led by a beating heart

10. honor your health with gentle nutrition

this is the last principle in the intuitive eating process, in part bc specific nutritional considerations will not be pressing for many people if they are practicing the previous principles, but also bc it is the most advanced level. having first dismantled our diet cultural indoctrination, we can ultimately arrive at a place where nutrition is attended to out of respect for the body and not obedience to external authorities.

i should say that i am not a registered dietitian, and even if i were, you should unfollow me if i purported to know the right way to eat for everyone. individual nutritional and eating-behavioral needs vary significantly. my hope here is for you to get the idea, not specific rules or behaviors. 

gentle nutrition requires that we consider all of our needs: a person with celiac will require a gluten-free diet, and if they also have a history of disorder, they may need a meal plan to be sure they get adequate calories in spite of their medically necessary restriction. someone with low or high blood sugar might consider what rough combinations of macronutrients and fiber content keep them feeling best (medication can also be really helpful). someone who is very physically active will need to supplement their diet with additional calories. those who tend toward iron deficiency anemia may need to think about eating iron-rich foods or pills separately from calcium-rich foods or pills. maybe you’ve had a heart attack: what fresh fruits and vegetables do you enjoy and how could you add them in them regularly? low blood pressure? get some more of your favorite salty foods. and so on.

i’ll tell you how this looks for me, and again, ymmv: let’s say i’m eating sugary candy without a lot of fat or protein. i might pour myself a glass of milk (w fat) or grab a handful of nuts or eat a hard boiled egg. this blunts the blood sugar spike i would otherwise experience and keeps me feeling stable. i also tend to sit on the low end of the ferritin range, so i take an iron pill with a glass of vitamin c rich juice a little while after dinner and before my evening snack, gently spaced. BUT if i’m hungry for a post-dinner pre-snack snack, i have it! no “rule” is absolute.

so, notice what makes you feel good, and form guiding principles around those observations (which may change over time!). approximate; don’t be fastidious (except in cases of e.g. food allergy, but even then don’t let those restrictions seep into other areas of nutrition). and most of all, keep practicing the earlier IE principles! we all need to go back to the basics repeatedly. if you’re starting to feel obsessive/compulsive around nutrition, forget principle #10 and come back when you’re ready. 

9. movement–feel the difference 

what this is not: a double demand to exercise AND to enjoy it

what this is: an open invitation to explore movement that feels good to you, whenever, however, if ever you’re interested 

let’s first be clear that exercise is only a minor health determinant. our health status is much more affected by our social location than our individual behaviors. the benefits of exercise have been grossly exaggerated in popular culture. exercise is not a cure, a guarantee, or available to everyone. i like the word “movement” bc it removes the false promises, strictures, and inaccessibility of formal exercise. movement can be a LOT of things.

what feels good to you? a deep inhale with arms stretched upward? rolling your neck? vagus nerve yoga? gardening? dancing? walking? flipping giant tires? lifting weights among grunting men? scrubbing the bathtub? swimming? shopping? playing with kids? any of these can be practiced as movement. notice the sensations it brings, check in with your body. where do you feel it, and how? even sitting upright can be a movement practice when we turn our attention to the muscles it engages and the feel of the position. our bodies are always working.

what you want w movement is something that feels good while you’re engaging in it, and afterwards. if you do something you hate, you’re unlikely to benefit from it long term. if you do something you love but which has negative physical or emotional consequences, also not beneficial. this is a tender approach, right? that’s the deal in intuitive eating! we are kind to the body. 

intuitive movement honors the changes that life brings. what feels good at one time may not feel good at another. 

intuitive movement incorporates rest.

intuitive movement requires no “discipline.” it is a practice, but one that is driven by its intrinsic benefits–if those are absent, the practice is unlikely to improve health status over time.

8. respect your body

respect your body. this is everything. 

i’ve been blogging on the many facets of body respect for 5 years and will not be able to cover them all in one post. but very basically, body respect means:

accepting your inherited size and shape, and your body’s unique weight set point, and

honoring your body as a living organism deserving of care irrespective of its aesthetic qualities

respecting your body means practicing interoception, living from the inside out, learning to attend to the body’s cues, from hunger to gut instincts, rather than imposing rigid, external, culturally determined rules on, to borrow mary oliver’s phrase, the soft animal of your body. it’s not treating or speaking about your body any worse than you would the body of a friend or a child or a pet–your body is as valuable as theirs. body respect does not require the presence of “positivity,” but it does require the absence of cruelty. 

respecting your body means caring for the body you have today, not punishing it for the sake of a future fantasy. it means honoring your health by determining what behaviors are available to and appropriate for you, and to what degree. it means reckoning compassionately with limitations, cultivating boundaries. it’s learning to collaborate with the body in the pursuit of meaning and self actualization, instead of treating the body as an obstacle to those things. it doesn’t mean never changing the body in any way, but it does mean distinguishing between alterations which can improve quality of life (e.g. transition) and those which, in the long term, cannot (e.g. intentional weight loss).

body respect is wearing clothes that aren’t painful, physically or emotionally. it’s affirming the total okay-ness of your bare face, even if cosmetics are sometimes needed for practical or creative purposes. it’s unlearning messages that body hair is undesirable; it’s decolonizing your beauty standards, defining the idea of beauty for yourself and deciding what place that idea has in your life. it’s exploring the possibilities of ugliness. body respect is highly political.

sometimes the best body-care practices are not within our power to access, and sometimes they are. in the former case, body respect is remembering what our bodies do deserve, and holding the injustice the body suffers with compassion. it’s appropriately externalizing blame for those injustices (which are structural), not turning blame inward toward the body.

7. cope with your emotions without using [restriction]

restricting food intake serves myriad functions for us, and has done for millennia: it can numb or blunt difficult emotional states; it can be experienced as an act of piety; it can temporarily lead to weight loss, helping us better meet social standards of acceptability; it can save money or resources when they are scarce. but it does so at very great cost to the body, and in cases of chronic restriction, also at great cost to other dimensions of the self. for many people throughout history, using food restriction to cope with life’s difficulties and uncertainties has proved fatal.

in today’s diet culture, it makes sense to want to conform to its (ever changing) standards for eating and exercise behaviors, as well as body size and shape, which garner social approval. we are social creatures! and life is hard, uncertain. the promises that we can control our physical & mental health and our relationships thru food restriction are very pervasive. who wouldn’t want to be in control, healthy, loved, and approved? it is natural to seek these things in the ways that we’re conditioned by our social context. but…

none of these promises is truthful. acceptance based on unsustainable behaviors and body size manipulation is not the kind of acceptance we really seek (that’s unconditional, based on on our inherent worth as humans). emotional dulling from restriction becomes another kind of profound suffering, and a deprivation of positive emotional states. preoccupation with eating, exercise, and weight breaks relationship, alienates us from one another and from our bodies/selves. the control we feel we exercise soon turns into the total loss of control when the body reacts to restriction and negative energy balance with hyperphagia (extreme hunger/eating).

so, what’s the better alternative to using dieting or disorder to cope with difficult emotions? it’s turning toward those emotional states with compassion. it’s practicing skills that allow you to experience and attend to your emotional states. it’s connecting with others, sitting with them in shared emotional experience and empathy. it’s turning emotions like anger into catalysts for action! it’s boundaries. it’s self acceptance. none of this is easy, but this process is what actually has a chance of yielding what we misguidedly seek thru dieting and disorder. 

feed yourself, feed your creativity, feed your compassion, feed your relationships, feed your inner child, feed your action and efficacy in the world. it is nourishment and not deprivation which makes this life livable.

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6. discover the satisfaction factor

pleasure in eating is one of the experiences that makes life worth living. truly, our species would not be the resounding success it is today [pls laugh] if eating were not a pleasurable experience for us. our bodies reward us for satisfying our basic needs & appetites, and that’s a good thing.

dualistic notions of the mind or spirit on the one hand and the body on the other have made us skeptical of pleasure, or convinced us that sensory pleasure is an outright wrong. this approach to inhabiting our bodies has done enormous damage to our ability to care well for ourselves. to repair some of that damage, we must reconnect intentionally with pleasure. a wonderful way to do that, as far as it’s in our power, is through food.

begin the practice of noticing what you want to eat, and what you enjoy eating. what tastes, textures, temperatures are pleasurable? under what circumstances? we don’t want to become preoccupied with eating the “perfect” way all the time–that’s diet culture’s thing. but, in general, we will find that paying attention to our cravings, then honoring them and eating with some intention (by which i mean something like sitting down at a table, not assiduous mindfulness), is most pleasurable. how can you pursue pleasure within the constraints of your life? can you make more time to eat? budget more money for experimentation with food? find places to eat that feel safe enough to allow for enjoyment? can you notice as you’re eating which aspects of the food you find satisfying? 

a common diet delusion is that we’ll be able to trick our bodies into being satisfied with something we don’t really want. eating a salad when you want a cheeseburger is not a clever move–the lack of satisfaction will lead to reactive eating. but if you eat the cheeseburgers when you want them, you will eventually find that you sometimes want salad! for the energy balanced and well-fed body, variety is most pleasurable. and, not incidentally, variety also provides optimal nutrition.

5. feel your fullness

the cool thing about being a homo sapiens is that you do this automatically!

if you’re consistently eating to a point of uncomfortable fullness, it’s almost certainly because you haven’t been practicing unconditional permission to eat, and eating regularly and adequately, for long enough. that’s okay! trust the process, and trust that as you learn to eat intuitively, you will eventually settle into the regular experience of satiety. see principles 1, 2, 3, & 4 for more on how to feed yourself in ways that don’t inevitably lead to eating beyond a comfortable point. 

and, don’t fear fullness: your body knows what to do with that food. if fullness makes you feel guilty or ashamed, tell that voice–the food police–to fuck right off, and then treat your body with kindness: deep diaphragmatic breaths, hand on the heart in self compassion, digestive aids (tea, tums, ginger, whatever helps), gentle movement… even a nap if you want it.

4. challenge the food police

let’s not push this metaphor too far, but the objects of ‘policing’ are never, ever helped by it. when it comes to food rules, we are trained to be both officer and citizen, attempting to regulate our own eating behavior thru uneven, cruel enforcement of an ever-changing set of laws. this doesn’t serve or protect us, or our health. food morality does keep us anxious, preoccupied, and distracted from real-world moral violations (food & body rules are rooted in imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, but are designed to obscure their own origins). 

the food police is the voice in your head that says eating in a certain way (e.g. controlled, rules-based, restrictive) is “good,” and eating in another way (namely, pleasurably) is “bad.” it would take volumes to record all the food laws that each of us has heard and internalized: don’t eat after a certain time, don’t eat sugar, don’t eat carbs, don’t eat fat, don’t eat gluten, don’t eat in the car, don’t eat unless you exercise, fill up on salad first, drink water to increase fullness, never feel very full, eat only organic products, and so on. these are obvious examples; such rules can be blatant or quite subtle. the wellness diet is marked by its ability to insinuate itself into the minds of people who think they’re giving up food rules… but they’ve only committed to a new external authority.

challenging the food police starts with recognizing its voice. this takes practice! once you recognize it, you can begin to challenge its cognitive distortions: no, eating this cheeseburger will not make me a moral failure; no, intermittent fasting is not what i want to do with my one wild and precious life; no, eating “right” is not the most important factor in determining my health; no, this next diet/lifestyle change will not be more successful than the last 20. the reality is that restriction and the harsh self-judgments that accompany it breed ill health, physiologically and psychologically. rebel.

3. make peace with food

this principle rests on one of the most fundamental concepts in intuitive eating: unconditional permission to eat. diet culture has programmed us w innumerable reasons why we should not eat at this time, or in that way, or this or that particular food. it tells us to eat less, to plan on eating less in the future, to always be looking for things to cut out and avoid. our hunger in the moment is affected by past deprivation, current restrictions, and the threat of future deprivation. given that the body’s main concern is obtaining adequate energy and nutrient variety from food, could anything be less peaceful??

what distinguishes this principle from the previous (honor your hunger) is its focus on the effects of psychological restriction, the highly conditional permission to eat with which we’re all indoctrinated in this culture. when we think we can’t have enough, or can’t have certain foods, the drive to obtain them in large quantities can be just as powerful as the drive to correct a negative energy balance. our bodies know what we’re thinking, bc guess what we’re thinking with!

when you recommit to yet another diet/lifestyle change, do you engage in what resch & tribole call “last supper eating”? you can’t have it tomorrow, so you better have as much as possible today! you’re not allowed to eat that cake on the counter so you eat everything else in the kitchen and then eventually the cake too, since you already “messed up” this time? the body REBELS against the threat of deprivation and creates compulsions to eat that few people can override (those people have eating disorders and are not to be envied).

2. honor your hunger

this is the radical notion that humans ought to eat when they’re hungry! how many ways has diet culture taught us to try to override hunger signals? being hungry doesn’t mean you’re thirsty, bored, lonely, food addicted, or any other invented narrative, it means your body needs energy in the form of calories from food. 

honoring your hunger can be really scary if you’re experiencing hyperphagia (extreme hunger/eating) after a period of deprivation. you may have a LOT of hunger! you may be eating far more than you think is normal. that’s part of the process of repairing biological and psychological damage from restriction. 

structure may actually help you here, tho it doesn’t feel “intuitive” at first. honoring hunger may mean getting on an eating schedule, something like 3 meals and 2-3 snacks per day. eat every few hours, and notice how you feel beforehand (hunger can appear as difficulty concentrating, dizziness, nausea, thoughts about food, irritability, even a sense of euphoria for some of us). you’ll find as you eat regularly and consistently that your hunger cues become more refined and perceptible, and you will learn to eat before you’re ravenously hungry. hunger will eventually become gentle and manageable if you’re eating adequately.

honoring hunger also means eating what you’re hungry for. if you’re craving a burger, don’t eat a salad. obviously we all have some material constraints around food choice, but believe your body when it communicates its needs in the form of cravings. as much as it’s in your power, eat what you crave and watch the body crave increasing variety over time. human bodies have been driving eating behavior via hunger for 200,000 years, and they’ve quite got it down–the fact that we have more dietary choice now is not reason to think our bodies incompetent in this area. 

1. reject the diet mentality

truly the IE principle of first importance, “reject the diet mentality” requires us to critically examine every message we have received about food and our bodies while living under diet culture (most of us have never lived anywhere else).

diet culture says: thinness means good health and fatness means poor health. weight loss is always good (and possible) and weight gain always bad. restricting our food intake is right and eating according to our bodies’ cues is wrong–bodies cannot be trusted, we must override our instinctive biological cues with Correct Dietary Knowledge and Practices.

every claim in the above paragraph is false. diet culture is a facet of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy; it’s a damaging, deceptive, lucrative method of social control. it doesn’t honor the natural spectrum of human bodies and experiences, and it diverts our energy from more constructive pursuits for individual and collective health.

so how will it look and feel for you to reject the diet mentality? it may reorient your entire life! it will mean learning to hear and respond to your body’s cues, and learning to accept and honor your body’s inherited weight set point. it’ll require you to trust your body as you learn to become an intuitive eater, and as you (possibly) gain weight. the body may temporarily overshoot its weight set point as it repairs damage from restriction. weight may creep upward for longer than you think you can stand. you may be very uncomfortable responding fully to your hunger. the more diet culture has informed your thinking and behavior, the tougher this process may be, mentally and physically. but it can lead you to peace and freedom that you never thought possible.

no more diets. diets have harmed your mental and physical health for too long. no “wellness diet” lifestyle change, no whole 30, no keto, no [current fad diet], no just another [x lbs] to lose. from now on, your body is the final authority on what it needs. it will probably take years for this practice to become instinctive again! (it was when you were a kid, before the diet mentality took hold.) be very patient with yourself, and mean as hell to the diet mentality.