The Truth Of Why Intuitive Eating May NOT Be Working For You When Healing Disordered Eating

If you were in front of me right now, I would ask for a raise of hands, "Who has tried Intuitive Eating and it hasn't worked for them?" So feel free to email me at support@stephaniemara.com with an emoji hands up and I'll know what you're referring to.

First, I'm grateful for Intuitive Eating as it was a starting point in guiding many people into a more peaceful relationship with food. And, with any modality, over time we've seen that there are gaps in Intuitive Eating, yet it's been the predominant approach to healing patterns of disordered eating and eating disorders for decades. When it was first created it was revolutionary and healing approaches in relationship with food have changed and we know so much more now about factors that created your food coping mechanisms.

So today, I wanted to normalize your experience and take any self blame or shame you've had around Intuitive Eating not working for you.

Let's go into some main reasons I have seen and researched Intuitive Eating to not be effective for some people looking to heal from disordered eating or an eating disorder.

1. Intuitive eating is a neurotypical, mental approach to eating.

Yes, I get that it's called intuitive, yet the tenets created around Intuitive Eating entail mentally assessing things like reject diet mentality which is focused on your diet thoughts, make peace with food which is a thought process of thinking about food differently, or challenge the food police also a mental noticing when you're policing yourself around food. As you've learned here, you cannot logic your way out of your food behaviors. They're coming in as a way that your body is communicating something to you so the work here is to increase your capacity to be in your body and widen your window of tolerance so that you can sit with any emotion or sensation arising without trying to solve it, fix it, or make it go away with food.

Additionally, this is a neurotypical approach where someone is expected that they can navigate their inner world when it comes to food with practice. If you're someone who has an exquisite neurodivergent brain that can include flowing with patterns of ADHD or autism, your body may need much more structure and support to feel safe with food.

2. Doesn't address the dopamine changes from past trauma.

Intuitive Eating does not address the effects trauma has on your dopamine receptors. Trauma can lead to changes in dopamine production, release, and receptor sensitivity. It can make your dopamine system hyperactive leading to feeling anxious or underactive leading to depression and difficulty with feeling pleasure and eating can become the place where you're trying to regulate your dopamine levels. 

A cycle can get set up where there is an unattended trauma response that has been changing your neurotransmitter balance. You're told you have a restriction problem and you need to eat whatever you want. You let loose and go after all of the hyper-palatable foods that you've deprived yourself of. Your body starts to get the hit of dopamine it's been looking for and you feel so good but after you're done eating, you go right back to where you were. So you'd have to keep eating and eating and eating to get that momentary feel good experience. This doesn't have to do with the food. It's how the food is being utilized in your body and Intuitive Eating doesn't address this and why so many feel out of control when they start practicing Intuitive Eating. When you start to heal the trauma, your body can find a new homeostasis where even a hyper-palatable food can be digested differently.

3. Does not teach you about your nervous system.

Often your food coping mechanisms are a response to a dysregulated nervous system. When your survival response is activated, your body releases adrenaline and cortisol. Your focus shifts away from intuition and toward immediate potential danger. As you become primed to attend to perceived threats, it's difficult to tap into gut feelings. You may miss subtle internal cues as your attention is outward instead of inward, which can decrease your sense of trust in your instincts. As you're functioning more from the fear part of your brain, you won't have easy access to intuitive reasoning that occurs when you're functioning from your prefrontal cortex, the logical, rational part of your brain.

So let's say you're living in a fight, flight, freeze, or flop state as a response to past trauma and food has become your #1 greatest support in feeling momentarily safe or just getting a break from feeling like you're running away from something. Now, an Intuitive Eating practitioner comes along and says you've gotta try Intuitive Eating, it will solve everything for you. You dive right in with the hope that this is going to solve all your eating challenges. But, what you discover is that it makes things a lot worse. What I have heard from thousands of those I have worked with is that their Intuitive Eating practitioner tells them to keep going and that the overeating will all subside. So they keep going and they keep eating more and more and more and nothing is decreasing and their practitioner is telling them to trust the process.

The focus this whole time is on the food and trying to rebuild trust with it, yet, this is incredibly hard to do when you're living in a survival response where your intuitive instincts and sense of trust are diminished. Intuitive Eating may work for you later, but with the state that you're living in, it may not be possible to practice this modality right now. You may need to first address the lack of safety in your body so that you can experience more nervous system flexibility and are able to have more moments where you're living in the parasympathetic nervous system or tend and befriend state. When you feel safe and secure, that is when your bodily intuition can come forth with food and in your life.

4. You may not be able to hear your hunger or fullness cues.

Two more tenets of Intuitive Eating are to listen and honor your hunger and fullness cues. Yet, when you're experiencing sympathetic nervous system dominance, your digestion is shut down and your internal resources, like your blood, move away from your digestive tract toward your limbs to fight or flee from perceived threat. This can feel like a defeating experience where you never know if you're hungry or need more food, and so, you may find yourself trying to rely on your brain to figure it out. 

But, the felt sense of hunger and satiation are happening inside your body and this is a place where you may not want to be because the body has been a cue of threat with all of the emotions, sensations, and past experiences it's holding onto for you. It will be difficult to interpret which foods your body needs, what foods resonate with your body, and your hunger and satiation cues when you’re still working on feeling safe in your body. This is not your fault. Don’t gaslight yourself into believing that there’s something wrong with you that food feels so challenging to navigate.

5. The focus is on food.

Your food challenges don't have to do with food itself. With Intuitive Eating, the focus is on the food and allowing yourself to have food. Focusing on the food itself can be protective though. If you're fixated on what you're eating, when you're eating, how you're eating, then you don't have to be in your body feeling what's there. So while the intention of Intuitive Eating is to feel more free with food, you may find yourself feeling even more trapped. 

It can set up a cycle where you feel like if you just heal your relationship with food then everything will be alright, you try Intuitive Eating and you bring more attention to the food which has been the thing you've already been hyper attending to so that you don't have to feel the wounds and pain in your body, you feel frustrated and hopeless that anything will change as you continue to try to figure out how to be an eater, and then a part of you says screw this, you find yourself overeating, and the cycle begins again where you feel like you've got to try to heal your relationship with food and maybe you didn't give Intuitive Eating enough of a chance.

So while Intuitive Eating may have felt greatly helpful to someone who is neurotypical, with little trauma in their past, and perhaps secure attachment, this approach to food healing is not going to be effective if you're someone who is neurodivergent, navigating a trauma response, with a dysregulated nervous system, and insecure attachment.

This is where my work of Somatic Eating® comes in and I wanted to share with you all that the doors to the Somatic Eating® Program are officially open. I only run this class twice a year so this will not be offered again until October. I'm constantly adding new research into the program and I'm truly excited for this upcoming class as I feel it might be the best one yet. We start on April 22nd and spend 11 weeks together cultivating an understanding of how your current food behaviors are your body's way of trying to communicate something to you and what that something might be. We will build your somatic resources for you to utilize in moments when you would normally choose food to help you feel safe and secure. All classes are live and recorded for you to be able to watch the replay. For this upcoming class, the live classes are on Mondays at 5:00 pm ET and you receive individualized support within class and through a private group so you will be able to reach out 7 days a week and I'm there for you every step of the way.

Some feedback from past participants of the program have said:

"The Somatic Eating® Program has helped me learn how to have compassion for myself and for these behaviors I have learned as a way to keep myself safe. My relationship with food now feels more peaceful and intentional. I feel so connected to my body and my emotions. I don’t think about food as the problem, instead I think about how I’m feeling, what I’m needing, and what I can do to give myself that. Sometimes it's food and sometimes it's something else!"

"I feel so much more aware of what is happening with the choices that I make and why. Through the lessons and practices in the Somatic Eating® Program I was able to develop an understanding that many of my "self sabotage" behaviors were actually self-protective, and were my best effort at taking care of myself the best way I knew how. In understanding that, I have developed much more of a tenderness for myself, and in turn cultivating the true self compassion that I have always longed for. I see signals from my body to overeat or turn to comfort foods that feel good for a moment but leave me feeling terrible in the long run in a whole new way. I thank my body for those signals now because I understand that something deeper is at play."

"I loved this program because it felt like not adding another thing to your plate, but instead learning to sink into the knowledge that your body has and holds already. I feel that it has given me a map to understanding myself in a way that is flexible and unique to me. What is different about this program is that you are not being given a set of rules and guidelines to follow, you are learning to decode and determine your own."

I would love to connect with you further in the Somatic Eating® Program so if you're interested in signing up, go to somaticeating.com or click HERE to join and if you have any questions email me anytime at support@stephaniemara.com. I hope that today's episode planted a seed that healing your relationship with food has to be unique to you and your body. Your body is the expert on this adventure and you get to continue to practice building your sense of safety in your body for your body wisdom to come through and be heard.