Intuitive Eating Gone Wrong with Leah Kern, RD
Intuitive eating has become a hot topic in the media. I’m glad it’s become popular, but that comes with a danger… diet culture has adopted intuitive eating for its own purposes.
So, as people who actually want to heal our relationship with food and not subscribe to diet culture, how do we approach intuitive eating? During this week’s episode, we discussed just that.
This episode is with my dear friend, Leah Kern. Leah is an anti-diet dietician. She’s an RD and a certified intuitive eating counselor. Her practice specializes in helping people heal their relationship with food using intuitive eating. Read on to see some of the topics we discussed, and be sure to check out the full episode to hear her insightful takes!
Listen to the Episode Now
Basics of Intuitive Eating
There are 10 principles of intuitive eating (more resources on that at Leah Kern’s website, linked at the end) but the very, very basic idea is this: intuitive eating is about rejecting the outside world’s rules, and instead learning to tune into your body’s cues – its cues of hunger, fullness, tiredness, etc.
Intuitive eating came from such a beautiful place – no diets and no rules – however, unfortunately, the diet culture is powerful (and smart, and sneaky), and they’ve hopped onto the train of intuitive eating. They may call it other things, like “intuitive eating for weight loss” or “intuitive fasting” – but the truth is that they are just trying to sell another diet.
What to avoid to follow Intuitive Eating
So what do you do if you’re trying to follow intuitive eating, but don’t want to get sucked into diet culture? Essentially, you have to be able to spot a diet in disguise. Anything that is outside of yourself that you are being told to use to govern your eating decisions is a diet.
An exception would be if you are working with a dietitian to help create a meal plan for recovery. This usually happens in the beginning of your journey when your goal is making sure you’re eating enough and you’re eating consistently. You will probably have guidelines and structure to your meal plan. You’ll also likely have challenges you and your team deliberately set up that don’t feel “intuitive” at all. The biggest difference between this and a diet is that this is temporary. The goal for this plan is to help you get to a place where you can (if applicable, medically rehabilitate/weight restore and eventually) rely on your body’s cues of hunger and fullness – not to lose weight.
Be wary of any plan that tries to govern your use of food in order to lose weight.
Gentle Nutrition
This one can get tricky, especially if you follow this principle without the other 9. Therefore, it is probably best to introduce gentle nutrition when you feel secure in the other principles of Intuitive Eating. From there, it’s important to note that gentle nutrition is nutrition from a place of self-care, not self-control. It’s eating for the way you want to feel in your body versus the way you want to look in your body.
Leah talks gentle nutrition through the framework of Rachel Hartley’s nutrition hierarchy: adequacy, balance, variety, and individual foods.
For more on this, check out Rachael Hartley’s book, Gentle Nutrition (linked at the end).
Movement
Leah notes that so much of approaching exercise through an intuitive eating framework comes down to intention. If your intention is to manipulate the size or shape of your body – with words like burn, sculpt, or tone – then that is not intuitive eating.
However, if your intention is to decrease anxiety, boost mood, get better sleep, and so on… those are all in line with intuitive eating.
This is just the start of what we talked about – don’t miss our full conversation. Download the episode now!
Tweetable Quotes
“Gentle Nutrition is nutrition from a place of self-care, not self-control.” – Leah Kern, RD
“There’s 10 principles of intuitive eating. Could you get benefits from using just some of the principles? Sure, but there really is this synergy that combines to create the power of intuitive eating.” – Leah Kern, RD
“A lot of my niche is really taking someone from surviving to thriving.” – Leah Kern, RD
“I think that’s the key – that this is not an overnight process and anyone who sells it to you that way is trying to sell a diet.” – Rachelle Heinemann
Resources:
Leah Kern’s Website - free resources and coaching