Evelyn Tribole Quotes

If you don’t love it, don’t eat it, and if you love it, savor it.

come from a place of curiousity, rather than from judgment

Having a healthy relationship with food means you are not morally superior or inferior based on your eating choices.

Make food choices that honor your health and taste buds while making you feel good. Remember that you don’t have to eat a perfect diet to be healthy. You will not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency, or gain weight 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.

When you rigidly limit the amount of food you are allowed to eat, it usually sets you up to crave larger quantities of that very food.

Listen for the body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry. Observe the signs that show that you’re comfortably full. Pause in the middle of a meal or snack and ask yourself how the food tastes, and what your current fullness level is.

Just because someone makes an inappropriate comment does not make it true!

Honestly, unless you killed the chef or the farmer, there should be no guilt about your eating choices.

Accept your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect realistically to squeeze into a size six, it is equally futile (and uncomfortable) to have a similar expectation about body size. Respect your body, so you can feel better about who you are. It’s hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly critical of your body shape.

Dieting may cause stress or make the dieter more vulnerable to its effects. Independent of body weight itself, dieting is correlated with feelings of failure, lowered self-esteem, and social anxiety.

Throw out the diet books and magazine articles that offer you the false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently. Get angry at the lies that have led you to feel as if you were a failure every time a new diet stopped working and you gained back all of the weight. If you allow even one small hope to linger that a new and better diet might be lurking around the corner, it will prevent you from being free to rediscover Intuitive Eating.

The Japanese have the wisdom to keep pleasure as one of their goals of healthy living. In our fury to be thin and healthy, we often overlook one of the most basic gifts of existence—the pleasure and satisfaction that can be found in the eating experience. When you eat what you really want, in an environment that is inviting, the pleasure you derive will be a powerful force in helping you feel satisfied and content. By providing this experience for yourself, you will find that it takes much less food to decide you’ve had “enough.

We define healthy eating as having a healthy balance of foods and having a healthy relationship with food.

You have forgotten what you really like to eat and instead eat what you think you “should” eat.

Children deprived of food in an attempt to be thin become preoccupied with food, afraid they won’t get enough to eat, and are prone to overeat when they get the chance.

Call a truce, stop the food fight! Give yourself unconditional permission to eat. If you tell yourself that you can’t or shouldn’t have a particular food, it can lead to intense feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings and often, bingeing. When you finally “give in” to your forbidden foods, eating will be experienced with such intensity, it usually results in Last Supper overeating and overwhelming guilt.

Find ways to comfort, nurture, distract, and resolve your emotional issues without using food. Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, and anger are emotions we all experience throughout life. Each has its own trigger, and each has its own appeasement. Food won’t fix any of these feelings. It may comfort for the short term, distract from the pain, or even numb you into a food hangover. But food won’t solve the problem. If anything, eating for an emotional hunger will only make you feel worse in the long run. You’ll ultimately have to deal with the source of the emotion, as well as the discomfort of overeating.

Dichotomous or black-and-white thinking can be dangerous and is often based on the premise of achieving perfection. It gives you only two alternatives, one of which is usually neither attainable or maintainable. The other then tends to be the black hole in which you inevitably fall after failing to get to the first. You set your sights so high, constantly chasing an ideal that you can grasp only moments at a time. When the standard for being okay is this lofty, you’re destined to feel lousy most of the time. And we know that when you feel lousy, you’re bound to end up going off the deep end in your eating behavior.

In fact, groundbreaking work by therapist and dietitian Ellyn Satter has shown that if you get the parents of overweight kids to back off and let them eat without parental pressure, the kids will eventually eat less. Why? The child begins to hear and understand his own inner signals of hunger and satiety. The child also knows that he or she will have access to food. According to Satter, “Children deprived of food in an attempt to be thin become preoccupied with food, afraid they won’t get enough to eat, and are prone to overeat when they get the chance.” We have found this to be true for adult dieters as well. Only for adults, the Intuitive Eating process has been buried for a long time, often years and years. Instead of having a parent loosen up the pressure, this loosening of pressure has to come from within and against society’s myth of dieting and distorted body worship.

the many experiences you will encounter. If, however, you focus on the end result (which for many people is weight or the amount of pounds lost), it can make you feel overwhelmed and discouraged, and end up sabotaging the process.

Quality fats—fat is also a nutrient, required by the body. Notably, when the essentiality of fats was first discovered, they were called “vitamin F” (Evans et al. 1928). Too bad this nomenclature didn’t stick—if it had, it would help remind people that we do need some fat in our diet.

Ironically a “good” or “bad” scale number can both trigger overeating—whether it’s a congratulatory eating party or a consolation party.

and you dread eating the foods you love, because you’re afraid it will be hard to stop.

Several studies have shown that the regulation of food intake has its foundation in early eating experiences. If as a child your parents took control over most of your eating without respecting your preferences or hunger levels, you easily got the message

The failure of dieting is that it promotes weight stigma by not recognizing that people come in all sizes and shapes and that each individual is worthy just as they are.

We have become a nation riddled with guilt based on how we eat.

Although physically eating the food, they were emotionally depriving themselves in the future.

A substantial body of research shows that dieting is not sustainable and leads to a host of problems, including eating disorders, food and body preoccupation, distraction from other personal health goals, reduced self-esteem, weight stigmatization, discrimination, and—paradoxically—weight gain.

Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity. —Voltaire

Worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue, which means you can spend your whole life thinking you’re irreparably broken just because you don’t look like the impossibly thin “ideal.” • Promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status, which means you feel compelled to spend a massive amount of time, energy, and money trying to shrink your body, even though the research is very clear that almost no one can sustain intentional weight loss for more than a few years. •  Demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others, which means you’re forced to be hyper-vigilant about your eating, ashamed of making certain food choices, and distracted from your pleasure, your purpose, and your power. •  Oppresses people who don’t match up with its supposed picture of “health,” which disproportionately harms women, femmes, trans folks, people in larger bodies, people of color, and people with disabilities, damaging both their mental and physical health.

If dieting programs had to stand up to the same scrutiny as medications, they would never be allowed for public consumption. Imagine, for example, taking an asthma medication that improves your breathing for a few weeks, but in the long run causes rebound asthma attacks and ultimately damages your lungs. Would you blame yourself for the medication not working, yet still continue to take it? Of course not! That’s what the process of dieting is like, even if your healthcare professional prescribes it. Would you really embark on a diet (even a so-called sensible diet) if you knew that it would ultimately fail? The pursuit of weight is so problematic. It perpetuates weight cycling and harms your relationship with food, mind, and body.

Yet, if dieting were held to the same standards as prescription drugs, it would fail miserably, and wouldn’t even be approved for use in the first place! There is a body of research that shows that food restriction for the purpose of weight loss is not effective in the long run, not sustainable, and moreover causes harm—even if it’s prescribed by a physician or dietitian! In spite of this research, weight loss continues to be prescribed. This is a modern-day Semmelweis reflex, which is the rejection of new evidence because it contradicts established norms, beliefs, or paradigms.

The perpetual pursuit of food plans and trying to change your body size rob you of truly getting to know yourself and your emotions. Dieting can serve as a coping mechanism, as can over-exercising—which ultimately disconnects you from your feelings.

Also, the harder you try to diet, the harder you fall—it really hurts not to succeed if you did everything “right.” The harder you try restricting the foods you eat, the more your body and mind adapt to surviving the self-imposed famine. As far as your cells are concerned, you are trying to kill them. Your brain finally sends out chemicals that send you to seek large amounts of food for survival. Cravings escalate, until you can’t resist them, and for many people, the pressure to eat escalates to the point of loss-of-control eating. It’s like holding your breath. You have the illusion of willpower to limit your breathing. But at some point, your body can’t take it, because it needs air to survive. When you finally breathe, it’s a profound gasp for dear life, rather than a polite inhalation.

(honor your hunger, respect your fullness, cope with feelings with kindness, reject the diet mentality).

The cure for linear thinking is process thinking, which focuses on continuous change and learning, rather than just the end result. If you start thinking in terms of what you can learn along the way, and accept that there will be many ups and downs, you will go forward.

Intuitive Eaters were found to have higher body satisfaction, without internalizing the thin ideal, which indicates that Intuitive Eaters are less likely to base their self-worth on being thin. Intuitive Eating Scale total scores were positively associated with self-esteem, satisfaction with life, optimism, and proactive coping.

Interoceptive awareness is the ability to perceive physical sensations that arise from within your body. It’s a direct experience, a felt sense that happens in the present moment—it’s not the past or future, it happens right now. It includes basic states like feeling a distended bladder, hunger and satiety cues, and the felt sense of every emotional feeling. Every emotion has a unique physical sensation in the body. When you perceive bodily sensations, it gives rise to powerful information to help get your psychological and biological needs met.

The principles of Intuitive Eating work either by enhancing interoceptive awareness, or by removing the obstacles to perceiving and responding to the felt sensations in the body. The obstacles are usually from the mind in the form of rules, beliefs, and thoughts.

The way an individual values and responds to these body sensations is known as interoceptive responsiveness.

Intuitive Eating was associated with the following benefits (Ricciardelli 2016): • Greater body appreciation and satisfaction • Positive emotional functioning • Greater life satisfaction • Unconditional self-regard and optimism • Psychological hardiness • Greater motivation to exercise, when focus is on enjoyment rather than guilt or appearance Furthermore, IE was inversely related to: disordered eating, dieting, poor interoceptive awareness, and internalization of the thin ideal.

Expression of thoughts, feelings, or needs appears to be a critical aspect of healthy eating behaviors.

However, when high emotional awareness was coupled with more self-silencing, participants had more disordered eating and less Intuitive Eating. The researchers believe that when women have clarity about their thoughts and feelings, but silence their voices, hunger signals may become confused, which may decrease trust of internal signals of hunger and satiation. The most intuitive and least disordered eaters in the study displayed high emotional awareness and low self-silencing.

When women emphasize the functionality of their bodies over appearance, they are more inclined to eat according to their body’s biological cues.

They identified four hallmarks of body appreciation: Possessing a favorable opinion of the body despite size and perceived imperfections. Being aware of and attentive to the body’s needs. Engaging in healthy behaviors to take care of the body. Protecting the body by rejecting unrealistic media body ideals.

One of the strongest predictors of weight gain is dieting, regardless of the actual body weight of the dieter (O’Hara and Taylor 2018). This is a profound irony, given the medicalization of the pursuit of weight loss. Yet, if dieting were held to the same standards as prescription drugs, it would fail miserably, and wouldn’t even be approved for use in the first place!

Diet culture is a system of beliefs that: • Worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue, which means you can spend your whole life thinking you’re irreparably broken just because you don’t look like the impossibly thin “ideal.” • Promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status, which means you feel compelled to spend a massive amount of time, energy, and money trying to shrink your body, even though the research is very clear that almost no one can sustain intentional weight loss for more than a few years. • Demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others, which means you’re forced to be hyper-vigilant about your eating, ashamed of making certain food choices, and distracted from your pleasure, your purpose, and your power. • Oppresses people who don’t match up with its supposed picture of “health,” which disproportionately harms women, femmes, trans folks, people in larger bodies, people of color, and people with disabilities, damaging both their mental and physical health.

Food is love, food is comfort, food is reward, food is a reliable friend. And, sometimes, food becomes your only friend in moments of pain and loneliness.

There’s a lot more to health than what you eat—your relationship with food, mental health, social determinants of health, to name a few. Besides, body weight is not a behavior.

Intuitive Eating is truly about trusting that you will be able to access all of the information you need, by using all aspects of your brain—your reptilian instincts, your limbic connection with your emotions, and your rational thoughts.

The Intuitive Eating principles work by either increasing interoceptive awareness, or by removing the obstacles to this “superpower.” The obstacles usually arise from the mind in the form of rules, beliefs, and thoughts.

The basic definition of interoceptive awareness is our ability to perceive physical sensations that arise from within the body. This includes bodily states such as a full bladder or racing heart, and satiety and hunger cues. Every emotion has a unique felt sensation in the body, like a physical fingerprint. When we listen to our bodies via interoceptive awareness we have a treasure trove of information to get our biological and psychological needs met! In other words, our wants, needs, and emotions are very much tied to the direct experience of sensations in our here-and-now bodies.

And, please keep in mind that these ten principles are simply guidelines and not new rules that can be turned into a new diet. Any desire for weight loss must be put on the back burner, or it will sabotage your process of healing your relationship with food, your mind, and your body.

Every diet violation, every eating situation that feels out of control lays the foundation for the “diet mentality,” brick by brick and diet by diet.

Boundaries are also invaded when someone makes comments about your weight or how you should look.

The moment you banish a food, it paradoxically builds up a “craving life” of its own that gets stronger with each diet, and builds more momentum as the deprivation deepens.

Doubting their innate eating signals had extended to doubting their beliefs about many other aspects of their lives.

Self-care is defined as the daily process of attending to your basic physical and emotional needs, which include the shaping of your daily routine, relationships, and environment, as needed to promote self-care (Cook-Cottone 2015).

See the chart below.

For some, the trust issue goes even deeper. Several studies have shown that the regulation of food intake has its foundation in early eating experiences. If as a child your parents took control over most of your eating without respecting your preferences or hunger levels, you easily got the message that you couldn’t be trusted with food.

So Where’s the Chocolate Group? As we have said, we’re not going to pull a fast one. There are no forbidden foods, because deprivation doesn’t work. All of the above guidelines are intended as a balance over time—which means even if you eat a candy bar, it will eventually average out. When you have let go of the diet mentality and have made peace with food, you will discover that you sometimes have a desire for food that has no nutritionally redemptive powers. We call this food play food. We prefer this term to one of the most commonly used terms to describe what’s considered unhealthy foods—junk food. The term junk food implies that there is no intrinsic value in this food—in fact, that it probably should be thrown in the garbage can. But we feel that this thinking is unwarranted. There are times when a piece of red velvet cake or a stick of licorice is just the food that will satisfy your taste buds. And eating these types of foods doesn’t mean you are an unhealthy eater.

Above all, do not bribe, reward, or attempt to comfort with food. Food is for hunger, satisfaction, and nourishment. Help your children learn how to endure feelings. Let them know that their feelings are real and valued and that there are ways to be comforted without using food.

Talking to a child about future health issues is also not the correct course. First of all, it can scare the child and make her have excessive worry about herself. Unfortunately, we hear parents tell their children that they will get diabetes or have heart problems if they don’t lose weight. Secondly, the concept of future heart problems is too abstract, even for an adult, let alone a child. Worry about future health issues does not have the power to motivate behavior change. Feeling physically better in the moment has far more impact.

In our society, the pursuit of thinness (whether for health or physique)—has become the battle cry of seemingly every American.

Intuitive Eaters march to their inner hunger signals, and eat whatever they choose without experiencing guilt or an ethical dilemma.

Forget Being Obedient. A well-meaning suggestion by a spouse or significant other, such as: “Honey, you should have the broiled chicken . . .” or “You shouldn’t eat those fries . . .” can set off an inner food rebellion. In this type of food combat, your only weapon to fight back becomes a double order of fries. Our clients call this forget-you eating.

Using food to cope with emotions comes in degrees of intensity. For some, food is simply a means of distraction from boring activities or a filler for empty times. For others, it can be the only comfort they have to get through a painful life.

Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates. Otherwise you can trigger a primal drive to overeat. Once you reach the moment of excessive hunger, all intentions of moderate, conscious eating are fleeting and irrelevant. Learning to honor this first biological signal sets the stage for rebuilding trust with yourself and food.

Call a truce; stop the food fight! Give yourself unconditional permission to eat. If you tell yourself that you can’t or shouldn’t have a particular food, it can lead to intense feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings and, often, bingeing. When you finally “give in” to your forbidden foods, eating will be experienced with such intensity, it usually results in Last Supper overeating and overwhelming guilt.

Weighing in on the scale only serves to keep you focused on your weight; it doesn’t help with the process of getting back in touch with Intuitive Eating.

Unconscious dieting usually occurs in the form of meticulous eating habits.

This is explained in part by the Boundary Model for the Regulation of Eating developed by C. Peter Herman and Janet Polivy, psychological experts in chronic dieting. This model considers both the biology and psychology of eating.

Intuitive

When underfed—whether from a self-imposed diet or starvation—you will obsess about food.

The Dieter’s Dilemma is triggered by the desire to be thin, which leads to dieting. That’s when the dilemma unfolds. Dieting increases cravings and urges for food. The dieter gives into the craving, overeats, and eventually regains any lost weight. He is back to where he started, with the original weight—or higher. And once again the dieter has the desire to be thin … and so another diet begins. The Dieter’s Dilemma is perpetuated and gets worse with each turn of the cycle. The dieter is heavier and feels more out of control with eating.