Hands down, the most common thing clients say to me is this: “I want to stop dieting…but I also want to lose weight.”
If you’re on your intuitive eating journey, it feels taboo just reading that, right? But if you’re feeling this, hear me when I say after 10+ years of helping women ditch dieting, stress less about food, and make peace with their bodies that you are not alone.
I’ll say it again for the folks in the back: wanting to lose weight while doing intuitive eating is totally normal. We’ve been told the secret to being “healthier,” more confident, successful, and just feeling good in your skin.
Today, I want to take you behind the scenes of what I say to clients who aren’t sure how to do intuitive eating and lose weight, and what our work together looks like.
Can You Want to Lose Weight and Still Eat Intuitively?
Whenever a client tells me they want to eat intuitively and lose weight, I totally get it. Diet culture has told us again and again that a smaller body is “healthier,” “better,” and “worthier.”
Weight stigma is very real – 40% of U.S. adults across a wide range of body sizes report weight-based bullying, teasing, and discrimination. This stigma and anti-fat bias is baked into our society, showing up everywhere from chairs in waiting rooms and gown sizes at medical appointments to the way larger bodies are presented in the media.
So I GET IT. It makes sense that you would yearn for what you think weight loss would give you.
But the truth is we’ve been sold this fairy-tale fantasy that if you just lose weight, you’ll be happier, healthier, more successful, more lovable, regardless of what it takes to get there.
But here’s the truth: I won’t ever promise that intuitive eating will lose weight. I don’t have that crystal ball. But I can promise that with the right skills, tools, frameworks, and strategies to work with your body to find its current set point weight. To have peace and freedom with food. To enjoy being on vacation, to go out for Mexican food with your girlfriends without overeating, and see your labs improve while eating things like Oreos and Cheetos.
If you lose weight as a part of intuitive eating, that’s fine. But the goal is to heal your relationship with food, and get your sense of self to where it isn’t contingent upon losing weight.
The secret? Get curious.
What I Say to My Clients
As a non-diet dietitian, I hear clients say they want to lose weight in almost every session and I get it. But instead of ditching intuitive eating and diving back into diet culture to lose weight, get curious.
- Why do you want to lose weight?
- How much do you think you should weigh?
- What’s your relationship with food?
- How do you feel about and in your body?
- Do you have a specific health concern or diagnosis?
Then we dig into lots of exploration about what their past experiences have been with dieting, weight, health, and where their weight is at now in relation to the past.
We have to get curious to do the work. This may uncover some deeper issues, so be gentle with yourself as you dive deep. This isn’t about right or wrong. It’s about uncovering the root of your desire to lose weight and healing your relationship with food.
The Truth About Health and Weight
We’ve heard for years that health is weight-based, but research actually shows:
- Those with an “overweight” BMI may actually have longer lifespans.
- Weight cycling correlates with cardiovascular disease and early death.
In other words, health isn’t about a low number on the scale. It’s about how your internal organs work and how you incorporate health-promoting behaviors – and how flexible you are with them.
Your body is smart. It knows what weight you need to be at to be truly healthy, without restricting or doing dieting behaviors. This is known as the ‘set point’ weight. The only way to find it is to figure out how to work with your body rather than against it.
How? Get off the dieting rollercoaster. You have to step away from restricting, tracking your food, obsessing over calories and macros, and all the other stuff that makes you feel out of control around food and with your body.
It may feel counterintuitive, but letting go of your attempt at control is what will allow your weight to find where it needs to be.
That doesn’t mean you should have a free-for-all with food; it means you should figure out how to do intuitive eating the way it’s intended to be done. Then we get to see how your metabolism comes up out of the gutter, your cravings and compulsions diminish, and you can eat normally while being intentional about your health.
How Real Women Found & Made Peace With Their Bodies’ Set Point Weight
Case Study #1: Meet Jamie*
When Jamie came to me, she was tired of dieting. She was a pretty intuitive eater until she started her first diet leading up to her wedding. She lost some weight, then regained it and a little more during her first few years of marriage. Jamie dabbled with intuitive eating on her own, but secretly hoped it would help her lose weight. When her weight didn’t change, she panicked and went back to dieting and ended up weight cycling, landing at her highest weight ever.
During our session, I told her that wanting weight loss isn’t the problem. It’s that our culture has taught you to believe that thinness is the only way to feel good in your body. That if she ended up losing weight as a byproduct of intuitive eating, that was great, but our goal would be to heal her relationship with food.
We applied the 10 principles of intuitive eating – starting with rejecting diet mentality – and when she stopped trying to manipulate her weight, she finally started living.
She started saying yes to things she’d put off for years – the vacations, wearing shorts in the summer, getting in the pool. She discovered movement she actually enjoyed and felt strong and empowered when she did it.
By putting these pieces together with the intuitive eating principles, it clicked. She started making peace with food, learned how to listen (and trust!) her body, and implementing gentle nutrition.
What felt so good to her was knowing that she was breaking the generational cycle of dieting in her family so it wouldn’t pass down to her daughters.
Case Study #2: Meet Heather*
After her cholesterol came back a little high, Heather’s doctor told her to lose weight “for her health.” She started following a plant-based diet because she was scared about her risk of heart disease. Heather came to me wanting to address her ramped-up binge eating and frustrations that she kept gaining weight.
In our first session, I said, “Let’s talk about what health actually means and how we can support your body, regardless of what your weight does.” We leveraged her medical knowledge to help her see how health is different from the number on the scale…and that her current behaviors weren’t actually healthy.
Heather started focusing on how she felt:
- More energy
- Clearer hunger and fullness cues
- Less anxiety around food
- Gentle nutrition by adding in foods rather than restricting
- Combining carbohydrate, fat, and protein
- Finding realistic ways to fit movement she loved into her schedule
Her weight stayed the same, but her labs improved, her health got better, and she feels confident, happy, and comfortable in her body.
Before You Go
It’s okay if you’re still feeling like you want to lose weight. Often, when you dig deeper, the root of that desire is wanting to heal your relationship with your body and make peace with food. In intuitive eating, we do just that.
Many people think that intuitive eating is just not dieting. It’s actually a 10-principle, research-backed framework that works together to create a real, lasting shift relationship with food and your body.
If you’re thinking you’re not doing intuitive eating right or want to dive deeper into how it works, join me for the Intuitive Eating Exploration, your 5-week anti-diet reset for the rest of the year. Save your spot here!
And remember, you are worthy just as you are.
*names have been changed
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