Honor your health with gentle nutrition is the 10th principle that creates the foundation for intuitive eating. Evelyn Tribole, co-author of Intuitive Eating, says “Make food choices that honor your health and taste buds, while making you feel physically pleasant. Remember that you don’t have to eat perfectly to be healthy. You will not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency or become unhealthy from one snack, one meal, or one day of eating. It’s what you eat consistently over time that matters. Progress, not perfection, is what counts.”
This is principal number 10 for a reason. Gentle nutrition should never be the first principle you dive in with when starting your intuitive eating journey. Before you start trying to learn about nutritional science and understand the roles of all the vitamins and minerals, it’s important that you first master intuitive eating principle number 3, making peace with food. Principle number 3 is dedicated to removing guilt and shame from the eating experience. Once you remove morality from food and are able to see food as neutral, then you can begin to make nutrition decisions with the intentions of honoring your health and allowing all foods in your diet.
Evelyn Tribole uses the “I love you” analogy to explain the neutral mindset that we want to create with food. If you have ever been in love before, think about the first time you were waiting to hear your partner say “I love you”. Maybe your hands were sweaty, your face turned bright red, or your heart was beating out of your chest. Now, if you’re still with that same partner and they say “I love you”, you don’t have that same physical response because you’ve heard it so many times before. We want to create this same neutrality with food.
When you eat a food that is forbidden, it’s like that first time of hearing “I love you”. You have an urgency to eat more of it because you don’t know if you’re going to have it again. We want all foods to get pulled off that pedestal. It’s not that we don’t want you to enjoy your favorite foods, but we want it to be just food.
Once you establish a place of neutrality with food, then you can start to explore what it would look like to incorporate more nutrient-dense foods into your diet. If you want to honor your health with gentle nutrition, choose nutrient-dense foods that you truly enjoy and satisfy you. There are some things that you can do to improve your physical health from a nutrition perspective, but it all comes back to your intentions behind the choices you make. If you are only eating a spinach salad because you want to shrink your body and lose X number of pounds, that intention is drastically different from the gentle nutrition principle.
If you want to learn more about how to incorporate gentle nutrition, check out my WTAF podcast episode titled: Everything You Need To Know About Gentle Nutrition where I continue this conversation with two other intuitive eating dietitians including Rachael Hartley, who wrote an entire book dedicated to gentle nutrition. In addition, if you liked reading this blog, I know you’ll LOVE my blog post entitled: Hunger Cues – Breakfast Edition!
