Intuitive Eating: Is it just another trend?
Diets come and go, food trends peak and disappear, will the popular Intuitive Eating be the same?
Remember the Special K diet? The diet being: eat Special K and only Special K.
With the tag line: “Doing something good for yourself has never been this easy”.
The promise: You’ll lose all the weight you dream of losing AND look like the lady in the red bikini on the ad.
It seemed too good to be true, because it was. The diet industry is now estimated to be worth $71 Billion, Special K isn’t the only diet out there looking to steal your money, your time, your energy and your confidence.
Is Intuitive Eating also a bit too good to be true too?
As someone who has eaten intuitively now for 7 years, without a diet or weighing scales (both the food kind and the body weight kind) in sight, I’m here to share my own experience of intuitive eating. And, as a Trained and Certified Intuitive Eating coach I know my stuff.
When it comes to eating and food, anything that shows up in our world as a way of eating is bound to be classed and fall under the category within our minds of ‘Diet’. According to this survey, the average adult has tried 126 diets. It’s only natural that when we come across something described as a way of eating we link it to dieting. But Intuitive Eating isn’t a diet, it’s the opposite.
Whilst diets have rules you can break along with shoulds and shouldn’ts and often ‘cheat’ or ‘treat’ days and well… they’re full of guilt and shame, Intuitive Eating is a self-care eating framework without black and white rules. It’s gentle, compassionate and allows for learning, evolution and a trust in oneself that no diet can ever achieve.
Throughout my late teens and early twenties I’d tried plenty of diets some very structured: Slimming World, Weight Watchers, NO CARBS (in shouty letters because that’s how I felt constantly). Others under the guise of healthy eating : not eating after 6pm, drinking water if I was hungry, only eating salads and veggies and absolutely no cake or chocolate or ice cream or hot chocolate or crisps or… you get my drift.
And due to the messaging from the media - in magazines, on social media, even within school, I had very rigid ideas around what size and shape I should be and what constituted as healthy both from a nutritional point as well as an exercise and movement stance. I did the Jillian Michaels 30 day Shred (oh my goodness did I hate it), I went to the gym at 6am and ran on a treadmill for an hour mindlessly, I did dance-fit videos and HITT sessions and went to weird, shouty, Frantic Energy exercise classes. I did this for years and, no surprise here, it didn’t help me love myself. I didn’t even really like myself and I certainly wasn’t all too keen on my body. I didn’t particularly feel healthy or energetic; just exhausted and stressed when another diet or fitness plan didn’t work long term.
Intuitive Eating: 7 years in I’m still a huge advocate for it. Through learning to eat intuitively I was able to let go of the dieting stories I told myself, the forms of self-punishment around food, the restriction and binge cycles and the constant poking, prodding and frowning at myself in the mirror. I was able to create freedom with food, feel at peace with food and it’s no longer something I think about all day long. I don’t really think about the way I look all too much either, thanks to eating intuitively.
So, do I think it will be a trend that comes and goes? It’s risen in popularity, that’s for sure. As someone who hosts an intuitive eating course and coaches 1:1 clients in eating intuitively I’ve noticed a major increase in enquiries and those wishing to ‘just eat intuitively’ , believing its something that can be learnt within a session. On TikTok #IntuitiveEating has over 1.3 Billion views, on Instagram the hashtag has accumulated over 1 million posts, BUT this rise in popularity isn’t necessarily a good thing. With this kind of traction, mis-communication and mis-information on the topic is rife. Un-trained and un-certified influencers turning Intuitive Eating into rules and diets - the exact opposite of what it is. This may well give this life changing way of eating a bad rep.
For now, I take great comfort that many will find a way out of diet culture due to this rise in popularity and that can only be a good thing.