Can You Lose Weight Eating Intuitively?

Hola amigos! Welcome back!

Can you lose weight eating intuitively? The answer may surprise you. Eating intuitively is a transformation out of dieting into eating in a way that helps you feel good. If you are seeking weight loss, you will benefit from this close look into intuitive eating.

Highlights of this episode:

• Defining Intuitive Eating
• Weight Stigma
• Problems with Weight Loss
• Weight and Chronic Conditions
• Intuitive Eating and Weight

Episode Show Notes: 

Warning: if you are in an eating disorder or body image recovery journey and are triggered by conservations of weight loss, obesity, overweight and fat stereotypes, please feel free skip this episode.

[02:19] The Intuitive Eating Approach

Intuitive eating is a gentle nutrition approach that Orozco Nutrition uses for individualized nutrition services. In our free discovery calls, we let potential clients know that we do not focus on intentional weight loss. With intuitive eating, our clients report a relief from guilt and less baggage. This helps them feel good about themselves and the stress can free them up to enjoy life more. Then, a life event triggers them into a desire to lose weight. Then, our clients want to know, can you lose weight eating intuitively?

The advice to lose weight is everywhere for every chronic condition. Did you know that people in a large body are often misdiagnosed due to their weight? That is not right. That is scary.

Intuitive eating is a weight inclusive approach is a step away from weight and looks at other factors contributing to health. With dieting, many people are often not honoring their body’s individual nutritional needs. Intuitive eating considers a person’s relationship with food.

Intuitive Eating Principles

The intuitive eating book provides 10 principles to guide healthy eating behaviors.

1. Reject the Diet Mentality
2. Honor Your Hunger
3. Make Peace with Food
4. Challenge the Food Police
5. Discover the Satisfaction Factor
6. Feel Your Fullness
7. Cope with Emotions with Kindness
8. Respect Your Body
9. Movement
10. Honor Your Health

Intuitive eating is not a rejection of healthy behaviors and it is also not a diet for weight loss. It’s not a diet at all. It is also not only about hunger and fullness cues either. Intuitive eating builds interoceptive awareness skills that connects you to your body and mind. With practice, you can build a positive relationship with food and your body. This is a transformation from dieting to what feels good.

[10:02] Can You Lose Weight Eating Intuitively?

What if we told you that weight is less of a health issue than a mental issue? Social constructs have erroneously decided that people with more fat are gluttonous and lazy. This message is so loud, that people in larger bodies even believe these traits apply to themselves. So, if society thinks so, and you think that about yourself, this is external and internal weight stigma. This stigma is absolutely harmful to health. If you think you struggle with weight stigma, we highly recommend seeking help from a weight-inclusive healthcare provider. If you are asking, Can you lose weight eating intuitively? – it is time to explore why you desire weight loss.

There are more and more examples of people in large bodies coming forward out of the background and into the foreground showing all of us that weight is not the issue:  Lizzo, Jessie Diaz-Herrera, Mirna Valerio,  and many others. And we love it. It’s proof that health exists in a variety of bodies.

[13:59] What About Losing Weight for Chronic Conditions?

When client’s ask, Can you lose weight eating intuitively? They are concerned about their health. You do not need to lose weight if you have a chronic condition or want to prevent a chronic condition. We know that you probably have heard the opposite. We encourage challenging this assumption. However, the scientific community has never, ever, never, found causality with weight and disease. Weight alone does not cause diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure, acid reflux, digestive issues, sleep apnea, depression, joint problems, etc., etc.

Now, there are correlational studies showing a link between chronic conditions and weight, sure. Before you say, aha! Keep reading. First, research may be an echo chamber and is not free from human bias. Second, there’s a lot of funding in dieting programs and only some in weight loss research, which may skew results. Third, benefits of weight loss programs show little benefits.

Weight loss programs have been criticized for a long time. In 2011, there was a review that is considered a cornerstone for evaluating research for weight loss efficacy.

Evaluating the Evidence

“Current guidelines recommend that “overweight” and “obese” individuals lose weight through engaging in lifestyle modification involving diet, exercise and other behavior change. This approach reliably induces short term weight loss, but the majority of individuals are unable to maintain weight loss over the long term and do not achieve the putative benefits of improved morbidity and mortality. Concern has arisen that this weight focus is not only ineffective at producing thinner, healthier bodies, but may also have unintended consequences, contributing to food and body preoccupation, repeated cycles of weight loss and regain, distraction from other personal health goals and wider health determinants, reduced self-esteem, eating disorders, other health decrement, and weight stigmatization and discrimination…

…when socioeconomic and other risk factors are controlled for, obesity is not a significant risk factor for mortality; and… for those 55 or older, both overweight and obesity confer a significant decreased risk of mortality…

…Most prospective observational studies suggest that weight loss increases the risk of premature death among obese individuals, even when the weight loss is intentional and the studies are well controlled with regard to known confounding factors, including hazardous behavior and underlying diseases”

(Bacon, L., Aphramor, L. Weight Science: Evaluating the Evidence for a Paradigm Shift. Nutr J 10, 9 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1186/1475-2891-10-9)

The bottom line – body fat is way more complicated that it is presented in the media and in most public health campaigns.

Weight loss studies have methodology flaws which compromise the results.

“Three common challenges to this methodology are (1) very high attrition [drop out rate] of participants, (2) very little weight lost in any treatment condition, and (3) weight regain at follow-up.”

(Rothblum, E. D. (2018). Slim chance for permanent weight loss. Archives of Scientific Psychology, 6(1), 63-69. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/arc0000043)

Diets that are commercially available, known as fad diets, are not well studied for effectiveness long term or safety.

[25:49] The Problem with Weight Loss Programs

Weight loss programs promote weight stigma. They sell a short-term solution. They sell starvation and restriction which may lead to disordered eating patterns or eating disorders. This is an issue that is missed in healthcare. Physicians often do not see people in large bodies as someone with an eating disorder.

In our thin privileged society, weight loss is pursued because women mostly want to be thin, men want to be lean. But why do individuals want this? Many of our clients feel the need to belong and strongly believe that is through a thin body. And unfortunately, there are communities and networks of people who do alienate people in large bodies. If someone is fat, there is a strong sense that the person is wrong somehow. This is an othering mindset in mainstream Western culture. In healthcare, a person in a thin body with high blood pressure would be advised to check in on sleep, mental health, and stress. A person in a large body with high blood pressure is told to lose weight.

[30:09] Intuitive Eating and Weight Loss

Weight loss is full of problems, including damaging someone’s relationship with food. Food is essential, how can it be an enemy?  When clients ask, Can you lose weight eating intuitively? The answer is…that’s not the point. Building a positive relationship with food is counter-productive with a weight loss goal. However, since weight is more of a belief problem, not a health problem, we still talk about weight with our clients and leave space for it. Yet, we believe that what is going to really help our client’s health is gentle nutrition and a secure relationship with food, which is part of the intuitive eating approach.

It’s confusing out there. The diet and wellness industry is co-opting intuitive eating terms. They parade around with terms like healthy lifestyle and encourage less emotional eating. Well, we believe that people do not eat like zombies. Eating is emotional. That is different that eating to cope on a consistent basis.

The bottom line is that intuitive eating may change your body. Your body may experience weight loss, or weight gain, or no changes at all. Because intuitive eating is not about weight. It’s about your health. We look at the nuances of individual health.

Your podcast host, David, does not have the lived experience of a large body. He does not want to dismiss anyone’s concerns and because of those concerns, we provide free education about body weight and health.

Did you know that there are many cultures that uphold fat as beautiful and beneficial?  Places in Africa, South America, and Indonesian to name a few. So, what is contributing to poor health? Genetics, the environment, and social determinants of health have more of an impact than weight. Blaming individuals for large bodies is damaging, othering, and not how we help anyone’s health.  Even if you force your body to not eat, you may be great at it for years, however, the binge that follows is as natural as gasping for air when you are holding your breath. Your body and biology won’t take the dieting abuse forever.

[38:39] Intuitive Eating with One Small Bite

The One Small Bite approach uses intuitive eating principles with an approach of 4 traits for a positive relationship to food.

First, have self-compassion. If you have dieted in the past, think about your experience. What does work for you, really? How do we define something working well?

Second, curiosity – consider the long-term effects of dieting snake oil. Notice that intuitive eating makes no empty promises.

Third, give commitment and consistency to an evidence-based approach for sustainable healthy living. We have cited many articles in the shownotes, and this is the icing on this cake. In a 2014 review, it summarizes the evidence of why the weight normative approach is harmful and a weight inclusive approach is helpful.

Approaches to Health:

“…the weight normative approach rests on the assumption that weight and disease are related in a linear fashion, with disease and weight increasing in tandem. A weight inclusive approach rests on the assumption that everybody is capable of achieving health and well-being independent of weight, given access to non-stigmatizing health care…

…Weight is not viewed as a behavior, but eating nutritious food when hungry, ceasing to eat when full, and engaging in pleasurable (and thus more sustainable) exercise are self-care behaviors that can be made more accessible for people…

“Prescribing weight loss carries the risk of adverse outcomes for adherents and lacks evidence for sustainability over time, potentially setting many patients on a path of weight cycling..

…despite the widely held belief within the medical community and general population that a higher body mass index (BMI) causes poor health, data do not (and cannot) support this link. The risk for mortality is highest for people with BMIs < 18.5 (underweight) and BMIs > 35 (obese II), but lowest for people with BMIs 25 to <30 (overweight), and the risk of those with BMIs 18.5 to <25 (average weight) and BMIs 30 to 35 (obese I) is comparable to and falls between the other groups…”

(Tracy L. Tylka, Rachel A. Annunziato, Deb Burgard, Sigrún Daníelsdóttir, Ellen Shuman, Chad Davis, Rachel M. Calogero, “The Weight-Inclusive versus Weight-Normative Approach to Health: Evaluating the Evidence for Prioritizing Well-Being over Weight Loss”, Journal of Obesity, vol. 2014, Article ID 983495, 18 pages, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1155/2014/983495)

The bottom line – intuitive eating is a weight inclusive approach that promotes health more than the weight normative approach. Despite the name, intuitive eating, for some, this may not be intuitive at first. It’s messy and not easy to unlearn diet culture. But we do it because we believe in the importance of weight inclusive healthcare. And you don’t have to do this alone!

Stay Tuned! Next week: Be Nourished interview!

Resources:

Get Your Copy of the book – One Small Bite: Anti-Diet Stories that Empower You To Build a Positive and Secure Relationship with Food

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Starts July 12, 2022. There’s an early bird special. Classes are on Zoom, so no travel necessary. Read about it here: https://orozconutrition.com/courses/

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Chop the diet mentality; Fuel Your Body; and Nourish Your Soul!