The Zen of Thin

The “eat-anything-you-want” approach gains momentum—but with caveats.

Want to lose weight—and keep it off? Forget those boring rice cakes, ho-hum salads, or dead-on-arrival frozen meals. The key to a skinny new you may just lie in yielding to sweet temptation.

Crave hot fudge sundaes? Go for it. Love raw cookie dough or cheesy nachos? Enjoy. The blacklisting of forbidden foods is finally over, some experts say.

Dubbed the “no-diet diet,” intuitive eating gives the green light to eat anything you want. If this radical approach sounds new, it isn’t. It debuted to polite applause in the mid-1990s but a resurgence began several years ago thanks to the research of Brigham Young University health sciences professor Steven Hawks.

Hawks’ two-year study underscores the effectiveness of this “hunger-based weight management” approach. But what personally sealed the deal was the professor’s ability to trim 50 pounds from his own ample frame—and keep it off for five years—by eating intuitively. His seemingly upside-down views on weight loss add weight to what growing numbers of researchers say: Diets don’t work. Ninety-five percent of dieters fail to keep their weight off, regardless of the diet or motivation level. Some studies, in fact, suggest that dieting actually causes weight gain and possibly eating disorders.

None of this is new to intuitive eating pioneer Evelyn Tribole, MS, RD. Back when Hawks was still an unknown, she and Elyse Resch, MS, RD, penned their groundbreaking book on the subject. Today, the popular nutrition expert is more convinced than ever that resistance to food vices is futile. When we gnaw on cardboardlike crackers but secretly crave four-cheese pizza, we’re just setting ourselves up for an eventual fall.

Sooner or later, Tribole says, we have to make peace with our growling stomachs. And that begins by listening to what they have to say.

Good-Bye Food Police

Diets have tremendous surface appeal, Tribole says, but are doomed on several levels. For starters, they are usually harsh dictators, banishing essential food groups to permanent exile for little to no reason. But by making tasty foods taboo, diets make those forbidden fruit all the more appealing. Ravenous but torn by conflicting desires, we keep the dietary charade alive only by white knuckling it from meal to meal. As the final kicker, when our primal urges eventually prevail—and they always do—we beat ourselves up for being big fat failures. Experts call this up-and-down psychodrama the “deprivation roller coaster.” Dieters know it as a way of life.

Intuitive eating, by contrast, breaks the chains of restrictive dieting, does away with the internal dictator, and frees people to eat as they see fit. “My patients are really excited by it,” Tribole says. “They tell me they finally feel really free.”

Free—but also initially confused. More than merely novel, most everything about intuitive eating flies in the face of dietary tradition. People accustomed to the shrill whistle of the food police are puzzled to find a relaxing, be happy mindset that breezily winks at the eating of anything, from Chicago deep-dish pizza to Philly cheesesteaks to Boston cream pie.

“Most dieters are quite disbelieving,” Hawks says, “because dieting has conditioned them to believe that they can’t eat in control. In the United States, we automatically associate managing your weight with having to resist hunger, with the notion that ‘I have to exercise willpower; I have to deprive myself.’”

When people are told to drop ironclad rules in favor of intuitive eating’s Zenlike, know-thyself admonition, skepticism arises. But skepticism, Tribole says, is a very good thing. “By the time I see my patients, they’ve hit ‘diet bottom.’ If they had been more skeptical from day one, maybe they wouldn’t have been on so many crazy diets.”

To understand intuitive eating, let’s start by focusing on what it isn’t. Intuitive eaters don’t do many things. They don’t avoid foods, don’t set strict limits, don’t count calories, and don’t fixate on their bathroom scales. But here’s the important caveat: They also don’t pig out.

Intuitive eating is about eating anything you want, but it’s not about eating everything you want. You eat only when you’re hungry, stop when you’re full, and avoid both stuffing and starving yourself. On a hunger scale from a famished 1 to a button-popping 10, intuitive eaters try to maintain a steady 5. People who follow Draconian diets, by contrast, typically yo-yo between 2 and 9—and hate life for it.

Eating only to the point of fullness isn’t easy. In fact, it can be a completely alien experience for people accustomed to finishing off gargantuan restaurant servings, mindlessly munching snacks while watching the latest reality TV show, and eating on autopilot.

“Intuitive eating requires a lot of concentration and awareness,” Hawks says. “Rather than being an intellectual plan, intuitive eating becomes a physiological plan. You listen to your body. You figure out when you’re hungry, what you’re hungry for, and when you’re satisfied. It’s not an easy process. But it’s not nearly as painful as being hungry and deprived.”

Reflecting on his own weight management success, he says, “It’s been [several] years now and I’ve been totally comfortable. This is a happy thing because, as a dieter, it was constant feelings of deprivation, binging, and fighting that battle constantly. With intuitive eating, you’re really able to get beyond that.”

Tuning In to Tummy Talk

As happens with any movement, a few proponents of intuitive eating take extreme positions. Some encourage former dieters to literally surround themselves with their biggest, baddest temptations. Predictably, most dieters fear they’ll go completely nuts and gobble down everything in sight. But experts like Hawks and Tribole say the clinical process of “food habituation” usually sets in. With repeated exposure, we become jaded to even 5-gallon jars of M&Ms or plates of steaming pasta.

Philadelphia nutrition therapist Amy Tuttle, RD, LCSW, cautions against an in-your-face approach—especially for self-doubting newbies. Rather than having them rush into things willy-nilly, she has her clients focus on two things: developing a sense of “body trust” and practicing mindful eating.

Some people, she says, can manage this process on their own. Others can’t. For the latter group, dieting has caused them to become disconnected from their body signals. Nutrition therapists like Tuttle help clients relearn these subtle cues. By heeding our stomach’s seemingly alien talk, we begin to moderate our intake. In time, the pounds fall off. Tuttle says this relearning process—this tuning into fullness and then actually being able to stop eating—is difficult after years of deprivation.

Tribole notes that long-time dieting tends to disconnect people from their cues to the point that many dieters don’t know when they are hungry or getting full or way past full.

Tuttle agrees and adds that many diets have trained people to work, socialize, and otherwise live in a state of nearly perpetual hunger. The danger is acute, she says, “because [hunger] can push us over the brink into a self-defeating cycle of binging, guilt tripping, and comfort eating.”

Beware a hungry tummy, Tribole says. “Some people wait to eat until their ravenously hungry, until they are these eating machines,” she says. In such cases, she helps clients learn to take a time-out. This moment of stillness allows the individual to assess what it is like to actually feel full—but not stuffed. This is an important skill, she says. “If you are a busy, multitasking person doing a zillion things, how are you going to hear hunger?” Short answer: only by listening with both ears.

As we give ourselves permission to eat whatever we wish, habituation sets in. The come-hither stare of a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream actually starts to lose its hold over us. But if we really want it, we can enjoy—in moderation. Ultimately, intuitive eating really touches on our ability to trust our judgment. Many dieters have been so conditioned not to trust themselves that it may make sense to work with a registered dietitian, a nutritionist, or a nutrition therapist.

Intuitive eating has an added benefit of clearing the hunger-obsessed mind. “People suddenly have the ability to focus and concentrate,” Tribole says. Instead of being fixated on food, they turn their attention to the world around them.

Intuitive eating also frees people from the tyranny of the bathroom scales. Instead of obsessing over numbers, intuitive eaters use inches, clothing sizes, and belt notches as their benchmarks. The net result is a liberating experience. “Intuitive eating,” Tribole says, “gives complete freedom to eat and not really care about what other people think of your choice. It says that your morality and character haven’t changed because you order a cheeseburger for lunch.”

Pausing, she says, “I really believe that whether a restaurant serves you a 6-pound or a 6-ounce steak, it wouldn’t matter if you are in touch with your hunger-fullness cues, wants, and needs.” When the urge hits to eat a Big Mac, Tribole says her clients are encouraged to ask themselves if they really want the burger or if their desire for something soothing points to a nondietary need. When people really tune into their needs, a nutritious salad or peach will probably be just as satisfactory as a burger or chocolate bar, she says.

Points to Ponder

Even intuitive eaters sometimes overeat. The key is not to obsess over occasional overindulgences. But when it happens frequently, Tuttle says, people often benefit from asking themselves why they are eating past the point of fullness.

“If you’re going for the food and you’re not hungry,” she says, “ask yourself: ‘What am I feeling and what do I need right now?’” Tuttle’s clients often find they are prone to emotional eating and use sugar, carbs, and fat as medicine to soothe internalized feelings of hurt, depression, anxiety, loneliness, or anger.

Other people overeat simply because it’s a habit. After a hard day at work, we may have a decompression ritual that includes zoning out in front of the television with high-calorie, low-nutrient foods on our laps.

Tribole, therefore, underscores the need to recognize vulnerabilities. When we are too much of anything—too hungry, too stressed, too sleepy, too hurt, or too lonely—we enter the high-risk arena of the emotional eater. Successful intuitive eaters have to know their high-risk situations. If you’ve worked through lunch and arrive home as hungry as the proverbial wolf, “you’re apt to eat a meal’s worth” of junk food in minutes, she says.

Intuitive eating does not promise miracles. Weight loss is slow, not infomercial quick. “This is not an ‘overnight do this and drop five pounds a week’ approach,” Tribole says. Just as it takes time to pack it on, it takes time to lose that heft.

By now, of course, that should be intuitive.

— Matthew Robb and Nancy Robb, RD, LD