Intuitive Eating Myth #3: Intuitive Eating is a Diet

No, no, a million times no. Although the diet industry is trying to jump on the bandwagon and steal it away to turn it into yet another way to make money off of our insecurities through lies, true intuitive eating is not a diet!! A diet is a special course of food to which one restricts oneself to lose weight. Intuitive eating is neither restriction or to be used with the purpose of weight loss. Although weight loss can happen a side effect of intuitive eating, many do not lose weight, and some gain in the process. Intuitive eating brings us to our set point, the weight that our individual bodies feel healthiest at. It is never the focus or the purpose. If you see intuitive eating and weight loss in the same sentence, RUN!

Intuitive eating is a way to learn to eat outside of the diet mentality. It is used to create a new, healthy relationship with food, forever. It is used to help you become your own best nutritionist, to free you from the chains of diet culture and body ideals, and lead you to food freedom.

Intuitive eating is how you learn to disconnect food from all of those diet-based rules to help you to start looking at food in terms of satisfaction.

On a diet, you might look at a bowl of cereal and ask yourself: How many carbs or calories are in it? Should I eat this now or would it be better to eat it later? Will eating this mean I am being good today or bad? If this is bad for me, I might as well eat two bowls and put some ice-cream on top as well. On the other hand, with intuitive eating, it becomes simple. You simply look at the bowl of cereal and ask yourself: Do I want it? That is the simple question we start with. (Then naturally you will learn to consider other factors are well, but we can get into those at another time.) So all in all, with intuitive eating, a bowl of cereal is just that…a bowl of cereal. In dieting, it can be a million and one things from a bad food, an off limits food, an eat only sometimes food, an eat sparingly food, a high-carb food, and so much more…depending on the diet you chose to plague yourself with.

So no, no…it is everything a diet is not.

Continue to Intuitive Eating Myth #4.