Trust Your INSTINCTS

If you want the donut, eat the donut. Is diet culture finally dead?

To understand just how broken the American relationship is to healthy, reasonable eating, consider the recent interest in “intuitive eating,” a no-diet diet based on the radical idea that one should eat when hungry and then stop when full.

The notion of intuitive eating was first proposed in 1995, in a book by that same name by registered dietitians Elyse Resch and Evelyn Tribole. They were disturbed even then at the ascendancy of eating disorders in the culture and the onslaught of ideas marketed to people about how best to care for their bodies and themselves.

Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach is currently in its fourth printing, spurred by a recent surge in popularity as its disciples have been turning up here and there—Jessica Knoll wrote about it in a New York Times op-ed called “Smash the Wellness Industry,” for example —but I suspect its popularity has to do with the increasing number of people who are just exhausted by the hamster wheel of diet trends. Really, if anything