Can You Diet AND Do Intuitive Eating?
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Welcome back to Food Psych Weekly, the newsletter where I answer your questions about intuitive eating, Health At Every Size, disordered-eating recovery, and how to navigate diet culture without falling into its traps.
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This week’s question is from a reader named Emily, and just a Content Warning (CW) for food-stigmatizing language and the name of a popular diet in the question, and that diet name in my answer (in service of explaining why the diet is harmful to anyone trying to heal from disordered eating). Emily writes:
Thanks for all you do for your audience! I am a 55yo woman, recovered alcohol abuser (15 years sober). I abstain completely. No issues with temptation to drink, no matter what stressors exist. But: I struggle with/against disordered eating, especially around candy and baked goods. On the one hand, I believe in intuitive eating; on the other hand, my intuition regularly leads me astray, and it feels EXACTLY like when I was fighting against that little voice that wanted me to drink alcohol for most of my life.
Is there any such thing as “semi-intuitive eating” for someone who just cannot moderate with sugar? Fruit is fine, rice and sweet potato and other starches aren’t a problem. But with candy, chocolate, bread, cookies—once I start, it is very hard to stop. I engage in secret eating and some other things that are red flags for disordered eating (disheartening but not truly risky, thank goodness). I have ample supports like access to a gym, Noom, therapy, information about nutrition, the time and money to eat a variety of healthful foods, I meditate daily and I get a healthy amount of exercise. I have it all dialed in until I tell myself, “One cookie is probably fine…”
Is there a conditional intuitive eating option for former alcoholics like me? I keep hearing “you can allow yourself whatever you want, there is no bad food.” But then I mentally add, “…except for me, because I feel better when I abstain completely from candy and baked goods.”
Any info would be helpful!
Thanks, Emily, for that great question. Before I answer, just my usual disclaimer:
These answers are for informational and educational purposes only, aren’t a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice, and don’t constitute a provider-patient relationship.
I’ll be giving fairly quick and unpolished answers here for the foreseeable future because I’m trying to juggle work and caring for a new baby, but hopefully this will be a helpful start.
It sounds like you’re working really hard to heal your relationship with food, as I’m sure you did in your relationship with alcohol—15 years sober is a huge achievement! It also seems like you’ve been experimenting with intuitive eating and have a sense that it might be helpful to you, which is great.
What I’m seeing in your question is that you’re also doing a lot of restrictive eating—even if it doesn’t feel like restriction. In fact, I’d say that you actually already are doing “semi-intuitive eating,” and that it doesn’t seem like it’s working out the way you want it to.
I say this because true, full-on intuitive eating is an anti-diet approach, the first principle of which is “reject the diet mentality.” But in your question you mention that you’re doing Noom, and Noom is a diet.
It likes to claim it’s not—it calls itself an anti-diet and claims to be different from other diets because it emphasizes psychology—but in fact it’s a standard low-calorie diet that promotes counting calories, logging your food and exercise, and weighing yourself regularly. Noom also uses a “traffic light” system to categorize foods, which creates a sense of “good” and “bad” foods that’s very disordered and antithetical to a peaceful relationship with food.
As I told journalist Scaachi Koul for her great critique of Noom in BuzzFeed News (CW: weight and calorie numbers, specific diet advice), it’s mental gymnastics and rhetorical pretzel-twisting to say that Noom isn’t about weight, it’s about psychology. The supposed “psychology” it teaches is largely just diet rules, the kind that have been a part of many other diets for decades now. It also teaches so-called “intuitive eating” rules that twist intuitive eating into a diet—the “eat when you’re hungry, but only X number of calories, and second-guess-every-craving” diet. And as a certified intuitive eating counselor, I can tell you for sure that that is NOT intuitive eating.
There are a number of good reasons why intuitive eating discourages dieting, but one is that diets drive what I call “rebound eating”—eating to make up for restriction—which is a nearly inevitable response to dieting. Rebound eating can feel out of control, and so it can seem like the solution is more control (like the “abstinence” you mention, Emily)—but in fact the real key is more letting go and making peace with all foods, including and especially the ones you feel you eat too much of.
In sobriety circles where people aren’t well versed in intuitive eating, there’s often an analogy made between alcohol and sugar/flour, foods deemed to be “addictive.” But the thing is, food isn’t addictive in the same way that substances are. While you can absolutely feel addicted to those kinds of foods (as I did, too, in my disordered-eating days), those foods only create addiction-like eating in the context of restriction. I wrote about this several months ago, in a newsletter about 12-step groups for “food addiction,” so I’d definitely recommend checking that out.
The better analogy here is between alcohol and dieting. For people with disordered eating, giving up dieting completely is usually necessary—just as giving up alcohol entirely is usually necessary for those struggling with a substance-use disorder. People with these issues can experiment for themselves, and maybe a little bit of dieting or a little bit of drinking will be possible for some of them, some of the time. But in my experience those are very rare cases, and (at least in the realm of disordered eating, which is my area of expertise) the vast majority of people who struggle with food issues end up finding that they need to stop dieting altogether.
So in short, the feeling that you can’t stop eating particular foods isn’t a property of the foods themselves, but of your relationship with those foods—often specifically a relationship of deprivation. Once you’ve truly stopped restricting those foods, you’ll likely be amazed at how you’re able to eat them without that out-of-control feeling.* (I know this from both personal and professional experience.)
We’ll be talking more about this in next week’s episode of Food Psych, so be sure to subscribe to the pod to hear more. And if you want a much deeper dive into intuitive eating, with lots of resources for troubleshooting all the sneaky ways diet culture shows up for you, I’d invite you to check out my Intuitive Eating Fundamentals course. This round of course enrollment closes this Friday, June 24th, and it’s the last cohort that will have access to our private community forum and monthly Q&A series, so now’s a good time to join if you’ve been considering it.
I hope that’s helpful in getting started with intuitive eating, Emily, and thanks again for the great question.
* For some people with more intensely disordered eating, that may require support from a treatment team. Here’s a list of providers I recommend.
Ask your own question for a chance to have it answered in an upcoming edition of the newsletter.
On the Podcast
In episode 278 of Food Psych, I answer an audience question about how to avoid eating too little throughout the day and ending up in an unintentional restrict-rebound cycle. We discuss how to reframe the issue so that you’re not forcing yourself to eat or demonizing “overeating,” and explore why tuning into subtle signs of hunger is essential for self-care.
Check out the episode right here, and be sure to subscribe to the pod so that you get each new episode of our final season delivered straight to your device.
Thanks so much for reading! This newsletter is made possible by subscribers like you. To show your support, you can forward it to someone who’d like it, make a donation, buy my book or card deck, or join one of my courses.
Got this as a forward? Subscribe here for weekly anti-diet support!
Here’s to breaking free from sneaky diet culture,
Christy
P.S. If you want to learn more about how diet culture has influenced the health and wellness world, check out my book, Anti-Diet. It’ll help you recognize and reject the sneaky, modern guises of diet culture that pretend to be all about wellness but are actually just diets by another name, so that you can focus more of your time and energy on the things that truly matter.