What You Need to Know About Gentle Nutrition
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Gentle nutrition is a concept born from the tenth principle of Intuitive Eating. It’s a principle folks are often eager to get to and explore AND it’s the final principle for a reason.
Principle 10: Honor Your Health with Gentle Nutrition
Make food choices that honor your health and taste buds while making you feel good. Remember that you don’t have to eat perfectly to be healthy. You will not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency or become unhealthy, from one snack, one meal, or one day of eating. It’s what you eat consistently over time that matters. Progress, not perfection, is what counts.
From Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach, 4th edition
Authors: Evelyn Tribole, MS, RDN, CEDS-S & Elyse Resch, MS, RDN, CEDS-S, FAND
Gentle nutrition begins to consider how we can incorporate information about nutrients and the health-promoting properties of specific food-types in a way that is not morally laden or rule bound. But we need to be actively challenging both the moral judgments we’ve attached to food and the food rules we’ve internalized before we are going to be able to integrate nutrition information in a way that is truly neutral. Which means, we’ve really got to work through the earlier Intuitive Eating principles before this one is going to be accessible.
Defining Healthy Eating
The authors of Intuitive Eating define “healthy eating” as “having a healthy balance of foods and having a healthy relationship with food.” This is represented by the model for “authentic health” that the authors also describe. This model considers both your internal experiences—your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, physical sensations, and appetite cues—and external information—health guidelines, nutrition information, and philosophical values (e.g. buying local). Authentic health is the integration of these two worlds, your internal world and your external world, where in you decide how to integrate this information to best meet your unique needs.
Adapted from Intuitive Eating: A REVOLUTIONARY ANTI-DIET APPROACH, 4th Edition
It's important to note that just because nutrition information exists, it doesn’t mean it must or “should” be integrated. For example, just because there might be some evidence that consuming a diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids can support heart health doesn’t mean you must or should be consuming salmon (or any other omega-3 rich food source) on a regular basis (especially if you can’t afford or dislike it!).
YOU get to decide what information feels important, relevant, or accessible to you and how you’d like to integrate that into your decision-making process with food. There is not one path to practicing gentle nutrition or one way to eat healthfully. But you can probably see how, if you’ve been steeped in diet culture for a long time, it would be very easy to slide back into writing rules about how you should be using this information and feeling guilt for not doing something you’ve told yourself you “should” be doing.You can read more about my take on “healthy eating” in my previous blog post: What is Healthy Eating, Anyway?
How Does Practicing Gentle Nutrition Differ from Dieting and Following Food Rules?
Gentle nutrition differs from following food rules in many, many ways! I’ve outlined some of the biggies below, but this is by no means an exhaustive list.
Intake is adequate. An explicit intention of diets and food rules is often to restrict quantity of food that is allowed. This is often done in the name of health, but make not mistake, this is not healthy. Feeding your body enough food is. Adequacy is our body’s most basic nutrition need. Everything else about nutrition is kind of moot if our body is underfueled. So, consider eating enough essential to the foundation of being able to further explore gentle nutrition.
Emphasis is on being additive rather than restrictive. Once the basic need for adequate nourishment is met, we can explore what else we can add in to build out the nutritional profile of what is being consumed. This might mean assessing for food groups or nutrients that could be underrepresented and getting curious about ways we might add those in.
This is also when, if someone has a family history of a certain chronic health condition, or a diagnosis themselves that they are interested in addressing with nutrition, we can begin to explore what are some of the foods and nutrients that could be supportive and ways to building in more of those.
But generally, the focus is on adding in, not taking away.
Does this mean you can’t explore substitutions for certain food items? Absolutely not. But if doing this, it’s important that it’s coming from an internally-directed place, that preference is part of your consideration, and you are mindful of the potential for getting caught in an all-or-nothing mindtrap. For example, just because you decide to substitute in whole grains sometimes doesn’t mean you have to all of the time. Or just because you’ve switched to 1% milk, that doesn’t mean you need to switch to all low-fat or non-fat dairy. Flexibility is key.
It allows for individual differences. Just because a nutrient, food, or food group appears to support physical health in a certain way doesn’t mean it’s the only option that exists or that it’s appropriate or necessary for everyone. For one, not all people have the same health concerns. If someone is not concerned about their cholesterol, then it’s not relevant to focus on cholesterol-lowering nutrition recommendations.
Beyond that, even if someone does have elevated cholesterol that they are interested in lowering, nutrition recommendations may still not be the most supportive intervention. For example, for many folks trying to heal from an eating disorder or disordered eating, trying to focus on integrating nutrition recommendations to reduce their cholesterol may be a distraction from being able to focus on healing from their eating disorder/disordered eating. And may in fact reinforce some of the deeply entrenched eating disorder beliefs and behaviors, causing more harm than good. In this case, it might be more supportive to use medication as the primary intervention.
Honors individual preferences. Gentle nutrition still prioritizes pleasure and enjoyment with food and eating. That means, you aren’t choosing between eating foods that you enjoy or “eating healthy,” which is often a choice diets have us believing we must make. Instead, you are eating in a way that tastes and feels good. You are eating what you want in a way that also aligns with your health goals and values.
Autonomous. You are able to eat what you want in a way that also aligns with your health goals values because practicing gentle nutrition is autonomous. It means that you get to be in charge of your decisions. You get to decide what you do with the information you consume. You get to decide what information and what actions are going to be most supportive to your whole health and wellbeing and what will not. You get to change your mind, adapt to the circumstances, and ultimately call the shots. And, if you decide that a certain recommendation isn’t a fit for you, you don’t internalize that as being bad, negligent, or otherwise doing something wrong.
Removes moral virtue from food decisions. Again, no matter what you choose to do or not do, there is no right or wrong, and there is certainly no morality associated with those choices. Your goodness, your worth, as a human being remains unchanged by what you choose to eat or not eat. This holds true regardless of your health status, too. Not being able to, not wanting to, or otherwise choosing not to make a change to how you feed yourself based on health information you have has zero bearing on your goodness or worth as a human being.
Recognizes that nutrition is not the be all end all. The importance of this difference cannot be overstated. Yes, what and how we eat can impact our health. Not all foods are created nutritionally equivalent. Some patterns of eating may be more supportive of our physical health than others. And (this is a BIG and), nutrition is just one slice of the pie when it comes to all of the factors that impact our health and wellbeing. While diet and wellness culture will have you believing that if you just eat the “right” things you will never get sick and live forever, that is not reality. It’s not that nutrition doesn’t matter, but it is definitely not the only thing that matters, and arguably also not the most important.
For example, access to healthcare, access to food, access to safe spaces, access to education, access to housing, being financially secure, stress load, sleep, genetics, discrimination, I could go on…all contribute to health outcomes as well. These are things that we generally have much less control over and stressing about food often leads to just that…more stress, which isn’t health-supportive.
All to say that it’s OK to care about nutrition. AND, practicing gentle nutrition allows the degree to which we focus on nutrition to take up the appropriate amount of physical and mental energy without adding to the stress we are likely already experiencing in life.
Am I ready to practice gentle nutrition?
Here’s what I think about that question:
If you are finding yourself wanting to speed through or cross off all the other principles of IE on the list to get here, it’s a good sign that you probably aren’t ready for it. Because what this usually reflects is a lack of self-trust and a fear of not having rules or “guidelines.” Building self-trust to be able to let go of food rules is important for being able to discover what practicing gentle nutrition really means and looks like for you.
If you are trying to practice gentle nutrition and it’s feeling awfully reminiscent of a diet, then you are probably trying to turn gentle nutrition into a diet. This is usually what happens if we jump in before we are ready because we haven’t learned to feed ourselves without rules first.
This doesn’t mean you can’t explore gentle nutrition but does mean that doing some additional groundwork to help with your exploration could prove to be really beneficial.
If you’d like support in this process then you definitely want to check out our How to Eat for Health (it’s probably not what you think!) Intuitive Eating course. This is best described as a deep dive into gentle nutrition and beyond where we break down the steps for building up that foundation to make exploring nutrition information in a neutral way possible.
Not a one-size-fits-all approach, we are guiding you toward redefining what health means to you and how to eat in a way that supports that definition.
Was this helpful? You may also be interested in: Can Healthy Eating and Intuitive Eating Co-exist?