DWM Intuitive eating emphasizes internal cues like hunger, fullness, and how foods make you feel.

Intuitive eating emphasizes internal cues like hunger, fullness, and how foods make you feel.

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Principles

There are 10 core principles for intuitive eating. It will be important to understand each principle outlined below and how they work together to become an intuitive eater:

1. Reject the Diet Mentality: Toss the diets, quick fixes, and gimmicks. Diets offer nothing but the false hope that weight loss is easy, quick, and permanent. Reject the lies that diets have made you believe about yourself, feelings of failure for stopping and regaining weight. Even one small hope that a diet could work will prevent you from being able to rediscover intuitive eating.
2. Honor Your Hunger: Hunger is a normal, biological process. Your body requires adequate amounts of energy and carbohydrates to function. Ignoring this body cue and feeling hungry can lead to cravings, overeating, and binges. Learning to honor hunger cues is what sets the stage for rebuilding trust with yourself and food.
3. Make Peace With Food: Give yourself unconditional permission to eat whatever you want. This means including all foods without labeling them good or bad to eat. Once you tell yourself you can’t have a certain food, this can lead to feeling deprived and intense cravings can build. Cravings often lead to overeating, binges, and extreme food guilt.
4. Challenge the Food Police: Say “no” to self-induced thoughts of being good or bad based on what you eat or how many calories you consume. Diets say you’re bad for eating too many calories or eating that cookie. These are unacceptable rules and restrictions that diets have created. Not accepting negative food thoughts, guilt, and other diet rules will be a critical part of returning to intuitive eating.
5. Respect Your Fullness: Listen for body cues saying you are comfortably full. This means you’re no longer hungry and should stop eating. Pay attention to satiety signals throughout your meal, enjoying the flavors of the food, and always be aware of your fullness level.
6. Discover the Satisfaction Factor: Find joy and satisfaction in the eating experience. When you eat what you want in an inviting environment, it promotes contentment and satisfaction. A positive eating experience is shown to promote satiety with much less food.
7. Honor Your Feelings Without Using Food: Don’t stuff your feelings with food. Find ways to cope with emotions like stress, anxiety, anger, or boredom without turning to food. Food doesn’t fix these problems. Feeding emotional hunger only makes feelings worse and adds food guilt to the mix.
8. Respect Your Body: Body acceptance is an important part of self-love and feeling better. Instead of being critical of yourself, embrace your individual genetic blueprint. Body size and shape are unique for each person. Being unrealistic and critical about your body will make it difficult to reject the diet mentality.
9. Exercise (Feel the Difference): Exercise doesn’t have to be extreme to be effective. Focus more on how good it feels to be active and move your body rather than the calorie burning process of the training session. It’s easy to feel great and motivated about exercise when you experience increased energy, better sleep, and improved quality of life.
10. Honor Your Health (Gentle Nutrition): You don’t have to be a perfect eater as diets have you believe. One day of eating a certain snack or meal won’t make you gain weight or cause health problems. It’s what you eat consistently over time that matters. Making food choices that taste good and nourish your body is what’s important.

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