Intuitive Eating: A Radical Approach to Food in Our Diet Culture
by Avery Brown
Did you know that diets fail for 90 to 95 percent of people? Studies have shown that in almost all cases, any weight lost at the start of your diet will be completely regained within 2 to 5 years. According to intuitive eaters like Allyson Terpstra, the solution to this is not to find a diet that sticks, but to reject diets altogether.
Allyson Terpstra is a registered dietician who specializes in intuitive eating and health at every size. She offers nutrition counseling through her private practice, The Joyful Life Nutrition, where she helps clients build peaceful relationships with food and their bodies. Terpstra sat with me to discuss the ins and outs of intuitive eating and what it can do for the average person.
How would you explain intuitive eating to someone that has never heard of it before?
Terpstra: Intuitive eating is essentially a framework when it comes to health and well-being that was established by two dietitians back in the ’90s. What it does is it looks at this connection between our mind, our body, and some of our emotions and how those all interrelate, especially when it comes to how we view food and our body. It teaches us to rely on our bodies’ own intuition and internal cues instead of external cues, things like timing and rules and “eat this and don’t eat that.” It’s taking a step away from that and looking at, “what does my body need in this moment? What would benefit me? What would be good for me?”
What is diet culture and why should we reject it?
Our culture, which a lot of people in this arena refer to as diet culture, heavily influences how we see food and body and eating and all of that. So the first principle [of intuitive eating] is rejecting the diet mentality…really starting to reject those messages in that culture, because all they’re doing is making us feel unhappy about ourselves, and placing all these rules and taking away that wisdom and intuition that we’re born with. A lot of [my clients] have come from these pasts of people or culture telling them they’re not good enough because of their weight, or their size, or they’re not healthy. And so they have to go on diets to lose weight or to look a certain way or to achieve a certain health status. But what intuitive eating stresses is that diets don’t work. And there’s a lot of research on that.
How does intuitive eating bring a fresh perspective on food?
A lot of times we have this morality that we place on food; that certain foods are good, certain foods are bad, and therefore, I’m a bad person for eating these foods or I’m a good person for eating these good foods…that can lead to a lot of disordered thinking and behaviors when it comes to eating, which really take away from having a good relationship with food and getting pleasure and satisfaction from food. A lot of people view food as just fuel, but it’s so much more than that. Satisfaction is so often overlooked and so I love to bring that back in my work with my clients by helping them rediscover joy in what they eat.
What advice would you give to people who want to start practicing intuitive eating?
What was helpful for me, and what I’ve heard is helpful from a lot of my clients, too, is in the social media realm — discovering practitioners and other people who are into intuitive eating. It can be a really great support network. If someone starts to get into it and is realizing that there’s challenging work and there’s a lot they have questions about, seeking out a health care professional who is an expert in intuitive eating that can help really guide them through it and help them learn would be such a helpful resource.
Do you think intuitive eating has the power to change someone’s life?
It can absolutely change lives because sometimes we don’t realize the stress and the time and the energy and all the focus that we’re putting into food and exercise and our body image. Intuitive eating can help provide relief from that. You can take all of that time and energy and put it into other, more life-giving things. And that’s one of the reasons I called my practice The Joyful Life, is to help people discover the joy that is actually in their life outside of all these things…food, exercise, and especially the way we look are really just minor blips on the radar.
