DITCH THE LABELS
Good and bad feelings can be eliminated from food by practising ‘intuitive eating,’
Nadine Collison has been battling her weight since childhood, trying every diet out there from Weight Watchers to Dr. Bernstein. Then two years ago, she adopted a different approach — known as intuitive eating.
And now she’s enjoying a healthy active lifestyle and has stopped obsessing over food all the time.
She let go of her desire to lose weight, stopped stepping on the scale and allowed herself to eat when she was hungry AND stopping when she was full — a concept that sounds easy enough, but was surprisingly difficult.
“At the beginning, it was really hard to listen to my body,” said the Victoria, B.C., resident.
“It was really hard to identify true hunger and real fullness because I had spent so many years dieting and ignoring hunger signals.”
Collison, 44, removed “good” and “bad” labels from food, giving herself permission to eat formerly “forbidden” foods such as brownies and ice cream.
After learning more about intuitive eating, she also worked to eliminate feelings of being “good” or “bad” based on how much, or what, she ate.
The principles of intuitive eating were popularized by American dieticians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch.
First developed in1995, recent acceptance around body positivity and awareness of the negative mental health effects of dieting have brought it into the forefront.
Lisa Melo, a Burlington-based registered dietitian, studied under Tribole to become a certified intuitive eating counsellor. Melo uses a non-restrictive, non-dieting approach by helping clients work through their thoughts and feelings related to what they eat.
Studies show that restrictive weight loss programs are not sustainable in the long term. A study by the Institute of Medicine in Washington D.C. found that Americans who participated in weight loss programs to lose 10 per cent of their body weight regained two-thirds of the weight lost within one year. Within five years, almost all of the weight lost was regained.
Since yo-yo dieting can lead to negative health outcomes, such as lower muscle mass and reduced strength, in addition to higher rates of stress, Melo takes the focus off weight and onto intuitive eating.
Intuitive eaters may gain or lose some weight initially but eventually weight tends to stabilize, Melo said. Weight manipulation isn’t a goal of intuitive eating, she added. People get benefits from improving “their relationship with food in a way that they won’t be thinking about it all the time, they won’t feel guilty about it.”
When working with new clients, one of Melo’s first steps is to encourage unrestrictive eating. It can be counterintuitive for those who struggle with their eating habits.
“This can be really scary because it’s not something that we are used to hearing,” Melo said.
“Some people say, ‘Oh my goodness, but if I start eating ice cream, I won’t stop.’ ” While some might end up eating more of a desired food in the first few weeks, with time, their consumption normalizes, she said.
“A restriction is usually what is causing the ‘itch’ or a feeling of being out of control around food,” Melo said. Eliminating it gets rid of “the appeal of being a forbidden food.”
Collison experienced this when she first adopted intuitive eating. When Two-Bite Brownies were a “forbidden” food, she would binge on them after her kids went to bed.
“Before intuitive eating, I wouldn’t have felt safe having those in the house,” Collison said.
But after adopting an intuitive eating lifestyle, she can purchase Costco-sized packs of Two-Bite Brownies without fear of losing control.
“To be able to have brownies just sitting there innocently in my house, that’s a huge deal,” she said. “I’m good after (eating) two.”
Dr. David Jenkins, a professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences and Medicine at the University of Toronto and a staff physician at St. Michael’s Hospital, is open to experimentation with intuitive eating principles for people who haven’t had success through traditional diets. But he still believes there is value to diet restriction.
“I think there’s no harm in giving intuitive eating a try,” he said. But “one size doesn’t necessarily fit all.”
Results or successes of intuitive eating can differ depending on one’s genetic makeup or the way they’ve been “trained” to eat. For those wanting to try intuitive eating, Jenkins advises consulting a family doctor or a dietitian first.
Melo encourages lifelong dieters to start out eating three meals a day without prolonged periods of fasting, in addition to removing restrictions all the while keeping in mind that normalizing eating habits can take time.
“It’s not something that we do in a week or a month. It’s an ongoing process,” she said.
Given lifelong pressures to achieve or maintain a smaller figure, detaching the concept of weight loss from general health and well-being can be another challenge for past dieters. But Collison recognizes there’s more to health than how much she weighs.
“I do weightlifting, I hike, I’ve got a good heart rate, good blood pressure,” Collison said. “I can piggyback my 70-pound child up the stairs.”
Collison enjoys being active now because it’s for reasons other than weight loss. “I don’t feel compelled to do it so I can earn more points in WW or work off a big meal,” she said. “I work out because it feels good. I like being strong and fit.”
For Collison, letting go of the desire to lose weight is a worthwhile tradeoff for abandoning a lifestyle of obsession over food.