Will intuitive eating help me lose weight?

If you’re reading this blog you probably already see some value in jumping off the diet/binge hamster wheel, trusting your body and following your body’s perfect eating instincts (aka intuitive eating). You likely accept the reality of body size diversity, and the idea that you can be healthy at any size. You may even believe that all humans have total bodily autonomy and have no obligation to pursue health at all - regardless of size (especially since our notions of “health” are totally out of reach for so many people).

So, while you may hold these beliefs in theory, you may not be ready to accept body size diversity if it means your own weight may wind up settling in at a higher weight than you like, or higher than our society’s idealized BMI or weight range. 

Does this sound familiar? “I’m a huge proponent of never dieting again and eating intuitively, but I don’t want to do it if it means I might gain weight.”

This is NORMAL. You are normal. You are not wrong to want to stay or become thin. The world we live in values thin people - especially thin women - more than it values fat people. There is a lot of privilege to be gained by being thin, and a sometimes painful life of shame, stigma and oppression if you are fat. 

What right-thinking person would just automatically be OK with a fat body if they could be thin (and the rest of the world believes you could be thin if you just tried hard enough to do it)? 

Here’s the unvarnished truth: when you start the healing process away from lifelong restriction/binging and toward intuitive eating you might gain weight, you might lose weight, or your weight may stay about the same. There is no way to predict what will happen. 

My personal experience was that I gained weight, but not nearly as much as I thought I would given the sheer volume of food I was eating. I still wear all the clothes I owned when I started this work four years ago. I’m out of the initial re-feeding phase of intuitive eating (basically, the phase when you eat all the things that used to be binge foods to get out of the scarcity/restriction mindset that causes binges), and my body has been the same size for three years now. 

I know other people who lose weight because they started their intuitive eating journey after a long phase of binge eating (after a severe period of restriction), so they started out a little bit above their setpoint range.

And of course there are people whose bodies stay exactly the same size.

The thing is, intuitive eating is not a way to get or stay thin. It is a way to stop binging and emotional eating, gain perspective on how much we can or cannot control our body size, and ultimately eat in an entirely weight-neutral,healthful, peaceful and normal way. It is a path to peace and self-love. 

Your body wants to be whatever it IS, and I’m here to guide you into alignment with your body (not the other way around).

What if being fat (any kind of fat - from a COVID-belly-roll to super-fat) is actually something that human beings cannot control beyond a limited set-point range that fluctuates with the seasons, age, health conditions and mobility?

What if the only known way to permanently alter our weight set-point range is to diet below our range, and then re-gain more than before we started the diet, increasing our set-point weight range permanently? 

If you think I’m making this stuff up, I wouldn’t blame you. I recommend reading up on the research. Here are some great resources.

If you don’t have time right now to read all the books and articles, or listen to all the podcasts, here’s a summary of what I’ve learned:

• Our bodies are healthiest and happiest if they stay around the same weight. This is why our body weight “plateaus” when we’re dieting. Your body really wants you to stay the same size, ideally, so it will work like hell to make you hungry enough to regain the weight you’ve lost (and even add a few bonus pounds to protect you from future diets). This is an evolutionary feature - not a bug. We are hardwired to prevent starvation.

• Food restriction is the root-cause of binging and emotional eating, and, ultimately incremental weight gain. If you want to stop “feeling crazy” around specific foods or food types, the fastest way to do that is to de-criminalize those foods. Actively un-restrict and you’ll be amazed how quickly those foods lose their luster.

• People who are technically ‘overweight’ according to the BMI scale actually live the longest.

• Emotional/mental restriction (just thinking foods are bad, but eating them anyway) keeps us eating outside of hunger/fullness cues - you don’t have to actually restrict your food intake to be in a mental state of restriction that tells your body to crave a lot of specific trigger foods. Healing from binging starts with letting go of actual restrictions AND mental restrictions/judgements.

• There is no known way to permanently lower your body weight -- 98% of people regain weight lost after 2-5 years, and ⅔ of those people wind up heavier than before they started their diet.

So, if Plan A is to diet your way to a body size that is below your personal set-point weight range-- and Plan A is statistically nearly impossible-- how do we get past our own internal biases to live in peace with whatever body we’ve been given? What is Plan B?

I would offer that Plan B could be to spend some time and effort re-programming yourself to accept your body as it is (and to see other people’s bodies for whatever they are), eat what you want to eat, pursue health (food, exercise, mental health, etc.) separately from the pursuit of weight loss (i.e., through a weight-neutral lens), and put your abundant intelligence, creativity and energy into literally anything else besides dieting.

With that said: you always have every right to continue to diet! You are not bad or wrong for dieting. It is completely understandable that you would choose to keep trying to get smaller - even if it’s just for 2-5 years’ worth of thin time. Or a class reunion. Or a wedding. Or an acting role. 

I do this work because I believe it’s important for everyone to understand that intentional weight loss and eventual weight regain carries risks: weight-cycling is very hard on our bodies (and slows our metabolism permanently), restricting food is mentally and emotionally all-consuming -- preventing you from focusing on literally anything else that may be important to you, and of course it can be expensive (buying new clothes for every body size, spending money on wellness products and diet programs/apps, etc). For me, it was enough to  know that I was just going to continue to regain the weight I’ve lost plus more. I just wanted to jump off that train to nowhere, once and for all.

I hope to help you make that leap too.