At long last, after a handful of prior mentions on TOA I have finally pulled together a reading review (or two) for Intuitive Eating, a June 2019 read. The premise of the book is that healthy eating is a matter of honoring hunger by respecting the body's signals. It's a very simple idea, and one that on the surface appears to lack any new information, but for some reason the message in book form allowed it to finally resonate with me. This fact suggests that there is more than meets the eye about this book, which somehow convinced me to change my mind yet again regarding the best approach to nutrition and, more broadly speaking, the way I listened to my body.
Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch (June 2019)
My response to Intuitive Eating may simply have been due to the fact of a job, whose generous food and drink options had influenced certain eating habits - I would have oatmeal in mid-morning, a snack or two in the afternoon, and a beer in the company kitchen at the end of the day. The formation of these habits was a surprise to me - I would have told you before taking the job that I was immune to such nonsense - but perhaps being under the influence of these routines left me open to the book's emphasis on recognizing and responding to hunger signals. There is more than just workplace habits that can take us out of a healthy eating mindset. Factors such as time of the day, social occasion, or mere boredom are all familiar to me as causal events for eating decisions. Intuitive Eating stresses the importance of finding a way to access our body's signals in these situations, taking a moment to honestly assess our hunger before making a decision about eating.
The book also discusses the danger of allowing certain health guidelines to become their own form of restriction. I think this point underscores one of the book's themes - Intuitive Eating suggests that the dieting mentality is a constant threat to any healthy relationship with food. Even if we are guided by the principles of health food, a diet is a diet, which means we as eaters are choosing to follow orders rather than listen to our body's signals. The way the authors see it, we are naturally equipped to instinctively make healthy decisions, which means rejecting the premises of the dieting mentality - eating specific foods, dining at preset times, earning the right to indulge after exercise, and so on.
This anti-dieting message, which I may cover in more detail in a later post, is likely the aspect of the book that will generate the most resistance among reluctant readers. I think it's critical to keep in mind that researchers rarely support the claims of most diets. Intuitive Eating patiently explains the harm people do to themselves through dieting, noting the ways the mind and body are altered by the constant state of low-grade starvation "achieved" in dieting. The book convinced me to shelve my intermittent fasting routine, a decision that created certain inconsistencies with my previous praise for the method, but I've been happy with the results. I find that occasional short fasts are helpful, but nothing more (and that's assuming I've both overindulged the night before and woke up with no interest in eating breakfast). The difference in how I saw it before I read Intuitive Eating is this critical distinction - these days, I turn to my body instead of my brain to make my eating decisions, and I feel it's making a difference for me in terms of how I relate to food.
I have noticed the way this pattern of thinking has appeared in other parts of my life. Longtime TOA readers will know of my running habit, which has always been defined by mileage rather than sanity. I suspect that applying the principles of Intuitive Eating at the table prepared me to make intelligent decisions while out for a run - when to cut it short, when to take a day off, and so on. It may have also influenced my decision to sit on the floor - the way my legs felt after sitting on the couch or in a chair suggested that my seating accommodations were at the root of certain issues. There is no doubt that I am in a better position today to identify anxiety responses in my body, which in the past I may have ascribed to other causes such as fatigue, indigestion, or illness. I understand why some will suggest that the main idea of this book - listen to your body's signals - seems almost too simple to merit a book, but my recommendation is to give it a try and see if it can have an effect on your thinking.
TOA Rating: Three cravings out of four.
