This post on Andrea Amador's Juicy Woman blog mentions that in her findings as a coach and as an experimenter of the intuitive eating process, "if you haven't worked out your emotional issues and if you still have clouds hanging over your life, Intuitive Eating will not work for you."
Andrea goes on to say that you may find yourself feeling hungry when you're actually not, in order to fulfill the emotional needs through food still. Whilst I can see how this may happen, I still believe that you are better working though your emotional issues alongside an intuitive eating approach rather than a dieting one, because the impact of this, when those issues rear their head pushing your head into the fridge, is far less when you have got foods legalised and you don't end up bingeing out of deprivation as WELL as the emotional hunger!
The key I think, if you're feeling desperate to move from dieting but know you have emotional issues attached to food, is to accept that you may not be ready to lose weight with intuitive eating, but you are ready to work through the issues whilst freeing yourself up from the confines that diet-mentality brings.
I've been feeling more stable than ever around my eating, weight and approach to food lately. I feel like I've totally accepted where I'm at with weight, and rarely now snack between meals to feed anything other than hunger, but I know with a diet the issues I did have around food would remain blurred, in terms of what is there as a result of the dieting, a what is there from deeper psychological roots.
When you ditch the diet, the only option really is intuitive eating - what else is there? So I would say that it is better to work through your head crap while maintaining this approach as best you can, rather than to continue to control and lose control on a diet.
I totally agree with you, and also with Andrea Amador. All our food issues are linked to psychological issues, and we need to work on BOTH, at the same time if at all possible. And yes, I think, too, that since IE is what we're aiming for in a normal, psychological-problems-free life anyway, we might as well ditch the diets NOW and do our best with IE. One day, it will all fall into place and IE will not be such an effort any more. Whereas diets are ALWAYS a conscious effort. Now that my self-esteem is normal (as opposed to rock-bottom) and now that I've worked through all my REAL problems (not my weight, no my fat, not my body shape), I don't eat for any other reasons than 'I'm hungry!' (Well, there IS the occasional slip-up, but it is rarer and rarer.) If this could happen to me, then I'm absolutely convinced that it is true for everyone else. I was so desperate so many times in the past 15 years, I can't believe I'm nearly free of all these problems. If I can do it, I'm sure anybody can. But the psychological/emotional issues definitely need to be sorted out, otherwise IE will never really work in the long term. You have to have a high self-esteem in order not to care about what people think about your weight and why you're putting on so many pounds. And you can only have a high self-esteem if you work through the psychological issues.
Posted by: not hungry but... | August 21, 2007 at 10:29 AM
NHB - your comment about dieting being a conscious effort and IE falling into place really resonates with me. Now, the idea of consciously planning my meals and calculating what I'll eat seems so alien to me, and it is only almost 12 months since I stopped dieting. I still do eat when I'm not hungry, but not often, and if I do I'm happy to make that choice and not berate myself for it nor control what I eat at the next meal because of it.
Thanks for commenting!
Posted by: Andrea Wren | August 21, 2007 at 06:00 PM