Is intuitive eating for you? Let's find out!

Eating purely by intuition and maintaining a healthy body weight and body composition, is the dream for many. "Your body knows what it needs", is the mantra behind it. And while there is some truth to this statement (people with very low iron can start craving actual rocks!), in our current nutritional landscape of abundance, it leads most people astray.

In this post, I will describe an extremely practical framework to find out if intuitive eating can be an option for you.

Simply put, it either works (1 group of people), or it doesn't (2 groups of people).

It works

There are people whose appetites match with their energy intake. They can maintain their weight by "eating what they want" because how much food they want actually matches their bodies' energy demands! Their weight stays roughly the same.

If people like this go through a period of lower energy demands (a period with lots of sitting at the office and no time for exercise, for example), they will unconsciously decrease their food intake. By contrast, if these people go on a hiking holiday, they will eat more because their body demands more.

This is actually the desired situation, and in theory correctly functioning hormones involved with our metabolism should make this situation possible. But....not for everyone.

It doesn't work

There are two groups of people for whom intuitive eating will not work (yet), and it may never work.

There are people who under-eat, if left to their own devices. I know one such person, and he's incredibly skinny. Not much body fat, not much muscle either. He claims to eat a lot, but that's literally not possible (look up the first law of thermodynamics). Even if he eats a lot, apparently his body needs even more energy. He can "forget to eat meals", and lose weight quickly if he doesn't consciously eat a lot of food. I do think cases like this are quite rare.

The opposite is true for, I would say, most people living in a nutritional world of abundance: if left to their own devices, they eat too much. This is easily demonstrated by the percentage of people in our society that carry excessive amounts of body fat, aka: they're overweight. These days, the majority of people can be classified as overweight.

I think most of these people are eating intuitively and doing a bad job at it. Slowly, over the years, the number on the scale creeps up, and it's not muscle that they're gaining!

Why doesn't intuitive eating work for most people?

I dropped some hints as to why intuitive eating is a pipe dream for many, but here is a short list:

• there is simply too much food available everywhere, wherever you go.
• most food that people eat is too caloric, "empty calories" (high in fats and high in carbs).
• it's too easy to eat more calories than you require.
• the allure of tasty food is hard to resist for many people.
• social reasons: eating and drinking is done together, people overeat on social occasions. There can be social penalties if you don't partake.

Can you become an intuitive eater?

The way out of being overweight isn't easy, and it requires a willingness to confront your own nutritional habits and gaining the knowledge to do things differently.

It will definitely involve tracking what you eat for extended periods of time. This isn't fun.

But with the knowledge you gain while doing this, you can make more informed decisions about what you put in your mouth. Less "empty calories", more healthy choices.

You'll discover the power of volume eating, which is a way of still getting to eat a huge plate of food for fewer calories. Going towards a healthy body composition is not just a matter of "eating less", you have to focus on what you should eat more of instead.

Only when these lessons are fully understood, can you let go of the tracking. By that point, you know what a healthy meal looks like, and you know which foods are your personal traps.

And even if you aren't tracking your food, you should always track your body weight and body composition regularly, to see if you are truly where you want to be.

Personal example

To close off with a personal example: yes, I am an intuitive eater. I don't track what I eat, and I know my body will lower energy demands if I have periods when I'm less active. The opposite has also happened. When I was in Japan for 6 weeks, and walking 20-30k steps per day, I was eating insane amounts of food and literally nothing happened with my weight.

However, there are still things I do track. I weigh myself every day (to see if my weight indeed stays roughly the same), and I weigh my food. I need to know if I'm getting 130–140 grams of protein per day, so I weigh at least my protein sources on a kitchen scale. Also, I eat roughly the same things every day, every week. For dinners, I use a list of 10 to 15 meals that I rotate between.

The way I eat is boring, predictable. And that's how I succeed. There's room for a highly caloric snack here and there, but with the way I eat (large, filling meals) I don't really desire a lot of snacks.

If you want to become an intuitive eater with a healthy body composition, that's the route I would take: become a boring eater. Mind you, that doesn't mean that you eat tasteless meals. Healthy foods can be very tasty!

Which group are you in?

So, which group are you in?
Group 1: intuitive eater, and it works!

Group 2: under-eating, if left to your own devices

Group 3: over-eating, if left to your own devices

Group 4: ?? Maybe you don't fall in either of these 3 groups, let me know what you do!

Thanks for reading!

I offer nutrition and/or strength training coaching services. If you are interested in a no-bullshit approach towards getting healthier, feel free to plan an intro call with me.

These blog posts are written by me, I do not use LLM's to write for me. Cheers.