Congratulations on picking up this workbook. You may be sick of dieting, with all of its rules and stipulations. You may feel overwhelmed by dieting’s promises, which give no lasting return. You may be tired of being preoccupied with food, as it consumes your valuable time and zaps your energy. You may be frustrated with hating your body, always feeling that you are fighting against it. You may desire an alternative way of relating to food, eating, and your body, one that is characterized by kindness rather than criticism. You want help. Or perhaps you know someone struggling with these issues, and you want to help him or her.
With the Intuitive Eating Workbook, by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, you will be working toward freedom from these issues. You will learn about how to cultivate a healthy relationship with food and your body. This will give you satisfying eating experiences, self-compassion, enhanced well-being, and respect for your body and mind.
Tribole and Resch are the ideal people to take you on this journey. They created Intuitive Eating, defined as a flexible style of eating in which you largely follow your internal sensations of hunger and satiety to gauge when to eat, what to eat, and when to stop eating. Following Intuitive Eating builds trust in your body. To be clear, Intuitive Eating is a process of relearning instincts we once knew. We are born Intuitive Eaters, but cultural messages to diet and lose weight often infiltrate our minds and sway us away from listening to our bodies. Thus, Intuitive Eating stands in contrast to dieting, which entails rigidly using external rules to determine when, what, and how much to eat. Following dieting plans erodes trust in your body.
Tribole and Resch successfully created the ten principles of Intuitive Eating to facilitate the healing of their clients’ problematic relationships with food and their bodies. The authors published their first book on Intuitive Eating in 1995, and later editions, which included updated information and new chapters, appeared in 2003 and 2012. There is also an audiobook, released in 2009, which is not a verbatim reading of the book, but a discussion format with guided practices for all of the Intuitive Eating principles. I read their first volume in 2001, when I was a graduate student in counseling psychology and intern at a college counseling center. I used the ten principles to help my clients adopt a more adaptive relationship with food and their bodies. Once I witnessed Intuitive Eating’s benefits in clinical settings, I wanted to conduct research on it to answer an important question. Is Intuitive Eating adaptive for us all?
To find an answer, I created a scale to assess Intuitive Eating and validated it with college and community samples of women and men. From this research, we have learned that Intuitive Eating is associated with a whole host of benefits, including enhanced satisfaction with life, self-compassion, self-esteem, optimism, and body appreciation. Intuitive eating also is associated with lower markers of distress, such as disordered eating, food preoccupation, food-related anxiety, body dissatisfaction, binge eating, uncontrolled eating, and depression. Although weight loss is not the goal of Intuitive Eating, research has found that it is also related to a lower body fat percentage and a lower body mass index. To date, over sixty articles tout its advantages. There you have it—there is a large and growing research base that supports Intuitive Eating as beneficial for your mind, body, and soul.
Within this workbook, Tribole and Resch explain the fundamentals of why Intuitive Eating will move you toward enhanced well-being, while dieting will move you in the opposite direction. When doing so, they integrate up-to-date research that justifies the inclusion of each principle. Yet Tribole and Resch don’t stop there. They lead you through a series of thoughtful activities and reflections that cultivate each of the ten principles of Intuitive Eating. Underlying these principles is the nurturing of attunement—the ability to be in touch with what is going on in your body—and honoring your body through engaging in self-care and self-compassion. As Tribole and Resch emphasize, these principles are meant to be practiced regularly, and the activities in this workbook provide innovative and practical ways to achieve this goal. The authors also help you identify factors that disrupt attunement and self-care, thereby usurping Intuitive Eating, and they help you to generate strategies to move past these disruptions. Thus, this workbook serves as a valuable tool for how to implement the ten principles of Intuitive Eating within your daily life.
—Tracy L. Tylka, PhD, FAED
Department of Psychology
The Ohio State University
Fellow, Academy for Eating Disorders
Associate Editor, Body Image: An International Journal of Research