10 Principles of Intuitive Eating
Reprinted with permission from:
Tribole E and Resch E. Intuitive Eating, 2nd ed. (1995, 2003), NY:NY.
www.IntuitiveEating.org
1. Reject the Diet Mentality. Throw out the diet books and magazine articles that offer you false
hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently. Get angry at the lies that have led you to feel
as if you were a failure every time a new diet stopped working and you gained back all of the
weight. If you allow even one small hope to linger that a new and better diet might be lurking around
the corner, it will prevent you from being free to rediscover Intuitive Eating.
2. Honor Your Hunger. Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates.
Otherwise you can trigger a primal drive to overeat. Once you reach the moment of excessive
hunger, all intentions of moderate, conscious eating are fleeting and irrelevant. Learning to honor
this first biological signal sets the stage for re-building trust with yourself and food.
3. Make Peace with Food. Call a truce, stop the food fight! Give yourself unconditional permission
to eat. If you tell yourself that you can't or shouldn't have a particular food, it can lead to intense
feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings and, often, bingeing When you finally
“give-in” to your forbidden food, eating will be experienced with such intensity, it usually results in
Last Supper overeating, and overwhelming guilt.
4. Challenge the Food Police. Scream a loud "NO" to thoughts in your head that declare you're
"good" for eating under 1000 calories or "bad" because you ate a piece of chocolate cake. The Food
Police monitor the unreasonable rules that dieting has created . The police station is housed deep in
your psyche, and its loud speaker shouts negative barbs, hopeless phrases, and guilt-provoking
indictments. Chasing the Food Police away is a critical step in returning to Intuitive Eating.
5. Respect Your Fullness. Listen for the body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry.
Observe the signs that show that you're comfortably full. Pause in the middle of a meal or food and
ask yourself how the food tastes, and what is your current fullness level?
6. Discover the Satisfaction Factor. The Japanese have the wisdom to promote pleasure as one of
their goals of healthy living In our fury to be thin and healthy, we often overlook one of the most
basic gifts of existence--the pleasure and satisfaction that can be found in the eating experience.
When you eat what you really want, in an environment that is inviting and conducive, the pleasure
you derive will be a powerful force in helping you feel satisfied and content. By providing this
experience for yourself, you will find that it takes much less food to decide you've had "enough".
7. Honor Your Feelings Without Using Food. Find ways to comfort, nurture, distract, and resolve
your issues without using food. Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, anger are emotions we all experience
throughout life. Each has its own trigger, and each has its own appeasement. Food won't fix any of
these feelings. It may comfort for the short term, distract from the pain, or even numb you into a
food hangover. But food won't solve the problem. If anything, eating for an emotional hunger will
