My Intuitive Eating Journey: How Intuitive Eating Saved Me From An Eating Disorder
by Guest Author Annie Skopeliti
Let me introduce myself....
I am a former disordered eating sufferer and diet addict who has been enlightened by Intuitive Eating. If you are reading this, you may still have some reservations about the so-called “anti-diet.” If you are searching for some honest feedback to decide whether Intuitive Eating is worth your trust, this is the article for you!
I have been in those muddy waters too. Wondering whether Intuitive Eating was yet another fad diet covered in glorious packaging or a practical solution to my binge eating problem. I will not keep you on the edge of your seat. It has indeed helped me recover.
Just so that we are all on the same page, check out this article: “What is Intuitive Eating?”. In a few words, it is the science-backed eating philosophy of eating whatever you want whenever you want it. It has its foundation on 10 principles. The 10 principles of Intuitive Eating are:
Reject the Diet Mentality
Honour Your Hunger
Make Peace with Food
Challenge the Food Police
Discover the Satisfaction Factor
Feel Your Fullness
Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness
Respect Your Body
Movement—Feel the Difference
Honour Your Health—Gentle Nutrition
Source: https://www.intuitive eating.org
All is good in theory, but do these principles have an actual application? No recovery story is all sunshine and butterflies.
If you want to learn the ups and downs of my Intuitive Eating Journey, then stick with me.
The beginning: What led you to Intuitive Eating?
I have read somewhere that Intuitive Eating is just eating. It is the sort of eating we used to do as kids. We ate what felt right whenever we were hungry and to the point of comfortable fullness. So, in the end, Intuitive Eating is what remains if you remove all the conditioning, diet rules, and restrictions. Instead of eating intuitively from childhood to now, I only returned to it after a period of a severely distorted relationship with food.
I cannot talk about my disordered eating recovery unless I talk about the situations that led me to seek a way to recover. My story begins with none other than a diet. I started dieting at 19 during the lockdown in my country. I wanted to shed the extra kilos I had gained during a stressful exam period. I stumbled upon Intermittent Fasting and the not-so-well-researched research that backs it up. My med-student mind felt comfortable with it. I thought that since I ate “whatever” I wanted (of course, I ate no carbs), it wasn’t restrictive at all. I was also very active for the first time after a long period and was feeling very well overall. The society promotes diets and losing “extra kilos” as a reward to ourselves. Therefore, I felt like I treated myself.
I indeed reached my goal that first time. Then, my life underwent multiple changes, and in the meantime, I experienced a drop in my mental health. My weight and appearance slowly became a way to compare my body with others. Have you noticed that whenever you want to get something, that is the only thing you notice around? I went from wanting a healthy body to craving a thin body. So, I continued dieting, and my goal weight kept dropping lower and lower.
Almost half a year into dieting, I started combining intermittent fasting with calorie restriction. Around the same time, I started binge eating occasionally. I gradually started over-restriction and exercising to balance the “damage” done by overeating. Long story short, this continued for almost a year. In the end, to put my binge eating under control, I consulted a dietician to lose that final weight I couldn’t shake off (because my body had gone into self-rescue mode). The irony here is that they agreed! The application of even more severe restrictions made things far worse. I needed a solution that wasn’t more pressure and control on my diet…
The Discovery: How did you find out about Intuitive Eating?
I consider myself lucky because, during the entire year, I was very well aware that I was harming myself. I was also seeing a therapist, but I just couldn’t convince myself to stop. After one and a half years of dieting, the thing that tired me the most was not the physical hunger (and oh boy, was I hungry…). It was the misery of not being able to live a normal life, to live only to think about food. Finally (and thankfully!), I had a severe binge-eating incident, and in a lucid moment, I realized I would never be happy if I went on like this.
That night, I tried to find a binge eating disorder treatment that wasn’t dieting… I googled “ways to recover from an eating disorder” because asking for help seemed very final to me at the time. I found many hypocritic articles, but some advice stood out from the rest. I stumbled upon something called Intuitive Eating. I researched it extensively and discovered dieticians who preached about it and a lot of recovery stories.
I had enough sense of self-preservation to go “all-in”. I held onto it for dear life. I wanted to feel happy again so badly that I was prepared to gain weight. I tried not to think too hard about the outcome and the possibility of failure or relapse.
The first baby steps: What happened in the first period of Intuitive Eating?
Intuitive Eating is a leap of faith. Especially if you have been dieting for a long time, your metabolism is probably low, and the weight gain, at least in the beginning, is unavoidable. Furthermore, you cannot predict how much you will gain and whether you will go down again. You cannot know whether you will like what you will see in the mirror. Intuitive Eating, however, is not a diet plan. It is an entire philosophy that requires a lot of mental and psychological preparation. That is where the 10 principles help!
Reject the Diet Mentality
The first one is one of the hardest to achieve. My way of rejecting the diet mentality was getting angry at it. I held it partially accountable for my misery. I furiously deleted all the dieting accounts from Instagram and cursed at every insulting article about restriction that popped up in my recommendations.
2. Honour Your Hunger
Refeeding yourself or honoring your hunger is also a tough one. When you are used to calorie restriction, you are familiar with the feeling of hunger. You treat hunger like a feat or achievement. Your self-worth is sometimes dictated by managing to not eat when hungry. You probably have also lost your hunger and satiety cues. Meaning you might be no longer able to tell when you want to eat and when to stop eating.
At first, I was eating a huuuge amount of food. I couldn’t possibly imagine I could ever eat so much. Thinking back at it now, I recognize that my starving body was trying to stock up on healthy reserves again. I lost my calorie-counting equipment and ate however much my body needed. And it was blissfully satisfying both physically and psychologically.
3. Make Peace with Food
Sugar is bad, Carbs make you fat, Eat your vegetables. Years and years of conditioning have probably made you categorize food as “good” or “bad”. But food is just food and eating the food you like is just a food choice that doesn’t dictate your self-worth.
In the beginning, except for eating funnily large amounts, I also ate whatever and whenever. I “forced” myself to eat the things I wanted despite the hateful inner dialogue. I tried my best to push away the negative thoughts. Instead, I contemplated how eating the food I liked made me feel. I will never forget the happiness I experienced when I hit the store for the first time after starting Intuitive Eating. I was like a child hopping from aisle to aisle, buying things I thought I would never eat again.
4. Challenge the Food Police
Who are the Food Police? In my experience, EVERYONE is the food police. Your aunt that has just started dieting, your Instagram, yourself… The way I coped with people and thoughts that doubted my methods of recovery was by learning as much as I could about Intuitive Eating and then preaching about it.
5+6. Discover the Satisfaction Factor and Feel your Fullness
“Life is too short to eat just to not be hungry”. Wise words from someone I don’t know. Food is undoubtedly your fuel, but it is also a great pleasure. Eating the things to enjoy should NOT be confused with emotional eating. Identifying the tastes you like and the amount of food your body needs to be satisfied demands mindfulness.
It took me some time to reach the point of not eating to uncomfortable fullness. You need to trust the process. Your body recovers from the shock of starvation and tries to feel safe in the new eating regime. Also, your mind needs to understand that food will continue to be at your disposal.
7+8. Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness and Respect Your Body
The Intuitive Eating Journey will be a very fluid period when multiple things will unavoidably change. Your mentality will change, your body will probably change, your habits will not be the same, etc. Treat yourself with kindness and accept whatever comes your way.
I gained all the weight I had lost and some more in just a month. I thought I would be terrified, but instead, I was happier than ever. Getting out of the misery of prolonged dieting and being able to restore my relationship with food gave me a crucial psychological boost. I saw myself as beautiful as never before! I realized that no matter how much weight I lost, I would NEVER be happy with my appearance because I was not in a good place mentally.
9+10. Movement—Feel the Difference and Honor Your Health—Gentle Nutrition
Before finding Intuitive Eating, I used to hit the gym for some exhausting cardio to “get rid of the fat”. After finding peace with my food, I felt no need to do the exercise I didn’t like. I moved my body whenever I felt like it, which was rarely, to be honest. I was also eager to try forms of exercise I was curious about, without caring how many calories I would burn.
Regarding the part of Gentle Nutrition, there is a significant reason it comes last. A mind trained to diet mentality is susceptible to relapse in the slight application of something that resembles restriction. I was hardwired to diet, and I knew I would find “Gentle Nutrition” as an excuse to run back into the comfortable arms of dieting. It took consistent and mindful reminders to NOT incorporate “nutrition advice” unless I felt ready.
I proudly tell you that it took me a year to put on my plate a green salad. Because I honestly resented it and “forced” myself to not eat it just because “it was healthy”. I only allowed myself to eat it when I truly craved it for the first time.
Conclusion: What happens now?
A few months back, I celebrated a year from saying no to dieting culture and embracing the anti-diet culture, a.k.a. Intuitive Eating.
Some of you may care to know about the Intuitive Eating results on my body, and it is okay. The truth is that my weight has gone down to where it had been before I ever started dieting. However, I haven’t done anything that could result in weight loss. I am just living my life as usual. I don’t know what will happen in the future but honestly, I don’t mind at all.
You will realize that when fad diet rules are off your shoulder and you have restored a healthy relationship with food and your body, eating becomes a very natural process in your life. Intuitive Eating is just something you do without putting much thought into it. Of course, in the beginning, you make each step after great consideration. But, leaving behind all the overthinking around food is also a part of the healing process. Just to think, I had to revise the 10 principles of intuitive Eating to write this article!
I wish you good luck in your Intuitive Eating Journey. Whatever your reasons for wanting to heal, I hope you find what feels good. Remember, enjoy your life and food!
Thank you Annie for sharing your personal story with us, it is so important to have an insider’s perspective - we hope to inspire as many of you reading this to take the leap of faith in your recovery and journey into finding your ideal relationship with food. It’s worth it, we promise!
If you would like help beating disordered eating habits or binge eating and emotional overeating in particular, I offer private therapy sessions online or in my practice in Dorset. If you are interested, click the button below to get started - I can’t wait to meet you!
