Is Intuitive Eating Healthy? Exploring the Evidence Behind the Anti-Diet Movement

Intuitive eating moves away from restrictive diets and focuses on listening to your body to guide your food choices. While it promises more sustainability than restrictive diets, a lingering question remains: is intuitive eating healthy?

The opposite of intuitive eating would be any kind of restrictive diet, which is often marked by “weight cycling,” or continuously gaining and losing weight. Weight cycling and yo-yo dieting are known to have detrimental effects on physical and mental health.^{[1], [2]} Many of us have experienced it first-hand, myself included, and intuitive eating offers solace from this struggle.

However, intuitive eating is complex, and though plenty of research supports it, some studies provide valid criticisms against it. To address the pivotal question, is intuitive eating healthy?, I dug through an array of clinical studies, unraveling the evidence that both champions and challenges intuitive eating. My aim is to present the evidence on both sides so that you can make your own informed decision.

What Is Intuitive Eating?

Intuitive eating encourages you to listen to your body and honor your natural hunger and fullness cues rather than strictly adhering to external diet rules. At its core, intuitive eating is about establishing a harmonious relationship with food, one that respects the body’s innate wisdom.

While diet culture labels different foods as “good” and “bad” — a mindset vividly illustrated by the popular book Eat This, Not That — intuitive eating seeks to break these constructs and view all foods neutrally. This helps reduce the psychological toll of constantly straddling the line between feeling good for “eating well” and feeling guilty for “eating bad.”^[3]

While the phrase ‘intuitive eating’ was popularized by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch in their book Intuitive Eating, my personal introduction to this concept was actually Geneen Roth’s book Women, Food, & God. No matter who you turn to, the message is clear: eating exactly what appeals to you when you’re hungry and stopping when you’re full is the surest path towards reaching your natural weight.

Of course, this is an oversimplification as there are entire books on the topic, but that’s the high-level proverbial nutshell. Instead of restricting foods, intuitive eating allows all foods and encourages participants to focus on listening to their bodies.

To some people, however, intuitive eating seems too good to be true, begging the question, is intuitive eating healthy? Let’s dig into some common points of skepticism.

What Sparks Concerns About the Health Implications of Intuitive Eating?

Intuitive eating encourages a profound shift from away from traditional dieting, which places many foods off-limits, and instead encourages permission to eat whatever foods sound appealing. As you can imagine, this paradigm shift often raises concerns and skepticism.

Here are some of the most common apprehensions people have about intuitive eating:

• Does intuitive eating promotes unhealthy food choices? While intuitive eating technically gives free rein to indulge in “junk food,” does that make the program unhealthy? In reality, the absence of forbidden foods reduces the allure and subsequent overeating associated with restrictive diets.^[4]

• Will intuitive eating leads to constant eating? Some people worry that without structured meal times or portion sizes, intuitive eating will lead to non-stop eating. However, one of the tenets of intuitive eating is honoring your body’s fullness, which contradicts this concern.

• Can intuitive eating help with weight loss? Many people worry that intuitive eating won’t help with weight management goals, and I don’t blame them. Too many intuitive eating coaches forbid the desire to lose weight (which I discuss later on) which contradicts one of intuitive eating’s goals of alleviating guilt.

• Is intuitive eating healthy if it ignores nutritional guidelines? Intuitive eating aligns with nutritional well-being by encouraging you to explore how different foods make you feel and how they contribute to your health. It’s called gentle nutrition, which embraces that all foods can fit into a balanced diet, and it’s one of the core tenets of intuitive eating.

In the following section, we’ll delve deeper into how intuitive eating effectively addresses these concerns, backed by clinical evidence. Before we dive in, I have a quick distinction that I’d like to make.

Within my practice as an eating psychology coach, my ideology overlaps with intuitive eating but is distinctly different. Intuitive eating places a greater emphasis on self-care and gentle nutrition while I place a much greater emphasis on eating psychology and spirituality (aka, my philosophy, Psycho-Spiritual Wellness).

Is Intuitive Eating Healthy? Looking at Clinical Studies

Plenty of clinical evidence supports the benefits of intuitive eating as it improves both mental and physical health. However, some research stands against intuitive eating, so it’s important to consider all sides when answering the question, is intuitive eating healthy? I am not going to try to convince you either way. Rather, I’m simply going to prevent all the evidence I found so that you can decide for yourself.

Here are five themes that emerged from the clinical evidence surrounding intuitive eating:

1. Intuitive Eaters Consume More Fruits and Vegetables Than Dieters