By Lily Thrope, LCSW and Chelsea Levy, MS, RD, CDN
Nourish and Thrive: A Guide to Intuitive Eating, Disrupting Diet Culture and Joyful Movement
By Lily Thrope, LCSW and Chelsea Levy, MS, RD, CDN
If you have ever felt exhausted by the constant noise around food, your body, and what you are supposed to be doing with both, you are not alone. Diet culture is loud and persistent, especially recently. Diet culture tells the same boring story, that your body is a problem, that food is a moral test, and that discipline is the path to feeling health and feeling happy in your own skin.
We have learned the value of a few key things to help dismantle this storytelling and become empowered in your body. We believe that shifting this script in this way can help you pursue your own health and wellness.
Between us, we bring a therapist and a dietitian’s perspective to this work. What we have both found, in our practices and in our own lives, is that healing the relationship with food and the body is less about learning the right “rules” and more about unlearning the ones that have harmed you. This post is a starting point for raising awareness around your relationship with your body and food.
What Is Intuitive Eating?
Intuitive eating is one of the most misrepresented frameworks in the wellness space right now. It has been co-opted by influencers, flattened into a permission slip to eat whatever you want, and sometimes used as a rebranded diet in disguise. As Certified Intuitive Eating Counselors, we want to set the record straight.
This is the best definition of intuitive eating which can be found on the website “Intuitive Eating is a self-care eating framework, which integrates instinct, emotion, and rational thought.”
Intuitive eating was originally developed by dietitians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch and is grounded in ten core principles that guide people back to a relationship with food that is built on internal cues rather than external rules. It is not a diet and is also not a free-for-all. For so many, they have received messages externally about what is “right” and what is “wrong” for their bodies. IE helps you reconnect to your inner wisdom and sort through your relationship to not only hunger and fullness but also to the emotional/relational aspects of food. Food can represent joy, community, culture and so much more.
We love to use intuitive eating as a starting self care framework to understand and support clients in their relationship with food and body.
The Ten Principles of Intuitive Eating
- Rejecting Diet Culture
Diet culture is not one specific diet or program. It is a system of beliefs that assigns moral value to food and body size, equates thinness with health and worth, and profits from making people believe they are perpetually not enough.
It is in the weight loss ads that interrupt your favorite shows. It is in the “wellness” content that is just restriction with better branding. It is in the comment your well-meaning relative makes at a family dinner. It is in the way a doctor looks at a chart before looking at a person.
Disrupting it starts with recognition. You cannot push back against something you cannot see. Learning to name diet culture when you encounter it, in media, in conversation, in your own internal monologue, is the first step toward having a different relationship with it.
Notice the language you use about food. Words like clean, cheat, guilty pleasure, and bad are diet culture language. They are so normalized that most people do not notice them. Noticing is enough to begin.
Audit your media environment. The accounts you follow, the shows you watch, and the content you consume shape your beliefs about bodies more than most people realize. Unfollowing accounts that make you feel worse about yourself is not avoidance, it is an act of self-preservation.
Get curious about the beliefs you have inherited. Most of the rules we carry about food and bodies were handed to us before we were old enough to question them. Therapy and nutrition counseling are two spaces where those inherited beliefs can be examined and renegotiated.
2. Honor your Hunger
In wellness culture, hunger has become somewhat of an enemy. Hunger is simply the bodies biological signal for fuel. Ignoring this cue can cause chaos in your relationship to food. Learning to listen to hunger and honor it by eating can prevent feelings of deprivation that could lead to uncontrollable cravings.
3. Make Peace with Food
Food does not have moral value. Eating a salad does not make you a good person. Eating a slice of cake does not make you a bad one. The moment food becomes tied to your worth, eating becomes a test you are always either passing or failing. Intuitive eating works to dismantle that equation entirely.
4. Challenge the food police
You know that little voice in your head that is constantly running a log of what you do and what you eat? That is your inner food police, judging every choice you make. Being able to challenge these rules and figure out if you actually believe them or if they have been there so long you didn’t even notice them. Working on your relationship with food you can figure out what food thoughts are genuinely yours, like your preferences and which ones are arbitrary rules you have held onto. One of the most common fears people have about intuitive eating is that without rules, everything will fall apart. In reality, unconditional permission to eat tends to reduce the obsessive thinking around food rather than increase it. When nothing is forbidden, the urgency around forbidden foods tends to quiet down.
5. Feel your Fullness
Fullness is information, just like hunger is information. Learning to notice, respect and understand fullness and satiety cues is a skill. Like any skill it takes practice without self-judgment. One of the main skills here is interoception, the ability to notice internal cues. This is something that we work with many of our clients on.
6. Discover the satisfaction factor
Food is joy, food is flavor, food is celebration. Food can be so much more than fuel. Allowing food to be satisfying and enjoyable is a huge part of letting go of diet culture norms. In diet culture food is something to be feared. Food can represent emotions, it can represent celebration, it can represent culture, all more important than letting it stay stuck in fear mode.
7. Cope with your emotions with kindness
This is one of Lily’s favorite principles and also one of the most misunderstood parts of intuitive eating. Learning to cope with emotions and recognize emotions is a huge part of your relationship to food. If food is your only resource for managing emotions, it is important to work on building other coping mechanisms. Food can always be a tool, and is there, but it doesn’t have to be the only one. Emotions that are not coped with can wreak havoc on your life and part of the IE journey is developing skills from a self compassionate place to deal with emotions.
8. Respect your body
Deep respect and acceptance for your body are key to dismantling diet culture. Diet culture predicates on your body being a problem, something to solve, change and chasing the ideal is never ending. This principle helps you accept the genetic component of your body while also rejecting the unrealistic standards that are set for bodies. Returning to your internal dialogue will be important here.
9. Movement- feel the difference
Even the shift from the language exercise to movement feels important here. We advocate for finding types of movement that feel joyful to you. Movement that does not shame or set limits on what you can do. Cleaning your house can be movement, playing with your toddler, or dancing like no one is watching. Your relationship with your body is key and finding a respectful joyful way to move will be so helpful.
Movement, like food, has been co-opted by diet culture. Exercise has been reframed as compensation, as earning, as a way to manage the body’s appearance rather than a way to be present and celebrate the self.
Joyful movement is the practice of moving in ways that feel good to your body rather than ways that punish it or produce a specific outcome. It is a radical concept in a culture that has reduced movement to compensatory math.
For some people in eating disorder recovery, taking a break from movement completely might be necessary.
The motivation behind movement can shift from “how many calories will this burn,” to “how does this feel in my body and mind.” Instead of choosing the workout that produces the most visible results, the question becomes “what kind of movement do I actually want to do today.”
For some people, joyful movement is a morning walk. For others it is dancing in their kitchen, cleaning their house, swimming, cycling, playing with their toddler strength training, or gardening to just name a few. The type of movement is less important than the relationship to it. Movement that is driven by punishment, anxiety, or compensatory thinking is not joyful movement regardless of what it looks like from the outside.
Compulsive exercise can serve a purpose of avoidance with emotions. In nutrition counseling and therapy clients can work through this avoidance and understand disordered behaviors around food or exercise. Building a more celebratory relationship with the body where you can access exercise and food choices from a place of respect and care. Shifting the focus from the body being a problem to solve to something to care for is a huge part of this principle. As we move joyfully we can take care of our body from a place of respect.
10. Honor your health with gentle nutrition
In both of our clinical experiences we have seen consistently that people do not lack willpower around food. They lack safety. Intuitive eating is one of the best ways to learn about your relationship to food and build that safety. Health is such a complex word and has been so misused in diet culture and society. We conceptualize health as an individual thing. A combination of mental health, physical health and social health. Figuring out what health means to you and pursuing that is what a dietitian can directly help you work on. Nutrition is still an important part of how we care for our bodies and since IE is a compassionate self care framework to eating, nutrition is a big part of that. Not in the typical ways you might know from diet culture, but from a more intuitive and caring place.
A Note on Where to Start
If you are reading this and recognizing something in your own relationship with food, your body, or movement, that recognition matters. You do not have to have a clinical diagnosis to deserve support. If you have been experiencing distress in your relationship with food or your body you deserve support.
The National Association of Anorexia and Associated Disorders (ANAD) offers a helpline, a provider directory, recovery mentors, and free online support groups.
Healing the relationship with food and your body is possible. It is not linear. It is often slower than people expect. It is one of the most meaningful things a person can do for their quality of life.
Your body was never the problem. The story you were told about it was.
Lily Thrope, LCSW, is a licensed clinical social worker, certified intuitive eating counselor, and founder of Thrope Therapy LCSW PLLC, a group eating disorder practice in Midtown Manhattan. Chelsea Levy, MS, RD, CDN, is a registered dietitian, certified intuitive eating counselor, and founder of Chelsea Levy Nutrition. Together they co-host the Recovery Supper Club, a free monthly community dinner for adults in eating disorder recovery in New York City.
