Losing It: Gut Instinct

at the fridge because sometimes that helps me. When I don't have an immediate craving, something might pop out at me. And it did. Sahitas, Yes, do we have tortilla? Yes we do. Victoria find some salsa too. In the video, she microwaves the food, eating some chips and salsa off the kitchen counter. As she waits, she's clearly enjoying it, closing her eyes after a bite and nodding vigorously after

eating another chip. She even does a little dance. And then her food is ready and she sits down to eat. This is divine. That first bite is hitting. She eats another chip, then goes back to her fahita. Then she takes a brief break, saying that she feels like she's been moving too quickly. Where's going to slow it down? Get back too mindful. It's like moment by moment she's paying attention to her body, how the food tastes, but

also whether she's still hungry. I'm getting to a point now where I'm like kind of full, but I'm not totally done eating, so just trying to determine when I'll be done, and sure enough, once she's full, she says, she stops. All of this is part of intuitive eating, which is about healing people's relationships with food. Intuitive eaters say that the way we eat has been screwed up

by diets and all the various rules about food. The diets teach people that were so focused on calorie counts that we can't actually tell what our bodies need anymore. TikTok is full of these kinds of videos, people like Victoria talking about what they eat in a day and how they go about eating. Some of the videos are just about eating in ways that aren't about dieting, about having dessert and carbs, the kinds of things. Lots of diets say are off limits, but also eating healthy stuff

like oatmeal or an apple. Think about the last time you eat something. What made you eat those things? Was it lunchtime or were you just getting hungry? And what made you choose that particular food. Did you crave that thing specifically or maybe you chose it because you felt like you should like it was the healthy choice. And then when did you stop eating? Did you finish your full plate or just some of it and you were done? Were you full? Did you feel satisfied? These are the

kinds of questions at the core of intuitive eating. The movement was started by two dietitians in THEES. This is a lease rush one of those dietitians. You want to be aware of your instincts. You want to be aware of what emotions might pull you away from your natural instincts, and you want to be able to use your caring, self compassionate, loving, cognitive part of your brain to help you find a way to eat the nourishes you and gives you spatisfaction. That all sounds great, don't get me wrong,

but what does that actually mean? Intuitive eating? Yes, gives you the freedom to choose whatever it's going to satisfy you. Also takes into consideration how does your body feel based on your on your choice of eating. Like a last just said, intuitive eating is eating what satisfies you, eating in ways that make you feel good. Some people would call it regular old eating. Eating when you're hungry and

stopping when you're satisfied. Sounds easy enough, right, But intuitive eating exists because we can't just eat, or at least many people can't. There's no way around it. We've just gotten so screwed up about eating. Intuitive eating advocates say that's why people need to relearn how to eat. They say that our bodies don't need rules because we naturally know when and what we should be eating. M or our bodies knew at least we knew when we were babies.

We cried when we were hungry and stopped after we were fed. That's the intuition that we have to relearn. So what changed? Why don't we know anymore? Well, you can blame diets, and intuitive eating does blame diets. Deprivation always leads to seeking what you can't have, and diets are depriving. You know, culture dominated by diets. This is a pretty radical idea. Is intunivating. The solution, Yes, is intunivating, the remedy, the healing that comes from deprivation, and a

sense of lack of trust in oneself. Yes, we are constantly being told that eating fewer calories is not just good but even virtuous, That dieting will make you thinner, and losing weight means being healthier. But those things are actually totally wrong. That's what this whole series has been about. Our ideas about weight are messed up. Diets don't actually make most people thinner in the long term, and they probably aren't the best way to get healthier either. The

battle to lose weight it's actually a losing battle. And yet, in spite of all that, dieting still has a hold on us. We're just not always calling them diets anymore. We keep believing that being thinner is better, even though that's questionable. Intuitive eating sells itself as the solution to all this, as a fix for so many years of messed up ideas about food, weight, and health. It says the people have put their faith in diets and food restrictions for far too long, and that people should put

their faith in intuitive eating instead. Naturally, I was intrigued by this. Intuitive eating seemed to offer a way forward past dieting and into something new, But I was skeptical too. If there were no rules about eating, would people still eat in healthy ways? And what happens to their health, not to mention their weight. In our final episode, You're gonna come with me on a journey to Intuitive Eating University.

That's not actually a real place, but there are classes that teach people what intuitive eating is and how to put these ideas into practice, something that's a lot harder than it sounds. By the end of this episode, you may well be convinced that it's time to ditch dieting. But then we also have to ask does it work. I'm Bloomberg News health reporter. I'm a court and from the Prognosis podcast. This is Losing It. Welcome to your first day at Intuitive Eating University. Take a seat. I

hope you brought a notebook and the syllabus. Of course, let's go meet our instructor. I found her on where Else TikTok. My name is Sammy Prevett and I am a registered dietitian, certified Intuitive Eating counselor, certified personal trainer and the founder of Fine Food Freedom. She also offers online classes like the one we're taking. Intuitive eating has been around for nearly thirty years, but it's become incredibly

big in the era of social media. It's also taken off at a time when more people are fed up with diets. Intuitive eating very explicitly defines itself as anti diet. According to TikTok, videos with the hashtag intuitive eating have gotten more than a billion views. Some of those are Sammy's videos. Sammy is thirty one, peppy, and has blonde hair. She makes these really accessible videos about intuitive eating. Intuitive

Eating Breakfast Edition. Here you will see I have one of my two because I already ate the other one. Frozen waffles covered with peanut, butter, cheese, seeds, livered almonds, raspberries, as well as topped with honey. Sammy will give viewers tips and little exercises to do, like challenging them to eat a food they forbid themselves to have. She encourages people to feel free to eat in ways that diet culture forbids, and here to remind you, I think you

are allowed to eat ice cream whenever you want. I know, sounds crazy, right, Well, if you're like, no, no, no, no, I'm not Why write what diets have you been on that I've told you can only have ice cream at a certain time. Sammy has this very plain spoken way of talking that's appealing. You feel like she's talking too straight and probably because of that and other reasons will get into later. Sammy's TikTok's are pretty popular. She has

more than six hundred and fifty thousand followers. Sammy is one of the dietitians and certified Intuitive Eating counselor. Out of practice, she started called Find Food Freedom. They call themselves non diet Dietitians and they offer coaching along with the online classes I took to be a certified Intuitive Eating counselor, Sammy and others went through special training and even coaching by the founders of Intuitive Eating. Do you

want to understand what intuitive eating really is? This is Sammy teaching and Intuitive Eating training that I went to a little while ago. At first, I honestly wasn't sure what to expect. I figured though, that a lot of my attitudes about food were about to get challenged big time. Do you have a desire to find food freedom but are also feeling afraid to give up the pursuit of weight loss and don't really know how those interact together. Do you genuinely want to improve your health? Do you

want to understand how it impacts health? Have you been dieting for what seems your entire life? Do you have shame and guilt associated to body size? Do you feel uncomfortable or discomfort in your body? All? Right, now that we've met our instructor, it's syllabus time. Intuitive eating has ten core principles. We'll go over some of them today, like the first rule of intuitive eating, which is you do not talk about intuitive eating. Oh wait, that's fight club,

My bad. But actually the first principle of intuitive eating is to reject diets, specifically to reject the diet mentality. That means tossing the South Beach Diet book, getting angry about how when a diet didn't work you felt like it was your fault, un following social media accounts that make you feel bad, telling up how much time you've spent logging food in the new map, think about how many hours of your day are spent on the obsession

about food or body image. And I want you to think about what would you do with those hours, those minutes every single day, if you could get them back right, take it seriously, think about it, I for one, would be a lot better at some of my hobbies like pottery. During the training, it became clear just how much dieting takes over people's lives and how sad they were about it. They got really emotional. Sammy asked people how long they had been dieting for trapped in a cycle of weight

loss and weight regain. So let's look at some of these answers coming through years since I was twelve, ten years, my whole life over forty years, since high school thirty plus years. Then Sammy asked people what they thought would happen if they chose a different path, and they gave such hopeful answers. Here's Sammy reading those out from a chat in the online training. I would be the best version of myself. It would take away the guilt. I would not be thinking about food always right. I would

think I would feel free. Did you hear that last one? I think I would feel free to me? This reflects how constrained diets make a lot of people feel like they're running on some kind of treadmill. They can never get off. Rejecting diets means letting go of them in an abstract sort of way, rejecting new and paleo and whole thirty. But it also means rejecting diets in terms

of what you wanted them to do for you. No longer holding out hope that there's some new program that will work for you, no longer believing that you can change your diet, change your body, and change your life. In fact, along with rejecting diets, Intuitive eating asks people to also cut weight out of the equation. Stop worrying about your weight when you eat, even stop weighing yourself entirely.

The scale is just a false idle. That was a lease again, the co founder of Intuitive eating with self care, self compassion, tuning into hunger, fullness, and enjoyment satisfaction. Our bodies are going to be what they're going to be, and it's about learning how to be liberated from a belief that you have to change your body in order to be acceptable. Discomfort with diets is actually where intuitive eating first began back in the es. Remember how I

said earlier that Elise Rush is a dietitian. You can think of dietitians as food and nutrition experts. Many of them work in medical settings, including to help people lose weight. When Alice was first starting out, what you wanted was to work with kids living with developmental disabilities, but that didn't end up happening. Instead, doctors were sending patients to her for weight loss to help improve health metrics like blood pressure and blood sugar, and I wasn't interested in that.

Alice had previously struggled with an eating disorder, so she doesn't of doing this kind of work. Then she comes across some books that sparked a totally different way of thinking about eating and weight. One of them was a bestseller called Fat is a Feminist Issue. It was written by the psychotherapist Susie Orbach and is still known today as a classic anti diet book. The other book, called Overcoming over Eating, was also geared at helping people stop dieting.

Lease is intrigued by this idea of letting go of dieting and helping people trust themselves instead of depriving themselves, so she gets together with another similarly minded dietitian named Evelyn Tripoli, and they write a book. It's called Intuitive Eating, first published it's sold more than five hundred thousand copies to date. Back to our lesson plan, we were just talking about how the first principle of intuitive eating is

to reject the diet mentality check. The next principle is to honor your hunger a k a. Eating when you're hungry. Like I mentioned earlier, that doesn't sound like it should be so hard, but remember we've absorbed all these rules about food from diets. Intuitive eating teaches that because of this, we have to rediscover things like hunger and fullness. First things first, how do you know that you're hungry? Your stomach growls, right, Maybe you feel a little sick, dizzy

or tired. And for that matter, how do you know you're full? You can actually feel it in your stomach. Right, Maybe you're not as interested in your meal anymore. Again, we're in class, so your homework assignment today is to track how hungry and full you are over the course of a day. This is actually an exercise Sammy private assigned in our classes together. As you're eating, think about enjoying your food. Are you able to savor it and

take pleasure in eating? Then, when you're finished, how does that fullness feel do you feel a little too full, does it feel pleasant? Or maybe you're not full at all and you need to eat more. But it's not enough to just tune into your bodily cues about eating,

Sammy take it away. To be able to listen to the body, to be able to be intentional and aware of hunger and fullness, we have to drop the guilt and shame associated with food because so often what will happen is people will want to listen to their hunger and fullness and satisfaction, but they can't even tap into that because there's so much noise going on in their heads saying you shouldn't be eating that, why are you eating? That,

you're such a bad person. I bet a lot of people listening right now have had these kinds of feelings about food. I know I have, But it's kind of crazy to think about because when you step back for a second, I'm sure you can see that you're not a bad person for eating a brownie, and you're not a good person because you had grilled vegetables at dinner.

And yet we get these kinds of messages all the time about food, which brings us to the third principle of intuitive eating, we have to make peace with food. Intuitive eating argues that the reason we overeat a k a binge is because of restrictions on food. Dieting has some form of restriction. We do that restriction as long as humanly possible, right until maybe we don't have access to food, or stressful life event comes up, or simply

we just can't do it anymore. And then we usually binge or feel out of control around the foods that were restricted. We say, see, this is why I have to be on a diet. I can't be trusted around X, Y or Z food. Right. This also aligns with how researchers think about scarcity, which is that it leads people to focus disproportionately on whatever is in short supply. If I'm trying to avoid sweets and there's a dispenser of chocolate covered almonds at work, I'm going to think about

them a lot. An Intuitive eating argues that I will at some point eat those chocolate covered almonds, and probably over eat them. Actually, you hit a breaking point where you say about that I would like some cars. By intuitive eatings, logic diets are actually creating the very issues they're trying to stop Okay, so learning how to intuitively eat means getting rid of food rules. Now, what does intuitive eating mean? Basically just having whatever you want to eat?

Sammy says that this is sort of a misconception because what you want might actually change once you let yourself have it. That's the idea. Anyway. Now, when we are going to big getting stages of our intuitive eating journey and trying to make peace with food, we do allow all foods and it will feel We call it a

couple different things. You might hear celebratory binge phase, honeymoon phase, where we're eating a lot of those fun foods or those playfoods, or those foods that were restricted for fifteen plus years. Sammy teaches that over time, you get used to it. Once you've given yourself permission, those foods may not seem as exciting anymore. When there are no good or bad foods, food is just food. You can have it when you want it. Any good college class wouldn't

be complete without a case study. So here's an example. A Lease Rush, one of the founders of intuitive eating, gave me. She had this one client who loved to eat grilled cheese sandwiches, but wouldn't let herself eat them. So I said, well, how about having grilled cheese every day for this coming week? Until I say it again, that's right, grilled cheese every day for a week, prescribed by none other than a dietitian. What do you think of that? If your reaction to that was really you're

probably not alone. It's worth thinking about why that was your reaction, Probably because it's really really hard to shape diet culture and the messages it sends. I'd also gently remind you that we're in coast today to learn to make peace with food. Remember, but you almost can't do that without principle four of intuitive eating, which is challenge the food police. That refers to the way diets have conditioned us to make all these moral judgments about food.

In this example, Elisa's client has been thinking of grilled cheese as bad even though she enjoys it. Maybe she's eating salads for lunch instead because salad is good. And who was telling her that exactly? Other people or some little voice inside herself. That voice is the food police, as I learned from Sammy's class. And you challenge the food police by letting food be neutral, cutting out all the moral judgments about it. So let's go back to Elsa's client, who has been told to live her best

grilled cheese life. What happened with that? She came in the next week and I said, how did it go? And she said, after about three days, I didn't want to look at any grilled cheese, and all I wanted was a salad. Imagine a world in which grilled cheese isn't bad and a salad isn't good. They're just foods.

They both fuel you, even if one of them is more nutritious, and you can choose the grilled cheese because you're going to enjoy it more without feeling like the size of your body means you need to make a different choice. Intuitive eating says this world doesn't have to live just in our imaginations, that it is entirely within reach. You might be wondering by now whether people gain weight when they intuitively eat, and the answer is yes, that

could happen. People could also lose weight, or their weight could stay the same. Anything could happen. It seems to me that the whole point is to take fear out of the equation, to not think of your weight changing as a consequence. Instead, the point is to develop a new relationship with food, to see it as both fuel for your body but also a source of enjoyment and pleasure, and also to develop a new relationship with your body.

Recognize that you may never be in as small a body as you would like to be, or as beauty ideals say you should be. You might look the way you look your whole life, and that would be okay, because intuitive eating says that people can be healthy no matter what they weigh. But I still couldn't help but think about healthy eating. If we could eat whatever we wanted, would we still make healthy choices? Elise and other intuitive

eating teachers say that we would. I think that's a big misconception that having that food available will lead you to only eating that food. If you're really listening to your body, you're not going to feel very well. If that's all you need, you might start craving a salad after a few days of eating grilled cheese sandwiches like

Alice's client. Alice says that making peace with food is emotionally healthier for us, and that when it comes to eating, mental health is as important, if not more important, than physical health. Intuitive eating also does teach people about nutrition, which they call gentle nutrition. It is the last principle of intuitive eating principle number ten, and was the final lesson of the course I took. Alice says that eventually you're not eating only so called bad foods or so

called good foods. You have a nice balance of many different kinds of foods so that you can feel good and get satisfied. And who doesn't want to feel good and get satisfied. Even before I started reporting this series, I have thought a lot about food and weight. They are incredibly thorny subjects. We get so many messages about them in society, especially as a woman. And also they

are completely unavoidable. You've got to eat, and no matter what, you're going to weigh something, so you're faced with countless fraud decisions each day about how to handle it. Intuitive eating seems like it could offer a solution. Listen to what your body needs. Let food be fuel and also a source of pleasure. Stop judging yourself for what you eat. You don't have to be thin to be healthy. In some utopian world where what you eat doesn't matter and

there's no baggage or judgment about food and weight. This is the way you might design things. It's very appealing. In other words, there's a clear draw. But in the real world you feel like you can't do that because if you eat chocolate cake when you want to eat chocolate cake, you worry about gaining weight and harming your health. Intuitive eating gives you permission to eat and think about your weight more on your own terms. Can you truly make peace with food and your body if it means

that you change the world around you? Doesn't? And that's not the only issue I ran into when I started digging deep into intuitive eating, Like, for example, there's the question of whether eating this way will actually make you healthier. First the good Calling food the enemy may sound melodramatic, but that is genuinely how it feels. Sometimes, Shifting to think about food as fuel and also a source of

pleasure felt pretty empowering to me. I began to ask questions about how hungry I was in a given moment, and why some kinds of foods felt off limits, whether I really needed to feel bad after eating chocolate as an afternoon snack. Also, until this, I hadn't realized how many diet foods I eat, even though I'm not on a diet, they just have this hold on me on lots of us. Really, when I see a hard boiled egg, I almost immediately remove the yolk before eating it. Why

diet culture? I buy race cakes as a snack. Why diet culture? Even the trend in recent years towards cauliflower versions of everything from pizza crusts to pasta's diet culture? Are we eating these things because we actually like them? Intuitive eating, to its credit, asks these kinds of questions, and it brings some important insights to the table. I'm talking about how dieting takes these things we rely on for life and twists them, turning them into bad things

like calories which fuel our bodies each day. And it's holbalism which takes those calories and uses them to keep us going. Yet we're afraid of having too many calories, and we blame our metabolism for being too slow. Not to mention, dieting makes us hate our actual bodies, which do so many things for us besides look great in a pair of pants, like breathe pump gallons of blood each day, he'll broken bones, fight off viruses. Intuitive eating points out how wrong it is to demonize the very

things keeping us alive. It also tries to take the judgment out of food, treating food choices with gentleness and understanding instead. No good or bad foods again, every offids are emotionally equivalent. This appealed a lot to me too. All this thinking inspired what I like to think of as the great chocolate covered almond experiment of Yes, for anyone who listened to episode one, we're talking nuts again. What can I say? I've actually been eating a lot

more since that episode. I hadn't realized before how rarely I eat them. We tend to think of nuts as high calorie foods, but studies have found that they actually have fewer calories than we thought. Of course, in the world of intuitive eating, that also shouldn't matter. Nuts aren't good or bad. They're just food, and you can eat them if you want to. Chocolate covered almonds are probably

my favorite, probably because of the chocolate part. We have them at work, and honestly I usually try to avoid them because I've been thinking of them as not the healthiest thing. Right, intuitive eating inspired me to buy chocolate covered almonds and bring them home. I ate them as an afternoon snack one day while watching TV. Another day in the evening, I even shared a few with my partner, and then the bag was done and I felt fine about it. The earth didn't chatter or anything, my pants

still fit, nothing really happened. I like treating the almonds like they weren't dangerous a threat to everything I hold near and dear, Like I could have them and it wouldn't really change anything. They were just chocolate covered almonds after all. Still, I wondered if I was really eating intuitively, was I doing it right? So I put the question to Sammy, the intuitive eating teacher. Kudos to you for that experiment, and you know, kind of digging deeper there.

Part of the reason I was second guessing myself so much with the chocolate almonds is that they seemed like maybe still a pretty healthy food at the end of the day, even if they were liberally doused in chocolate. I explained that to her. Was I still at the end of the day buying into diets in some way giving myself permission to eat but not too much permission?

Is there right or wrong food? Absolutely not. This is going to be different for every one, And what I would invite you to do is get curious about whether it's chocolate covered almonds, whether it was the chocolate part of the chocolate covered almonds. You know, what are the messages you've gotten around chocolate covered almonds? Sammy is saying, where did I get the idea that I can't eat the chocolate covered almonds? My guess is it's because of

the chocolate part. Sweet treats like this are completely villainized by our culture, even though depending on where you live, they're also kind of everywhere. As a result, I've kind of developed all these ideas about how often it's okay to eat these kinds of desserts and also at what times of the day self imposed rules that lead me to avoid chocolate covered almonds at work. She also said that what I experienced when I brought them into my

house is called food habituation. The big fear people here when they're like, Sammy, you don't understand if I have unconditional permission to eat I'm just going to eat chocolate covered almonds, pizza cake, cookie, ice cream, brownies, like all these foods for the rest of my life. But Sammy says, actually you won't. So what you did is you normalized

chocolate covered almonds. Right, You brought them into the home and said, I'm going to allow myself to eat these whenever I want, however much I want, and they're here and they're normal, and then by the end of the week you're like, you know, I'm kind of like good. The point isn't to like ruin chocolate covered almonds for myself and never have them again. The point is to stop being afraid of them by simply making them available. If diet rules have made them feel off limits, make

them neutral instead. The idea is pretty simple. If you're craving chocolate covered almonds, eat the chocolate covered almonds. But when I was talking about this with my editor Kristin V. Brown, she raised this interesting question. Here's she said, Can we really trust the food cues our body are sending us? Like, if you're stressed and eat a bunch of snacks, that's not because you're actually hungry, And there is a difference

between physical hunger and emotional hunger. In fact, our environment is pretty optimized to make us feel like we want to eat, even if it isn't actually lunchtime. We smell the fries being cooked, or see an enticing picture of a slice of cake in a store window. Scientists sometimes call things like this the obesogenic environment. It basically means the kinds of unhealthy environments that surround us each day. I asked Sarah Dowset, a psychologist who teaches an intuitive

eating class called Diet Culture Dropout, about that. She told me that we can eat the fries or a slice of cake. It's okay. Even if you don't feel so good afterwards. That feeling will pass and you can move on enjoying food and taking comfort in It is demonized by our society, but they actually shouldn't be. If food offers us comfort in a difficult time, maybe that's actually good, not bad. It happens, and it doesn't make you a bad person. Might do a behavior exercise where I ask

people to list five forbidden foods. I was just telling Sarah that I have a bit of a sweet tooth, so for you, it might be the chocolate and the cinnamon buns. And to get five helpings of those foods. So five sittings of those foods and allow yourself to eat them just for that, just for that one time, to take away the guilt, just to engage in the pure pleasure of eating those foods. It turns out that my chocolate covered on and experiment was pretty on point.

So okay, that's one part of intuitive eating, ditching diets and food rules along with them, trusting your body, actually enjoying your food instead of fearing it. And believe me, I can get on board with all this, especially after all we've learned about diets. But there's another part of intuitive eating too. Maybe you remember this from our lesson earlier. Intuitive eating means eating without worrying about your weight. I can appreciate the value of looking inwards and questioning why

you eat the way you do. Are you enjoying it? Is it serving you? But applying that knowledge moving forward as I live my life was harder than I thought it would be. Like does that mean no checking nutrition labels anymore? Or that you shouldn't choose foods just because they sound like healthier choices. And at the end of the day, healthy eating is important. I didn't want to lose track of that. All this, by the way, turns out to be something other people find challenging too, especially

letting go of the weight calculation. But at last, Rush, the Intuitive Eating co founder, we spoke with earlier says it's absolutely critical. That is a very difficult part of this. And as long as you're thinking about losing weight and you're not going to be able to start trusting your own body. In other words, diets and food rules make a lot of background noise, and as long as they're doing that, you can't listen to what your body is

really saying. Here's Sammy again, the entire your purpose of it is to bring back trust and connection with your body, so to quiet the external noise and rules of diet culture and to be able to turn inward and trust your body's cues. But there are limits to turning inward. As I took intuitive eating classes and experimented with not feeling guilty about eating chocolate covered almonds, I kept coming back to this one thought. Does such an idealistic way

of thinking and eating work in the real world. Like Sammy just said, intuitive eating means tuning out all of the pressures and messages of the world and just listening to your body. Is that even possible? The world that we live in is full of pressure to eat better and look thinner, But our world is also set up in a way that it's often hard to do these things,

especially when money, time, and other resources are limited. We live and work in places where it's hard to access nutrient dense foods and easy to access the opposite, where it's easy to drive but hard to walk, where long hours at the office and other obligations like taking care of your kids mean that healthy meals and exercise don't always fit into a day. We can try to quiet the external noise and rules of diet culture and listen to our bodies, but there is plenty of other noise

out there already guiding how we eat and live. In this way, intuitive eating seems a lot like dieting to me. The goals of intuitive eating are different from a diet, obviously, but its way of getting to that goal is sort of the same. Both tell us that it's on us to achieve whatever we want, while we'll sort of ignoring the realities of life. Both insist on individual change in the face of societal barriers. I don't know if we can do that, and I'm skeptical that our bodies naturally

know how to be healthy. I don't think that the biggest problem here is that we just haven't been listening to what our bodies are telling us. I wondered whether anyone had tried to answer that question. That brought me to Jatta Banasi, a researcher at Columbia. Jatta recently did an analysis with colleagues that looked at whether intuitive eating is actually linked with health benefits. Remember, lots of studies

usually focus on weight loss. They didn't do that. Instead, they were looking specifically at measures like blood pressure and regulation of blood sugar, but not a lot of studies had actually measured this, only about ten. There were some signs that intuitive eating could improve these kinds of health outcomes more than say, dieting, but that wasn't always the case. To say these interventions are really what we're looking for to promote the parameters is still difficult to to say

it's not possible at the current time. Seven of the ten studies they looked at found that intuitive eating was more effective than a control group dieting in improving cardio metabolic outcomes like glucose regulation, lipid profile, inflammatory markers, and blood pressure, but the results on those measures weren't consistent across studies. Like with glucose regulation, two studies found intuitive eating helped that more than the control group, while four

found no relative effect. So it's unclear weather intuitive eating leads to better physical health, but the results were way more clear when it comes to mental health. This kind of intervention can be used to promote a better relationship with food and body. Intuitive eating can help us feel better about eating and our bodies, but when it comes to our health, even though we have some promising signs, the science is very mixed. We just can't say right

now that intuitive eating makes us physically healthier. The relationship between the two is still to be determined. So keeping that in mind, what's the value of intuitive eating if it doesn't make you physically healthier, If it actually makes you physically unhealthier but you're in a better place mentally. I don't know the answer to that, but I think it's hard to have confidence in a system that can

only do so much for you. Feeling better about yourself is good, don't get me wrong, but it can only go so far, especially if physically you're not feeling all that good. There are things that we have to do for our health that aren't always gonna be something we want to do, and maybe harsh rules about what's good and what's bad have screwed us up, but I think sometimes people do need that, to be told to eat

your broccoli or get enough protein in your diet. Every day diets have definitely taken it way too far, but rules aren't always bad. People come to dieting to improve their health. Intuitive eating pitches itself as a better way forward, except we don't actually know that. People also come to dieting to change the way they look. Intuitive eating makes it pretty clear they can't do that for you. Changing how you look isn't the point. But even in this world,

the same beauty ideals are perpetuated. I saw that as I researched this episode, a lot of the prominent intuitive eating personalities look a certain way thin, white, blonde. Are people just following them because they want to look like them, because they hope intuitive eating will get them that body. How much of it is still about that elusive hope of losing weight at the end of the day, being white and thin cells. This is Delina Sodo, a registered

dietitian who's Dominican and lives in Philadelphia. Delina has brown, curly hair and a big, expressive smile. She's also thin herself and so when we see these big accounts, a lot of the time, I think that people are gravitated to them more because they fit that mold of what

the beauty standards that we have created are. She also sees this as a problem, although there's a lot of us trying to push back on that narrative, because again, intuitivating isn't eat like me, look like me, right, it's allowing yourself to um kind of like make peace with your body and fight that weight neutrality. Except weight neutrality isn't the norm today. There are all these really widely held societal beliefs that being thinner is not only healthier

but better. Weighing more can sometimes even feel like there is a moral judgment attached to it. The list of people who are still very focused on the scale includes doctors, family members, friends, co workers, and classmates. Intuitive eating says, you're just supposed to choose a different path and have different beliefs. But how do you do that throughout everything you've thought you knew and start all over again? Maybe the real question is what exactly are we trying to

accomplish here? Anyway, Dieting is trying to get people healthier by making their bodies smaller, and by this point we know that you can't really use dieting to make people's bodies smaller. Intuitive eating isn't trying to do that. Instead, it's about making people feel better about their bodies and how they eat, and it's based on the idea that

you don't have to be skinny to be healthy. But at the same time, intuitive eating isn't necessarily going to lead to better health, and even if you feel better about eating in your body, you still have to live in a world where thinner is treated as better. In that sense, intuitive eating only solves part of the problem. You can try to change the way you think about all this stuff, but you can't change how everyone thinks about it. So you can certainly try, and that'll make

it harder for you too to stay the course. Let me be clear, people have really messed up attitudes about food and people in bigger bodies. We can and should try to change that. But if it's just one person at a time, will it work. Maybe at some level these problems are unsolvable anyway. There's a reason people have turned to dieting for hundreds of years. It has this

irresistible pull. We're drawn to the idea that everything in our lives will be better, or if we just lost that stubborn weight, that getting skinnier will stop us from developing terrible sounding diseases or dying early. We want that for ourselves and the people we love. We all want to believe it's within our reach, but we can't actually guarantee any of it, that we won't develop terrible sounding

diseases or die early or anything else. And we can't guarantee weight loss either, even if we do all the right things. It would be great to send you away with this utopian new approach to eating that will solve all of our problems. But I'm not going to do that because giving you a simple answer to complex questions is exactly what diets have done for countless years, and the answer isn't eating. And even though intuitive eating brings some valuable new ideas to the table, probably not intuitive

eating either. I hope instead that you'll walk away thinking about change, how we can make it easier to be healthier, but also how we can be more inclusive and let people make their own decisions that freedom intuitive eating tries to bring to the process of eating. I think we could all benefit from that in ways that go far beyond our dinner plates. Losing It is written and reported

by me Emma Court. Kristin V. Brown is our editor, Magnus Hendrickson is our senior producer, Stacy Wong our associate producer, and Blake Maples is our audio engineer. Our theme was composed us and performed by Hannis Brown thanks to Francesca Leavy and Tim Annette. Be sure to subscribe to Prognosis if you haven't already, and if you like our show, please leave us a review that helps others find out about it. Thanks for listening, See you next season.