Can Healthy Eating and Intuitive Eating Co-Exist?
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One of the fears many clients report when we talk about letting go of food rules is, “If I let go of the rules, I’ll only eat the unhealthy foods.” There’s a lot to unpack in this sentence, including the black and white belief that foods are either healthy or unhealthy, but also why this fear exists in the first place and what they fear would happen if this were true. This post, however, will focus what I think the main question is, which is: “can I eat intuitively and also desire to eat nutrient dense foods?”
The ways in which intuitive eating is depicted in the popular media and by many social media influencers often doesn’t help matters much when it comes to contemplating this question. So often leading people to view the intuitive eating concept of unconditional permission to eat as synonymous with eating with abandon (which it’s not) and making doughnuts the unofficial symbol for intuitive eating.
Don’t get me wrong, doughnuts are great and definitely have a place in intuitive eating. But, sometimes, when there is so much celebration of the “fun” foods and not much representation of all the other foods, instead of normalizing forbidden foods (which is the intention) we just reinforce the very fears that lead people to diet to begin with. The fear that, “if I let go of the rules, I will only eat doughnuts for the rest of my life.” We are going to attempt to clear up some of that confusion here.
Why We Have Food Rules to Begin With
At some point in our life someone or something probably made us feel like our body wasn’t good (i.e., small) enough as is so we must do something to fix (i.e., shrink) it. This was followed by the message that, “all we need to do is limit our calorie intake and we can be whatever size we want.”
Or, we were led to believe that, left to our own devices, we are unable to control ourselves around food so best to establish some boundaries to keep our intake in line.
Or, some influencer, or health teacher, or celebrity, or documentary, or other perceived authority told us that processed food, or sugar, or some other food item or ingredient is toxic and if we eat it, we are going to fall ill and die, so we better cut it out of our lives completely.
Or, all the girls at school decided to go on a diet and we wanted to fit in so we decided to go on a diet, too. There was something thrilling about starting a new diet, a new eating plan, a new “lifestyle.” And so began our lifelong pursuit of finding the “right” or “perfect” way to eat. Moving from one set of rules to the next, until eventually they all started to blend together and we started creating our own.
Or, it was something else. Point being, there are LOTS of reasons why we adopt rules to manage our eating. But, they are never very helpful for very long, only serving to continuously erode our trust in ourselves and our bodies over time.
If Not Rules, Then What?
While at some point we may recognize that these rules aren’t serving us well. That, in our attempt to control food through the use of food rules, it actually ends up consuming us. That we spend so much energy figuring out how to fit our eating into the diet du jour, that we have little mental energy or space for anything else. That we think about food constantly. That we are obsessed and constantly crave what we feel we should not have. Only to then experience tremendous guilt and shame when we inevitably violate the rules, believing that this is also evidence of our inability to control ourselves. Making the rules are both tortuous and necessary.
Most people eventually recognize this as a very miserable place to be and yet are so paralyzed by fear at the thought of letting the rules go. But, BUT, you can let them go and there is so much freedom on the other side.
Intuitive eating is a framework that can help you release the food rules that have kept you stuck for so long.
Intuitive eating is not eating with abandon. Eating with abandon is just the opposite extreme of controlled eating. It is often a normal response to controlled or restricted eating. But again, it is not intuitive eating.
Intuitive eating helps you escape extremes and find a middle ground with food. Allowing you to reconnect with your body and learn how to nourish yourself in a way that both tastes and feels good.
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So, the short answer to the original question, “Can healthy eating and intuitive eating co-exist?” is a resounding yes. However, how “healthy eating” is being defined is important here. We talk all about this in another post: What Is Healthy Eating, Anyway?
Healthy Eating and Intuitive Eating
The truth is eating is not, and cannot, be so black-and-white as diet culture would have us believing. There is no clear definition of what is “healthy” eating and what is “unhealthy” eating. Truly, read our post on What is Healthy Eating, Anyway to learn more about this.
Intuitive eating is founded on the premise that food is neutral. It has no inherent moral value. It recognizes and acknowledges, of course, that the nutritional quality of food exists on a continuum with some foods being more nutrient dense than others. But that nutrient density is not a proxy for a food’s morality. And all foods, regardless of nutrient density, have a place in health supportive eating.
So, if the question is, can I still choose to eat salads, and grilled salmon, and whole grains, and yogurt, or whatever other foods diet culture has put on the moral virtue pedestal while practicing intuitive eating? The answer is yes, you can. You can choose to eat these foods because they give your body vitamins, minerals, fiber, protein, or whatever else. You can choose to eat them because they help to keep you full, regulate your digestion, regulate your blood sugar, help manage your cholesterol, or for any other physical health-related reason. You can choose to eat them because they taste good to you or they are convenient. Diet culture does not own these foods. It is not inherently restrictive and you are not automatically aligning yourself with diet culture because you choose to eat them. Just know, that you are not a better or worse person for making these food decisions and are under no moral obligation to do so. Because these foods have no moral value, your worth as a human being is wholly disconnected from these food choices.
Through the intuitive eating journey you will probably find yourself WANTING to eat foods that were once associated with your food rules and fell on your “good food” lists. The foods that society typically labels as “healthy.” But through the intuitive eating journey you will learn to relate to them differently.
How do I know?
When clients express this fear to me that they will only want to eat the “unhealthy” food if they don’t have rules that state otherwise, I always ask them to actually imagine that scenario. To imagine what it would be like, what it would feel like, if they were subsisting only on the foods they deem “unhealthy.” The answer is always “not good.” And when they really think about it, the idea of only eating whatever those foods are and nothing that the consider “healthy” really doesn’t appeal.
Sure, there may be a period of time during this process where you find yourself wanting the less nutrient dense, previously forbidden foods more frequently. A time when you are eating these in a way that feels disproportionate to the amount of more nutrient dense foods you are eating. But when we can truly allow ourselves to go through this process, to make the forbidden foods allowed and OK, what we find is that our bodies actually crave balance. They feel best when we are incorporating a variety of foods across the nutrient density continuum. When we start to lean more heavily to one side or the other, our body will signal to us to bring things back to the center.
Intuitive Eating Can Pave the Way to More Effortless Health Supportive Eating
One of the things that can happen when we are living our life according to our food rules is that, as we start to crave what is not allowed more and more, we also grow to dislike, perhaps even resent, the foods we feel we “should” be eating. This is true even if these are foods we actually would have previously identified as foods we liked. We are less drawn to the foods we “should” be eating, less satisfied when we eat them, and increasingly interested in the foods not represented in our eating plan.
Whereas intuitive eating helps us reconnect with our preferences and our values around food. It helps us learn to make decisions based on what appeals in terms of a sensory experience. But we also learn to make decisions based on other factors, like how certain foods might impact or make our body feel. This doesn’t happen overnight. There are many steps before we can get to this place where we are confidently making autonomous and internally directed food decisions. But, this is intuitive eating.
Eventually we find ourselves at the place where making food decisions doesn’t feel so hard. It’s not so fraught with an internal tug-of-war. We can more clearly identify what decisions will suit us best in a given moment. And, if we have an experience that doesn’t go as planned, that leaves us feeling overfull or less well than we hoped, we can view that as information that will only help us in future decisions, while withholding judgment.
It's not to say that eating becomes easy or totally effortless. But, comparatively, much easier than any diet plan we’ve ever followed for any extended period of time and without all of the guilt, shame, and vacillating between eating extremes.
So, I’d say, in this way, intuitive eating actually enhances our ability to more easily eat in a way that supports health than any set of food rules ever has or ever will. You can trust your body and trust yourself more than you realize. And intuitive eating will help you rediscover that.
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Or, consider joining our 6-week Intuitive Eating Support Group and Book Club! It offers community, connection, and conversation on all things intuitive eating, in the company of others who “get it” and are on a similar healing journey, and is facilitated by a Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor (me!). Click HERE to learn more, register, or join our waitlist. Feel free to contact us with any questions.