Fresh Focus Podcast Series: EP92
Title: Myths About Intuitive Eating
Host name and Credentials: Erin Gobeille, MS, RDN
Facility: VA Portland Medical Center
Guests and Contributors:
Audrey Perkins, Registered Dietitian Nutritionist and Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor. Clinical Outpatient Nutrition at VA Puget Sound in Seattle, WA.
Christina Johnson, MS, RD, Outpatient Dietitian at the VA Portland Medical center in Oregon

Erin: Welcome to the Fresh Focus Podcast, I’m Erin, a registered dietitian at the Portland VA Health Care System. My fellow Intuitive Eating Dieitians are joining me again today- Audrey Perkins a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist and Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor at VA Puget Sound in Seattle, WA and Christina Johnson a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist at the VA Portland Health Care System in Oregon.

When trying to learn more about intuitive eating it is easy to come across many myths that are held about the approach. Let’s dive into some of the most common myths that you hear about Intuitive Eating.

Christina: yeah that’s get started, One myth that I hear often, is that intuitive eating is all instinctual. Basically I think this comes from a misunderstanding that IE means that you absolutely are in tune with your body all the time, thinking in only absolutes. What may be missed with this thinking is that not everyone knows their body very well or how some people may not have the ability to listen to their body.

Erin: Yeah, I think you touched on an important part of this myth that we hear which is the belief that you can't do intuitive eating or that intuitive eating isn't for you if you're at a point where you currently don't have those internal cues to listen to or follow. However, Intuitive Eating is actually about the process of starting to use and build those skills more. So regardless of whether you have or don't have those “instincts” at this moment, you can still start intuitive eating by focusing on building those skills or diving more into why you don't have those even internal cues. Then you can learn how to apply the various intuitive eating principles as part of your individual intuitive eating journey.

Audrey: absolutely, it's also great because Intuitive Eating has 10 principles that don’t need to be followed in any particular order. So counseling can start wherever the patient is wanting to start and for example if a person isn’t in touch with their hunger and fullness you can offer to hold of on those 2 principles and perhaps start with one of the other eight. Some of them focus on identifying and building body awareness and some of them focus on overcoming the obstacles that get in the way of that body awareness.

Erin: Yeah, I think that's a great point.

Christina: Absolutely. And the thing about intuitive eating is, as we mentioned in some of the other episodes, is that it's such a personal journey and everyone is at a different spot learning about themselves. Everyone's starting from somewhere new or somewhere different.
how we've been influenced, and how we have a relationship to food or the instincts that we may or may not have (think about how we may or may not listen to our cues or have cues at all). Part of intuitive eating is that permission piece and self-care and all those other different perspectives that we can use. A great example of this is a participant in our last IE class who recently told us she was a little apprehensive to start the class because she thought it was another do this or don’t do that or dieting mentality but she was put more at ease and has less stress about IE when we told the particpants at the beginning of the class to really just start where you are at

Erin: Yeah, I love that, I think a strength of intuitive eating is that it highlights that individualization and how every person is unique in their approach to food and their body, It looks at what they may need in a way that other ways that we talk about nutrition doesn't necessarily incorporate all the time.

Audrey: also a part of Intuitive Eating is the consideration for emotions as well as thoughts and those come from different regions of the brain. Instinct is in our reptilian brain that controls our basic survival functions. We also have the limbic brain, our emotional control center, and then there is the neocortex, which is where rational thinking takes place. The journey of intuitive eating incorporates all those systems. If they were to just listen to their instincts, they would struggle to embody intuitive eating fully because they're lacking attunement with the whole system. You need your rational and emotional brain, in conjunction with the instinct, to determine what is helpful and needed by your body.

Erin: that point also flows well into the myth that “intuitive eating is the hunger fullness diet” because that is another way to reduce intuitive eating into this very black and white framework. When we see IE being used as a “hunger fullness diet” we often see people creating new food rules such as I can only eat when I feel certain amount of hunger and I have to stop eating when I feel a certain amount of fullness usually as a means to restrict calories or manage our weight and in intuitive eating we discuss a variety of factors that can influence our food choices beyond setting hard and fast rules only based in hunger and fullness cues alone so when we refer to
when we refer to intuitive eating as a hunger fullness diet and if we are thinking of intuitive eating as a diet meaning as a weight loss approach it really gives the wrong impression of what the goals of intuitive eating are.

Christina: agree

Audrey: Yeah. And again, that's where I just think of the other principles too, because there are other places that you can start your intuitive eating journey if you're not quite connected to your hunger or fullness cues yet.

Christina: so keeping in mind that everyone starts in a different place and I think the end goal is to be more instinctual and be more intuitive and be more in tune with your body. But realistically, we know that not everyone is there to begin with. So it's hopeful to get there or be more in tune with those things. But that doesn't mean that that's what it's only about or that's all it's about. Trying to get away from those absolutes its about the journey and the experience.

Erin: And that's something we highlight a lot when we talk to veterans about intuitive eating. We intentionally emphasize that even though the principles are 1 through 10, you can approach it in any way so if that means you start with seven and then jump to three, you can kind of mix and match intuitive eating to something that works for you and where you're at. I think that's one element of debunking the “intuitive eating is the hunger fullness diet” myth- that there are multiple principles, there are multiple layers that you start to uncover in your IE journey.
Christina: Right. Exactly, The basis of a lot of these myths are coming from that diet centric culture that we are immersed in and for most people IE is a big change in thinking and it's hard for people to take that on to begin with. So if you're coming at this with more of a dieting mentality or a little bit more closed minded you kind of get wrapped up in some of these myths, which is kind of where that hunger fullness diet myth comes from. Because people are still so connected to that dieting mentality, which makes it hard to have a change in thinking and reconnect with yourself, which is what a lot of intuitive eating is all about.

Erin: That makes a lot of sense too, because intuitive eating is something that's such a different paradigm to how we’re used to thinking, it can make sense that we would naturally try to take the intuitive eating information and put it into something that we know and makes sense to us, which is more of that typical diet structure or diet mentality. So in order to try to make sense of intuitive eating we're trying to make sense of it in a framework we know already. It does make sense that a “hunger/fullness diet” is people's initial thoughts when they hear about intuitive eating because it's so different than what we're used to thinking about in terms of health and your intuition and how we normally talk about it.

Audrey: Yeah, Erin, that's an insightful point. I think you're on to something with that because when people have a hard time understanding a new concept, they will more times than not default to a framework they are familiar with. I mean we all do it and I’ve had patients who decide to restart diets during IE because they aren’t seeing results at the rate or the outcome that they had become used to seeing when they were dieting its almost always tied to weight loss

Erin another important myth that we hear which is “nutrition doesn't matter when where we are eating intuitively.”

Christina: or “intuitive eating means you can eat whatever, whenever.”
That's why we ask everybody in our classes or who we teach intuitive eating “what does this mean to you?” Because it's going mean something different to everybody.

Audrey: I think for some people when they start on an intuitive eating path, especially if they have a history of emotional eating or using food for emotional comfort, it can strongly feel that way at first, where it's like “I just can't stop eating”, or “I'm eating whatever I want, whenever I want”. I think it's hard to focus on nutrition in some of those cases, but that's part of the path that isn’t tempered or it's just scary for a lot of people because. Like we were saying before, you want to accept unconditional permission to eat in order to become feel neutral towards food. This then sets you up to make peace with food so you're not applying moral principles to food. When you do this, food becomes less controlling. You start owning control of your choices when it comes to your eating, so the more and more a person leads into that and becomes more comfortable with food and the choices they're making about what they eat, how they eat, and when they eat, nutrition will also become more intuitive.

Erin yeah, Again, in intuitive eating, you're getting more in touch with your body. Your internal body systems - the cues, the signals and for most people if they pick just one food to eat over and over and over, in time and with paying attention, it starts to not feel so good in the body.

Audrey:The predicted outcome is you will then instinctually add more foods, and that can improve nutrition over time because you're more likely to incorporate variety, balance and moderation to your meals the longer you are on that intuitive eating path. A Veteran last week in our IE shared how he tried a couple new vegetables his dinner meals since our meeting the week before and although he discovered he didn’t like some of them he felt good for just trying new foods because it was building more balance into his food bank as well as into his thinking
About food.

Christina: One of the reasons why gentle nutrition, principal 10, is the last principle, is because we are building that relationship. Aside from that dieting mentality, aside from those external factors, you're really tuning into yourself. Knowing that nutrition is a part of intuitive eating and its something that you'll start to pay more attention to as you are able to pay more attention to your body. It doesn't mean that it needs to be the sole focus of our choices. it's a much more gentle approach as well in part because food is more and means more than solely the nutritional composition of foods.

Erin: Yeah, I think when you start to build more of that attunement and you can listen to that, that starts to inform those food choices in a way where you are taking into account how foods feel in your body and what nourishing your body feels like. You can start to take that into consideration once you've built on some of these other principles. When we are adjusting from how we normally think about food, nutrition and diets, where nutrition is this overly important factor in what we eat, and moving towards intuitive eating, where you're not even starting out with that nutrition piece, it can feel very different but I think it can be helpful to veterans to have that difference recently in one of our IE groups one veteran reflected on her experience and said this shift from that nutrition focus to starting with something different made her feel more empowered in her life in general and she even said “I feel more empowered to listen to my body not just whats happening in my mind and also feel empowered in being ok with wanting something and being able to eat it”

Audrey: Nicely said. I love that example

Erin: Thank you both for joining today and sharing your expertise and I am so looking forward to talking even more on this topic in future episodes. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and tune into future episodes where we will continue to answer questions about intuitive eating and how you can incorporate it more into you life. If you have any questions or need personal recommendations, feel free to contact your local VA dietitian! Thanks for listening!