In the health and fitness world, you will hear people talking about “intuitive eating” all the time. It is a very vague term, as most people eat intuitively and they end up not getting the results they want. It is literally what the vast majority of people in the developed world are doing. They just eat based on their intuitions. 

 

Wikipedia says that “intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without recourse to conscious reasoning”, and that is how most people eat.

If I told you that your mechanic was using “intuitive mechanics” to fix your car, you would probably not trust that mechanic. If your doctor treated you based on their “intuitive medicine” principles, you (hopefully) would not trust that doctor.

 

So why are people promoting intuitive eating, when most people end up with poor health eating intuitively?

 

Well, when the health and fitness world discusses intuitive eating, they are really talking about eating in a less restrictive manner, while listening to the signals your body gives you. You are still using conscious reason to make choices, but you aren’t being extremely anal about tracking or hitting specific targets. This is important to understand, because when people discuss intuitive eating, they are usually discussing a variety of practices, that they are using on the back drop of having some really sound food habits in place, along with a good understanding of nutritional science.

 

So what they are selling, and what the average person thinks when they hear “intuitive eating” are often quite different. Those who are “intuitive eating”, are usually just practicing good food habits and occasionally allow themselves foods that they have a craving for. They are still setting their diet up in a way that allows them to be in and around the calories and macros they need to be at for their goals, and it isn’t just a free for all as some people assume.

 

But look, you aren’t here to hear a discussion about what is and is not intuitive eating, you are here so you can glean some insight into how you could alter your diet longer term. Because, lets be realistic here, most people simply do not want to be tracking calories and macros on an app for the rest of their life. So how do we get you to an “intuitive eating” diet?

 

The path that seems to be most effective, at least for the countless clients we have had the pleasure of working with is as follows:

 

Step 1: Use calorie and macro tracking to figure out the best diet patterns for you. You are using tracking to figure out how many calories you need to eat, how to hit your protein targets and to understand food better. Yes, you can produce body composition changes using this tool, but we want to look longer term and think about what we would do if the calorie and macro tracking app you used was to disappear.

 

Step 2: Actually create a diet paradigm when you are using calorie and macro tracking. What I mean by this is, don’t just haphazardly track your food, rather, learn the rough calorie and macro amounts in different foods. Create a rough framework for when you need to eat to ensure you feel energetic and well fuelled throughout the day. 

 

Step 3: Once you have cracked the code for what kind of diet works best for you, slowly start phasing out tracking. If you know roughly what 2000 calories looks like, you know how to structure your food each day to feel full and energetic, and you know how to hit your protein targets, actually tracking it all doesn’t really need to be done. You can just eye ball things and because of your bank of knowledge and good diet set up, you can if you are close to where you need to be with everything. You know how to make some good choices with food, and you just need to make them.

 

Generally, I just get people to go from every day tracking, to 3-4 times per week, and then to retrospective tracking 3-4 times per week (i.e. tracking their food at the end of the day and seeing how close they were to their targets) and then we just move that down to 1-2 times per week, and then we get to a stage where you just periodically use tracking to ensure you are still eating in and around where you think you should be. You may also use tracking when you are consuming a meal you don’t have any experience with (i.e. you are eating out).

 

Step 4: Congratulations, you are now eating intuitively!

 

That seems to be the most effective way of going about things for most people, but of course, it doesn’t work for everyone. We have multiple tools in our toolbox, but this method seems to be very effective for transitioning people onto a more intuitive way of eating, while still actually eating a well structured diet.

 

Now, the method may be easy on paper, but there is a lot that goes on in the background to actually get to that intuitive eating point. Most people mess up with step 1 and 2. They set up their diets terribly (calories too low and poor food choices) and then they don’t actually create a sustainable diet framework within the calorie and macro tracking set up.

 

But if you can crack those steps, you will be in a very good position to transition to a more sustainable and life long diet paradigm.

 

If you don’t know where to start with this stuff, you have a number of options. You can engage with all the free content we put out on the podcast and on social media. That is free, and you can get an awful lot of information from those sources. If you need further help, you can either book in for a consultation with one of the nutritionists on the team, or you could even get coaching. It depends on what level of help you actually need, which we are always free to discuss!