to people in bigger bodies.” I had just written a Holistic Alternatives to Ozempic for Weight Loss blog featuring EFT and Intermittent Fasting for Food Cravings and Type 2 Diabetes which included links to my 3 YouTube videos on Food Cravings, Emotional Eating and Weight Loss.

Having taught EFT for the past 20 years at the 3 major weight loss clinics in Durham, it never occurred to me that I might be engaging in fat shaming. However, the book makes a good case for undoing the damage done by the pervasive diet culture that dominates our society. The authors, dieticians who came to intuitive eating from the traditional model of eat less, exercise more, cite evidence that weight loss diet schemes fail up to 95% of the time. If that success rate was true of a drug, it would not be marketable.

Millions of people have experienced failure on a wide variety of fad diets, sometimes beginning in childhood and persisting to torture themselves into adulthood with minimal success. Repetitive yo-yo weight fluctuations of 100 pounds or more such as I have witnessed among the severely obese clients at one of the clinics that is now out of business may be more harmful to health than maintaining a stable weight and may lead to additional rebound gains, frustration, and hopelessness.

The premise of the book is to restore a healthy relationship with food where the goal is to enjoy eating again and find satisfaction in whatever food you choose. Many people have such a distorted connection to the nutritional needs of their bodies that they have lost the ability to sense when they are hungry or full. Diets that place restrictions on certain foods or count calories only amplify cravings which result in inevitable bingeing. It is a vicious self-defeating cycle which fuels a profitable industry.

Who can argue with an approach that emphasizes mindfully savoring your food and makes you healthier according to various laboratory metrics even if you don’t lose weight? That said, the authors do have their blind spots, recommending canola oil and demonizing lard due to their outdated fear of saturated fat. While they note childhood trauma as an obesity risk factor, there is no mention of EFT. Since they avoid restrictions on eating patterns, they are wary of intermittent fasting despite known health benefits.

Due to their concerns about stigmatizing language, they relabeled junk food as “play food,” but don’t do justice to that fact that it is artificial and not really food at all. Processed foods laced with chemicals, artificial dyes, high fructose corn syrup, flavor enhancers, seed oils, or hydrogenated products are made purposefully addictive by the industry as described in the recent Senate Roundtable. With that caveat, the 10 principles of intuitive eating that follow are useful to know about and apply in your life.

1) Reject the Diet Mentality. The obsession with dieting is aggressively amplified by the media’s promotion of thinness dating back to the days of Twiggy and Kate Moss. Rejecting this programming can be very challenging, but is the important first step in the process. 2) Honor Your Hunger. Chronic dieters often go to great lengths to suppress their hunger to the point where they get ravenous and overeat in response to a sense of deprivation. They need to pay attention to subtle signals instead.

3) Make Peace with Food. Some people have struggled with food all their lives, so the concept of making peace with it may seem a remote possibility. Memories of childhood authority figures maintain a hold on us for years reminding to finish your plate or it will be sent to feed starving children in Africa. 4) Challenge the Food Police. Even though our parents may have done the best they could with limited nutritional knowledge, their voices in our head come in a variety of forms that hinder our intuitive eating.

5) Discover the Satisfaction Factor. When food has been demonized as the enemy, the idea of finding it satisfying requires retraining your taste buds and accompanying attitudes. You can bring back the joy of eating in the manner that Europeans have been accustomed to for millennia. 6) Feel Your Fullness. Learning to tune into subtle signals of satiety is a crucial part of the process. Heaven forbid, you might find that you may even leave food on your plate if you discover that you are comfortably full.

7) Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness. Stress eating to sedate yourself is one way emotions can sabotage your intuitive process. The first step to remedy it is just to be aware of the various factors driving your appetite and pay attention to what you are feeling. 8) Respect Your Body. The rest of the world seems to be judging your body, but the most important opinion is yours and that is the only one you have control over. Shift your focus to being grateful for the many functions that it performs well for you.

9) Movement — Feel the Difference. In a fashion similar to intuitive eating the focus for exercise is to enjoy moving. Start slow to avoid injury and measure success by pleasant feelings not the number of calories burned. 10). Honor Your Health with Gentle Nutrition. Beware the trap of orthorexia which means becoming obsessed with the quality of the food you eat to the point of taking the joy out of it. Trust that if you follow these intuitive eating guidelines you will get the diversity of nutrition you need.

While reading the book I was inspired to make a video on EFT for Intuitive Eating to tap away the guilt from prior dieting failures. My next challenge was to make a video on EFT for Intermittent Fasting that would be compatible with it. If you would like to tap with me on any of these issues I offer individual Zoom coaching sessions where we start by addressing cravings, deal with whatever trauma initiated the weight gain, and focus on removing barriers to success which are often in the form of limiting beliefs from childhood.

Originally published on Medium.com 11/21/24