lystn

Lots of people have been asking me: "Is TFID the same as Intuitive Eating?" It is and it isn't. They have the same goal: body trust, appetite trust, and food trust, with different ways of teaching and explaining how to get there. A lot of my writing over the years has talked about how I turned (what I thought was) "intuitive eating" and "listening to my body" into a diet. I turned it into a weird stressful attempt to eat the smallest amount possible. I interpreted good advice through a fat-phobic, food fearing, diet culture belief system. Lots of people do the same thing I did: they take good advice and twist it into a diet that they convince themselves is not a diet, because they let themselves eat a few squares of dark chocolate 3 times a week! Moderation is intuition! Right?! (UGH!) But... the more I've been asked to answer if TFID is the same as intuitive eating, the more I realize it's important to reflect on how I've referred to IE over the past seven years of writing this site, as well as in my book that's coming out in less than a month. First of all, Intuitive Eating is a book written by two registered dietitian nutritionists, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, that came out in 1995. The book is revolutionary in its genre and field, completely evidence based, and I recommend you read it. However, my experience with official Intuitive Eating and the official Intuitive Eating book is actually pretty limited, which means the way that I've referred to it (or not referred to it) should probably be examined. In fact, the book Intuitive Eating and Geneen Roth's books are mixed up in my mind at this very moment as I write this. Maybe that's because there is a hunger scale in both of them? (And I DEF turned that hunger scale into a diet.) I only read Intuitive Eating book once, when I was 18. And I'm not positive if I even finished it because I became a raw vegan 2 weeks later. I obsessively dieted as a teenager. I went on every fad diet that existed at the time. It was disordered, it was extreme, and I felt more and more and more out of control with food the more I dieted. When I read the book Intuitive Eating, it was the first time I realized that my dieting was dysfunctional. Before then, I thought that this was just the way it had to be. I remember the book really spoke to me. But I still didn't fully understand how deep it all went for me: culturally and metabolically and emotionally and on and on. And I didn't see how messed up my relationship was with weight, and how that was actually the core of the whole thing. I needed very, very explicit instructions to F*** IT: f*** all diet and weight loss noise, and be willing to gain weight and take up space and be angry and prioritize my mental health over my desire to be a pretty little thing. But I was also young, and clearly needed to suffer a little more before I really understood that dieting was always going to backfire. (***I bleep curse words for iTunes) Weeks after reading the book, and just a few weeks before I went off to college, my mom told me she had cancer, and we both became raw vegan to try and heal all of our earthly ills (it didn't work) (my mom is fine, but not because of raw veganism, she ditched it soon after starting chemo) (also, I have complex feelings about pharmaceutical companies too, but raw veganism was still not the answer).(Yes I was a raw vegan in freshman year of college.) I was raw vegan for almost a year - and then after I realized it wasn't "working" (read: I was less healthy, starving all the time, horrible skin, horrible digestion, and crazier than ever around food), I started trying to "eat intuitively" again... for 6 years. My general idea was that if I could listen to my body, and "not eat too much," that that was intuitive. But I didn't revisit the book, instead, for six years I did some version of "listening to my body sooooo closely and constantly trying to eat the smallest amount possible".