If you see messages on social media about intuitive eating being “the hunger-fullness diet” or the “eat whatever you want, whenever you want plan,” you’re not getting the full story. Let’s break down the differences between gentle nutrition and dieting.
Gentle nutrition and intuitive eating are slightly different during perimenopause and menopause
Dieting is specifically designed to help you lose weight. That’s it. This messaging gets packaged as wellness with the promise to reduce inflammation, increase insulin sensitivity, or make your body lean. Underneath the wellness claims, there’s also the promise you’ll lose weight if you follow the diet’s rules. Play the game by its rules, and you get the promised results (weight loss). Maybe. Hopefully.
If you don’t get the promised results, you assume it’s because you didn’t play by the rules. It’s your fault. Frustrated, you go back to eating whatever, until you hate your body again, and decide to try a new game, with new rules (a different diet).
This is called the diet cycle. The more times you’re on a diet and then off a diet, the more your weight fluctuates up and down. But then perimenopause hits.
Now, no matter how hard you try, the diet rules that worked in the past, your weight doesn’t budge. Now what?
How are gentle nutrition and intuitive eating different than dieting?
Like many of the women I work with, you know the diet cycle doesn’t work long term – even when you had marginal success losing weight over the years. You know you want to try something different – like intuitive eating.
At first, the beginning principles of intuitive eating feel easy. Reject the diet mentality. Make peace with food. Honor hunger. Challenge the food police. The newfound freedom you experience with food is amazing! Until it’s not.
You eat beyond comfortable fullness, clothes don’t fit, and your metabolic lab values, like blood sugar, cholesterol, and blood pressure, increase. Now what? Wasn’t intuitive eating supposed to be better than dieting? Why do you feel worse?
The messy middle of intuitive eating is knowing you don’t want to diet. You want to enjoy freedom with food, but you’re concerned about your health.
Do you have to diet to be healthy? Nope. Intuitive eating is dramatically different than dieting because of the last principle of intuitive eating, gentle nutrition.
I describe gentle nutrition as “honoring hunger, satisfaction, and fullness combined with body respect and acceptance.”
You need to know how to feel and honor subtle hunger and fullness cues. It’s also important to know what qualities of food satisfy you. Then you can make food choices by leading with satisfaction instead of food rules.
“But what about this weight? I’ve put on 20 pounds in the past year and a half. It won’t budge. I’m afraid if I really like the taste of the food, I won’t stop eating it, causing me to gain more weight!”
Bad body image moments, days, weeks, and months can affect attunement to hunger and fullness. Here’s how to deal with the negative body image days.
As your body changes during menopause, it’s important to show your body respect and acceptance – even when it feels hard.
Compassionate curiosity is essential in midlife. It helps you understand how body size, shape, mobility, and metabolic health change as a result of the menopause transition (perimenopause).
When you shift your mindset away from trying to fix your body, which is what diet culture teaches you, and towards acceptance, you’re more likely to make health-promoting behavior changes without focusing on the scale. You can practice the add-in strategy with food instead of worrying about what you shouldn’t be eating.
Dieting teaches you to think about food in a restrictive way – what shouldn’t you eat?
Gentle nutrition asks what do you want to eat?
What food would be satisfying right now? What do you want to add to your meal or snack to feel more focused, energized, or calm and relaxed?
Think about what you can add to meals and snacks instead of what you have to give up or eat less of. Let’s be honest, once you hit 40, you’ve given so much of yourself to other people and causes over the years. It’s time to focus on yourself and your needs.
Based on your health concerns, there can be specific foods to add in. For example, if you’re concerned about blood sugar, instead of saying you can’t eat refined or simple carbs, think about adding protein, fiber, and healthy fats when you want foods like white pasta, cookies, or sweets. Eating protein, fiber, and healthy fats with simple carbs helps keep your blood sugar stable by slowing the digestion and absorption of the carbs.
To get started with gentle nutrition for menopause, focus on adding protein (without being excessive), fiber, whole grain carbs, magnesium for sleep, foods rich in omega-3 fatty acids, and iron if you have heavy periods. You don’t need to track or measure your food, calories, or macros. Instead, build trust with your body.
When you stop dieting, you create trust with your body’s hunger, satisfaction, and fullness cues. Attunement to your body’s cues will tell you how much food you need and when. You won’t need food rules or measurements to tell you how to feed yourself.
If you’re not convinced that gentle nutrition is different from diet culture, listen to this Savor Food and Body podcast interview with Lynn, one of my former clients (shared with client permission).
