When it was first published, Intuitive Eating was revolutionary in its anti-dieting approach. The go-to resource-now fully revised and updated-for building a healthy body image and making peace with food, once and for all. This hasn’t changed enough because of the tremendous hold that the 72 billion-dollar-a-year diet culture industry has on the public, offering seductive, magical results.Free yourself from chronic dieting forever. What needs to change in the next 5 years is increased education in the media, schools, and the medical community to dispute these myths. There is no intentional focus on weight gain. A person’s weight can change while embracing Intuitive Eating-it might go up or it might go down, or it might stay the same. There are no rules! Finally, there is a misconception that the goal of Intuitive Eating is weight loss. Remember, Intuitive Eating is the anti-diet.

Often people create rules that say that you can only eat at a particular level of hunger and must stop at a specific level of fullness. The second misunderstanding is the thinking that Intuitive Eating is the “hunger/fullness diet”. But our emotions can affect our instincts, and the cognitive part of the brain can make the best decisions for our well-being. The main misunderstanding around Intuitive Eating is that it’s all instinctual. Each of these books offers further reflection and practice of Intuitive Eating.

I continued to co-author updated versions of Intuitive Eating (now in its 4th edition) and wrote or co-wrote two workbooks, a journal, and a card deck. After co-authoring the first Intuitive Eating book, which was released in 1995, I continued unlearning some old thinking, which led to incorporating more advanced learning, especially connected to social justice, with the aim of eliminating the oppression placed upon people in larger bodies. Wanting to do better for my clients led me to believe in a weight-inclusive philosophy, which would guide clients toward better attunement with their bodies and a more positive relationship with food and body. The teaching was weight-centric, with a misguided belief that weight loss was the key to health.

It all began in the eighties and early nineties when I found that what I had been taught in graduate school about counseling clients was not only unsatisfying but also appeared to be doing harm.

Elyse resch intuitive eating