Archives of Scientific Psychology:6, 63–69. (2018) What’s Wrong with War on Obesity? A Narrative Review of the Weight-Centered Health Paradigm and Development of the 3C Framework to Build Critical Competency for a Paradigm Shift.

Intuitive Eating is an empowerment tool–it’s time to unleash it and liberate yourself from the prison of diet culture and weight obsession. Only you know your thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Only you know what hunger, fullness, and satisfaction feels like. Ultimately, you are the expert of your body. Worse–the focus and preoccupation on weight leads to body dissatisfaction and weight stigma, which negatively impacts health (O’Hara & Taylor 2018). Study after study, shows that dieting and food restriction for the purpose of weight loss leads to more weight gain. To find a Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor in your area, read here.) There is not a single long-term study that shows that weight-loss dieting is sustainable. (This has been such a problem that in 2007, we started training and certifying health professionals in the Intuitive Eating process. If a health professional or coach is offering you Intuitive Eating for the purpose of weight loss–run away. There is nothing to count: this includes no counting of calories, carbs, points, or macros. There is no pass or fail, therefore there is no “blowing it”, rather it’s a journey of self-discovery and connection to the needs of your mind and body. Intuitive Eating is not a diet or food plan.

Essentially, Intuitive Eating is a personal process of honoring health by listening and responding to the direct messages of the body in order to meet your physical and psychological needs.

The principles work by either cultivating or removing obstacles to body awareness, a process known as interoceptive awareness. Intuitive Eating is a dynamic integration between mind and body. It’s thrilling to see all the research and gives me great hope. It is a weight-neutral model with a validated assessment scale and over 90 studies to date (Tribole 2017). Intuitive Eating is an evidenced-based, mind-body health approach, comprised of 10 Principles and created by two dietitians, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch in 1995. So I thought I would address are a couple of key take-away points about what Intuitive Eating is and is not. But it’s also frustrating to see the co-opting of our work by diet culture in social media and beyond. It’s exciting to see Intuitive Eating growing in popularity both in the media and in the research.

Elyse resch intuitive eating