How to Quit Dieting and Eat Happily Ever After
I discovered intuitive eating and it changed my life by allowing me to enjoy food without guilt or shame
The red-headed woman on my screen is warm, friendly and oh so young. I can't help thinking, "I started my first diet 20 years before you were born. What could you possibly teach me about food and eating that I haven't learned and unlearned a million times already?"
But when Laura Silver, a Brooklyn, New York-based registered dietician and nutritionist, one of whose specialties is intuitive eating, starts talking, I feel a palpable sense of relief. Silver is going to teach me what healthy eating means — not healthy as in "colors of the rainbow" (you know, eat green and purple and you'll live a long life), but healthy as in "feeding my body what it needs, wants and deserves."
She'll teach me about knowing when I'm hungry, when I'm hangry (hungry plus angry), what I'm craving and how to give myself permission to eat it without the guilt, self-loathing or shame that I'm used to feeling. She will help me to silence the clamoring food noise in my head that has been there forever.
I am going to relearn things that I intuitively knew many decades ago, way before Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers and the Scarsdale diet, before the pink and green diet pills, cadged from my mothers' nightstand, that made me so jittery I couldn't sleep for days.
She is going to teach me about intuitive eating.
Core Principles
Developed 30 years ago by registered dieticians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, and described in their 1995 book, "Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach," this is an evidence-based approach that helps you become attuned to your body's signals for hunger, fullness and satiety. According to a 2023 New York Times article, the practice has been mentioned 1.4 billion times on TikTok. It is International No Diet Day on May 6, a time to celebrate body acceptance, diversity and respect for all body shapes and sizes. It is also a good time to learn about the 10 core principles of intuitive eating, which include:
- Rejecting the diet mentality
- Honoring your hunger
- Making peace with food
- Challenging the food police
- Discovering the satisfaction factor
- Feeling your fullness
- Coping with your emotions with kindness
- Respecting your body
- Movement – feeling the difference
- Honoring your health with gentle nutrition
Before I learn about intuitive eating, I have to learn what "normal eating" means. (I'm old enough to get Social Security and I don't know what it means to eat normally? How pathetic is that?) And, oops, I forgot, but the intuitive eating model emphasizes observation of thoughts, feelings and behaviors related to food without criticism or judgment. So, I'm not pathetic, just human. I can live with that.
"The number on the scale decided how I felt about myself and how I ate for the day."
According to Ellyn Satter, creator of the Satter Eating Competence Model and an internationally recognized authority on eating and feeding, normal eating is flexible and varies in response to your hunger, your schedule, your food and your feelings. It is eating when you are hungry and continuing until you are satisfied.
It took Silver years of a chaotic cycle of dieting and disliking her body before she discovered intuitive eating. She says, "In high school, I thought about food all day long. I compulsively weighed myself every morning, and the number on the scale decided how I felt about myself and how I ate for the day. Constantly, I added new rules and restrictions for my diet, and, when I inevitably broke one, the guilt was crushing."
Finally sick of living like that, she threw out her scale and says "I decided to pay attention to how my body felt. I rediscovered the joy of eating all kinds of delicious foods, and became fully present and mindful, not only while eating but also while doing the things I love."
After more than 50 years of dieting and overeating, having lost and gained significant amounts of weight repeatedly since my adolescence, I too was sick of thinking about weight. I wanted to learn to eat in a way that would be satisfying and enjoyable, and relatively healthy.
I was not alone.
"I stopped following external rules and started trusting myself. Over time, my relationship with food softened, and the constant mental chatter, the 'food noise,' got quiet."
Elizabeth Sherman, 56, a life coach who lived in Austin, Texas, for 18 years before moving to a small beach town in Cancun, Mexico — land of bathing suits, chicken mole and tacos al pastor — says she made a very intentional decision to leave her scale in the United States. "I didn't want to waste another decade obsessing over food, counting, weighing and logging everything I ate. I wanted a sane, sustainable approach that would allow me to eat in a healthy way and still go to restaurants without being rigid about what I could or couldn't order."
She began noticing what foods gave her energy, what made her feel sluggish, and what left her feeling full, satisfied and calm. "I stopped following external rules and started trusting myself. Over time, my relationship with food softened, and the constant mental chatter, the 'food noise,' got quiet."
Intuitive Eating Benefits
Of course, when I started intuitive eating, I was terrified about gaining weight. Intuitive eating is a weight neutral, weight inclusive philosophy. Weight loss is neither a priority nor a measure of success, and this is a fundamental tenet of the non-dieting and Health at Every Size paradigms, which are aligned with intuitive eating. Changing your mindset naturally brings up feelings about body image and weight, since so much is embedded in society about physical beauty and valuing thinness above all.
Realistically, nutritionist-dietician Sarah Anzlovar writes in a 2023 article, "Just because you're ready to try intuitive eating doesn't mean you all of a sudden lose the desire for weight loss." Dealing with the ways in which a new eating philosophy affects you emotionally and physically is part of the challenge.
Some people will gain weight when they begin eating differently, others will not, and some will lose weight.
Some people will gain weight when they begin eating differently, others will not, and some will lose weight. Interestingly, numerous studies have concluded that chronic dieting (avoided in the intuitive eating model) is a consistent predictor of weight gain, with up to two-thirds of people regaining more weight than they had lost. Women who ate intuitively, rather than obsessively counting calories and restricting their intake, have fewer maladaptive eating behaviors including emotional eating, binging and overeating.
Intuitive eating appears to lead to weight stability and metrics such as lowered BMI and other improved health indicators including blood pressure and cholesterol levels. A literature review appearing in an issue of Public Health nutrition and cited by the National Institutes of Health provided evidence that an intuitive eating approach assists in weight maintenance, although perhaps not weight loss, for overweight and obese Caucasian women.
Scientific studies have correlated intuitive eating with increased body satisfaction, self-acceptance, reduced depression and higher self-esteem, with or without weight loss.
I have been following intuitive eating principles for four years now, and it has changed my life. I have lost about 25 pounds, without dieting. I am still overweight but my blood pressure, cholesterol and glucose numbers are all normal. The weight came off slowly and there have been times when I gained some weight, panicked and regressed to old obsessive dieting behaviors.
Change is always difficult, but when I saw how the return to dieting made me miserable, I decided I could live with a few extra pounds. I also keep snacks around the house now, and they can stay in the cabinet for days, even weeks, rather than hours. Sometimes I will actually choose a piece of fruit over a salty snack, because I have given myself permission to have something "fattening" if I want it. And I have deleted the concept of "good foods" and "bad foods" from my vocabulary.
Like Sherman, the food noise in my head is gone. When I'm out to eat with friends or family, I think about what I want to eat rather than what I think I "should eat." In fact, while writing this article, I munched on a bag of chips without feeling the slightest pang of guilt.
Thank you, Laura Silver — you're worth your weight in gold!
