Croí Intuitive Eating Programme

Intuitive Eating is a non-diet approach to health and wellness that emphasizes tuning into your body’s natural hunger and fullness cues, rather than following external dieting rules. Developed by dietitians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch in 1995, the concept is centred around the idea that our bodies inherently know what they need to eat and how much, if we learn to listen to them.

Intuitive Eating has 10 core principles:

Reject the Diet Mentality: This principle involves letting go of the idea that there is a perfect diet or way of eating that you need to follow. It encourages rejecting diet culture and the constant pursuit of weight loss.

Honor Your Hunger: Trusting and responding to your body’s hunger signals is crucial. This means eating when you’re hungry, rather than ignoring or delaying hunger cues.

Make Peace with Food: This involves allowing yourself to eat any food without guilt or restriction. The idea is to remove the “good” vs. “bad” food mentality.

Challenge the Food Police: The food police are the critical voices in your mind that tell you what you should or shouldn’t eat. This principle encourages challenging these thoughts and beliefs.

Feel Your Fullness: Pay attention to signals from your body that you’re no longer hungry. This principle is about eating until you feel comfortably full, rather than overeating or undereating.

Discover the Satisfaction Factor: Eating should be a pleasurable experience. This principle emphasizes choosing foods that satisfy you and eating in a pleasant environment.

Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness: Instead of using food to cope with emotions like stress or sadness, this principle encourages finding other ways to deal with emotions, such as talking to a friend, exercising, or practicing mindfulness.

Respect Your Body: Accept your body as it is, rather than striving for an unrealistic ideal. This principle encourages body positivity and self-compassion.

Movement—Feel the Difference: Focus on how exercise makes you feel, rather than on burning calories or losing weight. The idea is to find movement that you enjoy and that makes you feel good.

Honor Your Health—Gentle Nutrition: Make food choices that honor your health and taste buds while making you feel well. It’s about balance and making healthy choices most of the time, without striving for perfection.

Overall, Intuitive Eating is about building a healthy relationship with food, mind, and body, and rejecting the restrictive nature of diet culture.

Intuitive Eating is not designed as a weight-loss program, and it doesn’t focus on weight as a primary goal. Instead, it emphasizes building a healthier relationship with food and your body. The approach encourages listening to your body’s natural hunger and fullness cues, eating in a way that feels satisfying, and respecting your body’s needs, rather than following strict dieting rules or focusing on weight control.

Here’s what you might expect in terms of weight when practicing Intuitive Eating:

Weight Stabilization: Some people may experience weight loss, some may gain weight, and others may stay the same. The outcome largely depends on your body’s natural set point—a weight range that your body tends to maintain when you are eating intuitively, without restriction or overeating.

Focus on Health, Not Weight: Intuitive Eating encourages you to shift your focus from weight loss to overall health and well-being. This means prioritizing how you feel, your relationship with food, and your mental and physical health over the number on the scale.

Long-Term Benefits: Research suggests that Intuitive Eating can lead to improvements in psychological well-being, including reduced stress, better self-esteem, and decreased disordered eating behaviours. These benefits often translate to better long-term health outcomes, regardless of weight changes.

Potential for Weight Loss: For some, especially those who have been chronically dieting and weight cycling, Intuitive Eating might result in weight loss as the body finds its natural balance. However, this is not guaranteed, and it’s not the primary goal of the approach.

In summary, while weight loss might occur for some people who practice Intuitive Eating, it’s not the main focus, and it’s not guaranteed. The approach is more about achieving overall health, emotional well-being, and a positive relationship with food and your body. If weight loss is your primary goal, it’s important to consider whether Intuitive Eating aligns with your expectations and to focus on the broader benefits it offers.

Combining a weight loss program with Intuitive Eating can be tricky because the core philosophies of the two approaches are somewhat different. Intuitive Eating focuses on rejecting diet culture, listening to your body’s natural hunger and fullness cues, and building a healthy relationship with food without a focus on weight as a primary goal. Weight loss programs, on the other hand, often emphasize calorie control, portion sizes, and other strategies aimed specifically at losing weight.

For these reasons, we would recommend only joining one programme at a time. If you are considering joining a weight loss programme, Intuitive Eating might not be right for you at this time, however you can always come back to it in the future.

Yes, Intuitive Eating can be helpful for managing binge eating. Binge eating often stems from a cycle of restriction, guilt, and emotional distress, and Intuitive Eating addresses many of the underlying causes that contribute to this cycle.

Here’s how Intuitive Eating can help with binge eating:

Breaking the Restriction-Binge Cycle

No More Dieting: Many binge eating episodes are triggered by periods of restrictive dieting. When you deny yourself certain foods or eat less than your body needs, it can lead to intense cravings and, eventually, binge eating. Intuitive Eating helps break this cycle by allowing all foods, reducing the urgency to binge on “forbidden” foods.

Permission to Eat: By giving yourself unconditional permission to eat whatever you want, you remove the “forbidden fruit” mentality that often leads to bingeing. Over time, this can reduce the intensity of cravings and the urge to overeat.

Learning to Trust Your Body

Listening to Hunger and Fullness Cues: Intuitive Eating encourages you to tune into your body’s natural hunger and fullness signals, which helps you eat in response to your body’s needs rather than emotions or external rules. This can help prevent the extremes of starvation and bingeing.

Eating Mindfully: Being present and mindful while eating helps you to enjoy your food more and recognize when you’re satisfied, which can prevent overeating.

Coping with Emotions

Emotional Awareness: Intuitive Eating teaches you to identify and address your emotions without using food as a coping mechanism. By finding alternative ways to deal with stress, boredom, or other emotions, you can reduce emotional eating and the likelihood of bingeing.

Self-Compassion: Instead of judging yourself for overeating or bingeing, Intuitive Eating encourages a more compassionate approach. This can reduce the guilt and shame that often perpetuate the binge-eating cycle.

Healing Your Relationship with Food

No Food is Off-Limits: By removing the idea that some foods are “good” and others are “bad,” Intuitive Eating helps to normalize your relationship with all foods. Over time, this can reduce the psychological grip that certain foods have, making it easier to eat them in moderation.

Rediscovering Satisfaction: When you focus on eating foods that truly satisfy you, rather than what you think you “should” eat, you may find that your desire to binge decreases. Satisfying eating experiences can prevent the feelings of deprivation that often lead to bingeing.

Long-Term Sustainable Change

Building Sustainable Habits: Unlike diets that might work temporarily but often lead to bingeing once they’re over, Intuitive Eating is a lifelong approach that focuses on long-term health and well-being. By building a sustainable relationship with food, you’re more likely to maintain a healthy and balanced eating pattern that doesn’t include bingeing.

Intuitive Eating addresses many of the root causes of binge eating by promoting a healthy, balanced, and non-restrictive approach to food. It can help you break free from the binge-restrict cycle, cope with emotions in healthier ways, and develop a more positive relationship with food and your body. However, if binge eating is severe or accompanied by significant emotional distress, working with a therapist or dietitian who specializes in eating disorders can be an important complement to Intuitive Eating.

Yes, you can practice Intuitive Eating while taking Ozempic (semaglutide), but it’s important to understand how the medication might interact with the principles of Intuitive Eating and how to navigate that relationship.

Ozempic is a medication used primarily to treat type 2 diabetes, but it’s also prescribed for weight management. It works by mimicking a hormone called GLP-1, which helps regulate blood sugar levels, slows down gastric emptying, and reduces appetite. This often leads to reduced hunger and can result in weight loss.

How Ozempic Might Impact Intuitive Eating:

1. Appetite Suppression:
   • Altered Hunger Cues: One of the key principles of Intuitive Eating is tuning into your hunger and fullness cues. However, because Ozempic can suppress appetite, you might find that your natural hunger signals are less pronounced or less frequent. This can make it more challenging to rely on hunger cues alone to guide your eating.
2. Fullness Cues:
   • Earlier Satiety: Ozempic can also lead to feeling full more quickly. While this might help with portion control, it could also lead to confusion about when and how much to eat, especially if you’re trying to honour your body’s signals.
3. Gentle Nutrition:
   • Balanced Eating: It’s still important to focus on eating balanced, nutritious meals, even if you’re less hungry. Gentle nutrition—one of the principles of Intuitive Eating—encourages you to choose foods that support your overall health, which remains important while on Ozempic.

How to Practice Intuitive Eating with Ozempic

1. Tune into Other Body Signals:
   • Beyond Hunger: Since your hunger signals might be muted, pay attention to other cues your body gives you, such as energy levels, mood, and concentration. These can be important indicators of when you might need to eat.
2. Focus on Satisfaction:
   • Enjoy Your Meals: Even if you’re eating less due to reduced hunger, aim to make your meals satisfying and enjoyable. Choose foods that you like and that provide nourishment.
3. Be Flexible with the Principles:
   • Adaptation: You might need to adapt some principles of Intuitive Eating to fit your experience while on Ozempic. For example, you may eat smaller portions more frequently, even if you’re not feeling very hungry, to ensure you’re getting enough nutrients.
4. Avoid Over-Reliance on External Cues:
   • Balance: While Ozempic provides an external influence on your appetite, try not to rely solely on the medication to dictate your eating habits. Continue to practice mindful eating, paying attention to how different foods make you feel physically and emotionally.

In conclusion, yes you can join this programme while taking Ozempic. Our Dietitian has experience working with people who are taking GLP-1s and also wishing to practice Intuitive Eating.

No, to ensure privacy in the group sessions, the sessions will not be recorded. If you are unable to attend most of the live sessions, you will not benefit from the programme at this time.