Why "intuitive eating" doesn't really work
I object to the mystical way the term "intuition" is often defined, as if it's a magical power from the ether.
Intuition is actually quite logical and easily explained.
As outlined in the 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow by psychology scholar and researcher Daniel Kahneman, our brains can't always think about everything before we do it. There's a part of the brain that makes automatic snap decisions for the sake of efficiency. When we "just have a feeling" about something, it's the fast part of our brain pulling together all the pieces of data we've collected over our lifetime to make a quick, unconscious decision. We can feel it but the information is not available to us as defined thoughts and words.
Where do we get the internal data? We get it through our senses: what we see, feel, hear, taste, and touch. I would say there's a six sense in our ability to perceive other people's emotional energy. This concept is called "limbic resonance" in a book published in 2000 by a group of UC San Francisco psychiatric researchers called A General Theory of Love. Mammals, of which humans are one species, have a limbic brain that feels and senses emotions and requires us to care and nurture and to be cared for and nurtured in order to thrive.
So intuition is our body taking all the data from all our experiences we've had so far, and making a decision behind the scenes real fast like. What could go wrong?
Well...
Sometimes we haven't collected the best data. Do you think your expriences thus far have been optimal? The best ones? Never have to learn another thing because you've already got it? Probably not.
Let's stick with eating as the example. Let's say you grew up in a household where mac'n'cheese and hot dogs were a staple growing up but never salad. When you're hungry, your "intuition" is going to reach in and look for data to tell your body how to eat. Salad is not going to be in there because you never perceived salad. You did not collect data for salad. You only collected data for mac'n'cheese and hotdogs. So your "intuition" is always going to go for mac'n'cheese and hotdogs.
See how this works?
The key is to retrain our intuition so it has the best data for times when our rational mind isn't making decisions for us. Malcolm Gladwell outline the process of training our intuition and why intuition is so often wrong in his 2005 book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.
It does no good for us to slow down and tap into our intuition if we don't have the best data. What we first must do is learn the right way.
With food and nutrition, the right way is tricky. No one agrees and the science is always changing. Remember when eggs were bad in the early 90s? Now they're great. Remember when gluten was the devil but now they're saying it might be glyphosate (Round-up chemical) that's applied to the wheat that might be the thing? How does coffee both cure and cause cancer? ‾\_(ツ)_/‾
But there are a couple of things that all foodies and nurtitionists can agree on:
vegetables are good
refined added sugar is bad
If you can follow these two rules, you'll be in pretty good shape. Add in exercise and you will probably live a long, healthy life.
Many people do not grow up with models of how to prepare delicious vegetables. If this is you, you must take concentrated effort and diligent practice to learn.
My favorite method for learning to cook with vegetables is outlined in this blog.
Once we have learned all the wonderful vegetable and healthy food recipes and have practiced them and internalized them, they will then be available for our intuition to tap into when we're hungry and stressed.
Another piece of intuitive eating is knowing when we're full, when we're hungry, and when we need to drink water. The fast-paced American lifestyle, the high availability of soft drinks and other sweet beverages and foods including fast food, and the high prevalence of child trauma including physical abuse and neglect, are a potent combination for not being present in our bodies and having no idea what we feel like.
Yoga is a practice that has been studied and shown to help people, including those who have suffered trauma (literally all of us), to be more present and know what our body feels like. For more on the science of this, read Presence by Amy Cuddy and The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk.
Slowing down when we eat is another good practice. So is asking ourselves what feelings feel like in the body. None of this is necessarily "intuitive". We have to learn how to do it and practice it. Then it becomes intuition that works for us.
I teach this stuff in my 8-week No Sugar Challenge because it's not easy for most of us. Check it out here.