Intuitive eating

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Intuitive eating is a nutrition philosophy based on the premise that becoming more attuned to the body's natural hunger signals is a more effective way to attain a healhty weight; rather than keeping track of the amounts of energy and fats in foods or satiety levels. It's a process that creates a healthy relationship with food, mind, and body. Intuitive Eating, just like the many books available today, goes by many names, including non-dieting or the non-diet approach, normal eating, wisdom eating, conscious eating and more.

1 History of Intuitive Eating
2 Intuitive Eating Studies
3 Diets Don't Work
4 Notes and references
5 External links

[edit] History of Intuitive Eating

Exactly when the intuitive eating movement began can be argued, and probably never resolved. One of the earliest pioneers may have been Gwen Shamblin, who founded The Weigh Down Workshop in 1986. The workshop and her books approach intuitive eating from a religious angle. Yet another religious approach,Thin Within, goes back to the early 1970s.

Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch [1], coined the name in 1995 in their ground-breaking book, Intuitive Eating. Many people over the years have written on the subject, including Barbara Birsinger [2]; Debi Lander [3]; Michelle May, M.D. [4] (Am I Hungry? What to Do When Diets Don't Work) [5]; Bob Merberg [6]; and Cathy Wong [7], Gillian Hood-Gabrielson [8] and Judith Matz & Ellen Frankel (The Diet Survivors Guide: 60 lessons in Eating, Acceptance and Self Care, 2006).

[edit] Intuitive Eating Studies

In 2005, researcher Linda Bacon, published the first two-year long study demonstrating the effectiveness of Intuitive Eating ^[1][9]. Later that year, Steven Hawks, a professor of Community Health at Brigham Young University, made headlines when he claimed to have lost 50 pounds following his version of an intuitive eating program.[10]. Hawks claims the underlying philosophies of intuitive eating are thousands of years old and exist in most eastern and some western religions. Intuitive eating is designed to be a "common sense, hunger-based approach to eating," where participants are encouraged to eat when and only when their body tells them it is hungry.

In 2006, Ohio State University researcher, Tracy Tylka, published a study in the Journal of Counseling Psychology^[2]. which accomplished two key outcomes. First, Tylka developed and validated an assessment scale to define key traits of Intuitive Eaters, which are: unconditional permission to eat, eating for physical rather than emotional reasons, and reliance on internal hunger/satiety cues. Lastly, Tylka used that assessment scale on over 1400 people and determined that intuitive eaters have a higher sense of well being and lower body weights, without internalizing the "thin ideal".

Currently, University of Notre Dame psychology researcher, Lora Smitham, is recruiting people with binge eating disorder to study the effectiveness of the intuitive eating process for treating this problem ^[3]. Smitham's premise is that dieting triggers binge eating and learning to become an intuitive eater can be therapeutic.

[edit] Diets Don't Work

Intuitive eating is the opposite of dieting,(the latter of which is externally driven). It is a key component of the Health at Every Size movement. Supporters argue that eating in response to internal cues of hunger and fullness, while allowing all foods to be part of the diet, weight will be maintained to one's "natural" weight. Natural weight is the weight range predetermined by genetics.

When someone is disconnected to his or her internal cues of satiety, it's easier to be trigged by external triggers to eat,(which can be emotions, "because it's time", opportunity, and/or perceived rules of eating.)

If someone has rigid rules for so-called healthy eating, he or she is more likely to succumb to overeating, as a consequence of breaking their well-meaning rules. Scientifically, this all-or-none type of eating, built around eating rules rather than internal hunger/satiety cues, is referred to as restraint eating or Restraint Theory ^[4].