Eat what you want and get the body you love

No forbidden foods, no portion control. Sounds too good to be true? A health revolution, backed by solid science, claims you really can . . .

To most of us, bombarded by the diet and wellness culture, the idea that the healthiest way of eating is to follow your instincts and scoff exactly what you want, when you want it, sounds, frankly, too good to be true.

In an era of superfoods, carb restriction and endless finger-wagging over dairy, sugar and meat, ditching the forbidden list and instead embracing it all — mashed potatoes, biscuits, pasta, bread, whatever you fancy — feels positively sacrilegious. And mildly terrifying.

But that’s the basis of Intuitive Eating, the craze hailed for its body-positive message, currently sweeping the smartest kitchens and most fashionable Instagram accounts from California to Chelsea.

Described last month by U.s. Vogue as ‘a countermovement to the restrictive diets, fasting trends and other dubious self-improvement strategies so many of

us are committed to’, Intuitive Eating has exploded in popularity over the past 12 months. London even has its own Centre for Intuitive Eating to train nutritionists and clients.

In fact, it’s not a new movement. This year, it celebrates its 25th birthday. The term was first coined in the book Intuitive Eating, A Revolutionary Program That Works, by dietitian Evelyn Tribole, now 60, and nutritional therapist Elyse Resch, 74, who describes her Beverly Hills practice as overrun with new patients.

A new edition of the book is being published in June to coincide with the wave of fresh interest.

But why the revival now? Both women cite a backlash against the idea of the perfect female body.

‘I think the #MeToo movement has had a huge impact,’ says Elyse. ‘Women are tired of being told their value is based on their size or shape, and they’re tired of not enjoying their food.

‘One of the greatest pleasures in life is to feel satisfied after eating something wonderful. If you’re constantly worried about your health or your body, you just can’t experience that.’

A former teacher, Elyse struggled with endless dieting and binge-eating in her 20s and 30s — ‘it was probably a fully-fledged eating disorder’ — before retraining as a nutritionist and learning to love food.

Meanwhile, Evelyn was a distance runner, on the fringes of the U.S. Olympic team in the mid-1980s when women were first allowed to run the marathon. ‘I was never a chronic dieter,’ she says. ‘I hung out with the boys.’

But her mother was a diet obsessive. ‘When she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer at the age of 64, I remember her telling me how much she regretted wasting all those years dieting, worried about her size,’ says Evelyn.

Their favourite foods now are chocolate (Evelyn) and pasta (Elyse), but because they are ‘in tune’ with their hunger — the cornerstone of Intuitive Eating — they’re very much a normal weight, or the weight they’re genetically disposed to be, as they describe it.

‘Since the original book was published, 125 studies have been done on our methods, and they all conclude it’s really something that works,’ says Evelyn.

‘Now we have this social upheaval among women who want to eat for energy and health. It’s an incredibly exciting moment.’

Here, evelyn Tribole and elyse resch reveal the secrets to Intuitive eating in an extract from their life-changing book...

YES YOU CAN EAT ANYTHING!

IN A world of ever-multiplying and often contradictory dietary rules, Intuitive Eating seems like such a radical message. Ditching those rules can feel scary. Most of the clients we see at our nutritional practices are weary of endless dieting and yet terrified of eating ‘the wrong thing’.

But Intuitive Eating changes that mindset completely.

All those fad diets lead only to weight stigma, deprivation, rebellion and rebound weight gain.

When you eat according to your inner hunger and satiety signals and make peace with food, you let go of guilt. You eat in a way that ceases to be a struggle and boosts the health of mind and body. Intuitive Eating teaches you how to trust yourself again.

Yes, you can eat anything! When you allow yourself to eat all foods, a choice for chocolate becomes emotionally equal to a choice for a peach. It means your food choices do not reflect your character or morality. Intuitive Eating will not only change your relationship with food; it may change your life.

We do, of course, understand that initial sense of fear. Often it comes from an overpowering anxiety that, if you’re ‘allowed’ to eat anything, you won’t stop eating a favourite ‘forbidden’ food. Perhaps you are afraid that if chips and chocolate aren’t on the bad-for-you list, you’ll eat them all day long.

But, trust us, when you know that previously forbidden foods are unconditionally allowed, the urgency to have large quantities of them eventually dissipates. At first people often eat larger amounts of foods they’ve previously restricted and they may eat them more often, but that phase doesn’t last long.

Ironically, once you truly know you can eat whatever you want, the intensity to eat greatly diminishes.

Intuitive Eating means ditching the tyranny of the diet. Forget about will-power or obedience or rules! Ditch the scales, too. When you march in tune to your body, you’ll be relying on your internal signals rather than on external factors and authority figures, whom you’re bound to defy.

We’re nutritionists, but in the beginning we don’t focus on nutrition, because it interferes with the process of learning how to become an Intuitive Eater. Or re-learning it —the majority of us are born with an instinctive connection to the sense of hunger and fullness; we just lose it as a result of our endless obsession with diet and food.

Is this nutrition heresy? No. In case after case, once clients have made their peace with food, we find they end up balancing their intake to include mostly nutritious foods.

The last thing we want is for nutrition to become another mechanism to make you feel bad about the way you eat; instead, once you embrace

Intuitive Eating, it becomes a path to feeling as physically good as you can.

Many people use BMI (Body Mass Index) to determine weight categories, but that is a profoundly flawed metric, not least because muscle weighs more than fat.

Instead we use the concept of genetically-determined weight.

This is the weight your body will maintain with normal/intuitive eating and normal exercise.

The problem with most of the people we see is that their eating relationship is not normal, due to years of dieting. But remember — this is not a diet. Start by taking the quiz, above, to see what areas you need to work on first.