The Problem With Intuitive Eating
Why the diet trend could help you lose weight, but probably won’t
A fashionable new diet has emerged. A good example of a ‘no diet diet’, intuitive eating aims to undo the damage decades of diet fads have created.
But is following yet another regimen to undo the damage of others actually the solution?
The rise of intuitive eating points to a bigger issue: our need for someone else to hold the fork.
Notable nutrition experts Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch developed the intuitive eating program. The diet follows 10 principles centered around self-compassion and listening to your body.
Intuitive eating makes sense in theory, as many diet trends tend to if they gain enough traction. Promoting a more compassionate approach to health is a welcome change.
The main problem with the intuitive eating trend is that it needs to exist at all.
The media has for the longest time been diet culture’s greatest advocate. Peddling an aspirational body type means being able to sell all that comes with it. We consume media ideals whether we want to or not. They crop up in the form of innocuous diet tips to the more worrying promotion of drinks, pills, and surgery.
Like high-fructose corn syrup, they’re near impossible to avoid and the many effects are hard to quantify.
Looking back over the last few decades also reveals that it doesn’t seem to matter what body type is being sold. Men have generally aspired to some puffed-up or trimmed-down variation of GI Joe. For women, the cinched waist hourglass of the mid 20th century became the emaciated ‘heroin chic’ of the ‘90s. This in turn yielded to the new improbable curvy-athletic of today.
Body crazy curvy wavy, big titties little waist. They’ll keep selling for as long as we keep buying.
As Michael Pollan takes pains to show in his In Defence of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, the industrialization of the Western food system was swift and loud. So loud, in fact, that it drowned out the voice which had for eons informed our diets: the voice of the home cook (Pollan names them ‘mom’).
The mass production of ultra-processed food products alienated us from our food chain. Stakeholders then sought to turn a profit by marketing them as the healthier choice. Wonderbread quickly outsold wholewheat bread to become a staple in American households. Margarine was marketed as a healthier alternative to butter.
Some brands took a different approach. As more women entered the workforce after the Second World War, the Swanson company catered to the increasingly time-poor middle class with the invention of the TV dinner.
10 million trays were sold in the first year of production.
Eager to secure their position at the top of this lucrative new food chain, industry players forked out cash on campaigns (Got Milk?) and on lobbying to influence Government legislation. We began to refer to food in relation to its nutrients, with different nutrients deemed ‘good’ or ‘bad’ depending on whatever thinking was en vogue.
Over time we began to rely on the government to tell us how to eat, while the media told us how to look.
And so, our guidance on food and diet became outsourced.
A decline in our health followed.
Quick to make a buck on our helplessness, Atkins, Keto, Whole30, 5:2 and the rest proclaimed to be our saviors. The policing and stigmatization of when, how much, and what we eat became normalized. Math joined the menu, not only in portion sizes but in calories and the calculation of macros.
Food became a puzzle which only scientists and nutritionists could solve for us.
Imagine, now, a world that doesn’t capitalize on nutritionism and processed food. Where heroes and heroines are celebrated for their abilities rather than waistlines.
A world that doesn’t fetishize a specific body type (or at the very least fetishizes all body types equally).
A place where nobody tries to convince anybody that margarine is healthy. Calorie counting? Never heard of her. People let their stomachs, not plates, tell them when they’re full and eat food which mostly came from the ground. People move their bodies for the pleasure of it, not because they feel external pressure to do so.
Would a program like intuitive eating need to exist?
The 21st century has thus far been more wholegrain sourdough than Wonderbread, but we still have a long way to go. Weight Watchers may have rebranded to WW, but insidious diet culture is still alive and doing far better than a lot of people worshiping at its altar.
In an absence of diet culture, ‘intuitive eating’ would simply be called ‘eating’. It will be a happy day when people stop describing themselves as ‘intuitive eaters’ and instead just… eat.
It is easy to forget that we are permeable. What we consume, physically and mentally, affects what we put back out into the world.
The latest diet trend doesn’t hold the key to nourishing your body, nor does the FDA or the EU. You do. The ‘ideal body’ will continue to prowl, rattling the bars of our cage and claiming she holds the key to our happiness. It’s up to us to realize that we can get up and walk out at any time.
The only body we need to listen to is our own: your fork needn’t carry a copyright symbol.
*This is a thought piece on diet culture and should not be viewed as medical advice. Always consult a medical professional if you feel you need support with your health, both physical and mental.
