What Is Intuitive Eating? Evelyn Tribole on Trusting Your Body

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Today we have someone here who I have a hunch that a lot of you already know. Her name is Evelyn Tribbley, and she is the author of 10 books, including co-authoring the bestselling intuitive eating that everyone I know follows at this point, which is a mind body self care eating framework, which has given rise to over 200 studies to date.
Her newest book is intuitive eating for every day, 365 inspirations and practices.

Evelyn, do you have any background knowledge about me? Do you have any idea what you're getting yourself into today is what I want to know. I have a sense.
In fact, I've got to tell you, you entered my heart during COVID when you were, your book tour got canceled and you were sitting

on your couch in your colorful jacket thinking, screw it. I'm going to, I'm going to read from

my book in my presentation jacket. And that's when I knew I loved you.
Oh, thank you. I read

your book back then too. So yeah.
Thank you. So I have a sense, but I don't want to assume anything.

So that's the best way to go not to assume for me. For background, I want you to know that I have read everything you've done and listen to you everywhere.
And so I... Oh, wow.
Thank you. Can you explain what intuitive eating is? Like I'm a child.
Like pretend I'm in third grade and explain what it is. You know, it's so interesting that you come to that perspective of a child, because that's where our research is rooted, that kids are natural, intuitive eaters.
And you know, the thing that I think is important to help in the understanding of this, this all got started because Elise and I were witnessing the suffering for so many people dieting, so many people outsourcing their eating decisions to some guru, some expert, some meal plan at the expense of losing trust in themselves, trust in their abilities. I can't tell you the amount of women I've had in my office who are crying.
Very, very smart, successful women. They'll say, I know the calories of a single pea and I don't know how to fucking eat.
And that kind of is the background of this. And then to answer your question, what is it? It's basically you are in charge of your eating by listening to the messages of your body.
And we get into a little bit neuroscience. It's based on interceptive awareness.
And that is our bodies give us these amazing text messages, letting us know how we're feeling, whether we have to go to the bathroom, whether we're anxious because of a heart rate, or whether we're hungry or we're full. And we're in touch with that.
It's powerful, powerful information. The challenge right now, people are at war with their bodies, and they don't trust the messenger.
So we have a lot of work to do, Glennon. Yes, we do.
So I am in my 1200th level of recovery right now. I became bulimic when I was 10 years old.
And then I thought that I got it fixed when I was 25. Because I became pregnant with my son.
And basically, what I have learned is that from the ages of 25 until now, I'm 48. I had just switched bulimia for anorexia.
So I thought I was good, but what I really did was just create a million rules to try to control the hunger. So now I'm in anorexia recovery, and I think I'm getting healthy for the first time in my life.
Wonderful. Wonderful.
Which feels like starting over like I am a kid. So here's my question to you to start off with.
So I've listened to a lot of your interviews and I felt comforted when you say that a lot of other people say to you, I don't, I'm broken. Like I am a bottomless pit of hunger.
Like I hear what you're saying. This is what I believed Evelyn.
I believed for everyone else that they did have a mechanism that inside of them that they could eat and feel full and stop and then eat and feel full and stop, et cetera. I did not believe that about myself.
I believed that I did not have that thing, that if I started eating, if I let my hunger go, I would eat until I died, that I would never be satiated. What I want to ask you about is that I've heard you call that a primal hunger.
And I feel that like, I remember when I was in my bulimia years, just I felt like an animal, like a primally eating, binging. Absolutely.
But when I think about my recovery now and how much wider it is than just food, I think, you know what? I have that primal feeling about a lot of things. I have a primal sadness.
I feel like if I start crying,

if I let myself feel sad, I will never stop. I have a primal anger.
If I let myself scream,

I will never stop. I have primal exhaustion.
If I let myself stop, I will never get up.

So I heard you say that where there is primal hunger, we can look back and see deprivation. Yes, you got that right.
Absolutely. So is it possible that I clearly felt so hungry because my hunger was not allowed as a child? Like I wasn't allowed to eat.
I wasn't allowed to feel hunger. So the deprivation led to the primal hunger.
Is it possible that all of our primal desperation, if we look backwards, we find that we weren't allowed to have it. Like there was no room for sadness.
There was no room for anger. There was no room for rest.
And there was no room for hunger in my childhood home. And is that the source of the desperation? Wow.
I've never heard anyone ask it to me in that way, but I think you're dead on. I think about the book, Rage Becomes Her.
And it makes the argument of the same issue that women have been angry for so long. And there's this fear that if we let it out, it's going to be this amazing rage.
And yet we also know with anger and rage, there's energy that can compel us to making changes and so on. And when it comes to primal hunger, the thing I find with a lot of people is they really underestimate the power of biology.
You know, an analogy I love giving, and perhaps because I love to surf when I'm in the ocean all the time, you know, when a big set comes, you go under and you hold your breath, you hold your breath, and you hope to God when you come back up, there's not another wave because you have to hold your breath longer. And when you finally hold your breath long, long, long, long, and you finally, it's clear to breathe, you inhale this gasp and no one says, oh my God, you have lost the control breathing.
You need to manage it. You need to be on a breathing plan.
And, and yet, because, you know, and this is our survival mechanism, right, to live. And we are wired that same way when it comes to nourishing our body, because without food, we will die.
And I think because we have food 24-7, we can door dash it, we can do all kinds of stuff. We really don't appreciate how strong that drive is.
And so when you're walking around chronically hungry, and you've got this fear, I'm one bite away from a binge. That's another way I've heard it describing.
My response is, you know, it's understandable because on a biological level, your cells know, your cells know like, she hasn't been feeding me enough and I've been working out so hard and I'm so tired. And so part of it is taking that brave risk and that brave leap of faith on starting to feed your body, knowing that that's part of the antidote.
But when you're in that place of fear, you know, I really, I tell my patients, I respect the fear because fear gets in the way of doing a lot of things. We don't want it to hijack us, but at the same time, we need to look, okay, what do I need to feel safe in order to add this particular food to my eating in order to nourish my body and looking at those kinds of aspects.
So, yeah, there's a lot, a lot there.

I now believe I'm in this newest iteration of recovery and I now do believe that I have an internal thing that will tell me when I'm hungry and that I can eat and then feel full and then wait a few hours and then feel hungry again and then eat and then feel full. And then like, I understand what I'm saying to you sounds very obvious, but I did not know that about myself.
I actually really get it. And I respect that because again, there's a lot of fear to get to that place where you're at.
It's amazing that you're at that place that you have cultivated that trust in spite of the many years of being involved in disordered eating or eating disorders, which to me is a great message of hope for all your listeners out there who are struggling, whether they're on the edge of an eating disorder, disordered eating, that you know what, it is possible to recover. It is possible to reclaim this self-trust.
But it takes work, as you know. Just listening to both of you just now, is the opposite of fear trust in this conversation? Because what you're talking about with primal anger and primal hunger and primal exhaustion, And is it is the root of it really coming not only back into your body but trusting your yourself to make decisions trusting that your body is going to send the messages trusting that you will hear the messages and then also trusting that it won't like that the anger anger won't last forever, that the hunger won't last forever.
You know, that there are things that we can do. And I think the basic is, is to really trust your body and yourself because the world is telling us women in every way possible that we are not to be trusted.
Right. And it's like the most primal coming home.
Yeah. Oh, I love that language.
You know, it's good. How do we lose it? Like, I want to start with the little girl, right? The little girl know does know when she's hungry but let me tell you a story okay that I was thinking about this morning I have wonderful beautiful parents you know that during recovery a lot of stuff comes up right so I have been exploring the complexity of my family of origin.
Karmically,

I also have deeply feeling sensitive writers for children. So I know that I will be dealing with them figuring me out in several years, which so karmically I'll get it back.
But I remember my parents sitting with me at the dinner table as a child. And whenever I would go for a second scoop, my dad would look at me and he would say, did you wait for your message? Wait for your message.
Oh. And that is what was said to me every night.
And then I would freeze and then I would stop eating. So it's interesting though, Evelyn, right? Because it's like he was trying to teach me that I would have an instinct inside me of fullness.
But what happened was that I didn't learn that I had a message. I learned that he was the message and the control was outside of me.
Yeah. So that's one way.
How do we lose in general? How do people lose their trust in their own bodies and start looking outside of themselves? It's so complex, as you know. So one exercise I like to do with my patients is I call it your body lineage.
And that is looking at your family of origin. What was your earliest message of what a body should look like and how a body should be treated? We look at parents.
We look at the messaging through the life cycle up to the age of someone is seeing me. We look at siblings.
Was there teasing involved in what your parents do? And did the parenting match their normal parenting style? And often what I see is the teasing goes undisciplined and it makes it seem like it's okay. Then we look at grandparents, aunties and uncles.
What was the messaging there? Was there body gossip when you went to family events? And what's really sad now is I am seeing patients who are second and third generational dieters. Their grandma's been dieting.
And so you get that. And then that's just our family of origin.
And now let's expand to the world around us. Social media, media, media, all of these messages that you are one bite away, man, from killing yourself, or you're one bite away from curing yourself.
And eating is so much more nuanced than that. And so it gets really, really complex.
And the thing I like to emphasize with parents, I have not yet met a parent who doesn't want the best for their kids. And a lot of these things they do are a couple of things.
One, it's really well-meaning. And sometimes, obviously, I don't know your parents, but sometimes what's happening is the parents are projecting their own insecurities onto their kids.
They doubt their ability. I'll give you an example with my son.
It came up as you were giving your story. When he was two years old, I made this amazing meal.
I just, I remember it. Lasagna, salad, my favorite cake.
I don't know why I did it all for me, but I did. And the family loved it too.
So I serve everyone the same size of cake. He finishes his meal, he finishes cake, and he looks at me, goes, more mommy.
And the mommy in me is thinking, dude, you've had enough to eat. But the intuitive is like, you know what, let him have cake.
I've served him another piece, the exact same size. You know what he did? He ate one piece, he ate one bite rather, and off he went.
And so what that does, I was thinking, my God, if my patients that I see their parents witness that, they see the self-regulation. But if they are tightly wound and they're afraid, they might over-regulate and say, oh, you know, do think you really need that piece? Or in the case of your dad, you know, what is your tummy telling you what your messages and those kinds of things.
So it gets really, really complex. And one of the things I aspire to for families is, you know, diet culture out there is just so, so nasty and so pathological.
And the idea of changing culture is so big. But what if we simplify and said, you know, what if we end the legacy of diet culture at our own kitchen table? At least home.
Yeah. Is a safer space to the degree that that's possible.
We don't disparage bodies. We don't disparage food and those kinds of things.
Because the world outside is tough enough. And I have a lot of young parents who really, when they hear that message, like, oh, I can aspire to, I can do that.
I want to do that for my kids because they understand the suffering that they've been through with all the dieting and all the stuff that goes on, all the noise around diet culture. Well, and it makes me think the story of your son makes me wonder if you're the parent who says, no, you've already had your slice of cake.
That child psychologically leaves the table and all they're thinking about is wanting another piece of cake. And so that's done on a regular basis.
And the thing I want to emphasize, generally one episode is not going to make or break a kid's childhood. You know, so parents out there thinking, oh my God, I did that with my kid.
What do you do on a regular basis is what I would be looking at that's a really really good point and it encourages self-healing for parents because it does truly it's no bless us like when we say to our kid or if we say to ourselves well I can't just give them what they want they will eat eat until they are sick or that we must not believe that about ourselves. Like if we learn for ourselves, if we start to eat intuitively and we heal and we learn that actually we are not bottomless pits, that our bodies work, then that self-trust would wash over us with our parenting.
We would say, this child is not a bottomless pit. This child, I can provide this child what this child is asking for, and this child's body will regulate itself eventually.
Yes, it's trusting. And you know, and I love what you just said, and that is my body is working.
And that's something I have a lot of my patients do is to identify when their body is working. They'll come in sometimes and they're really pissed off because they got really, really hungry and ate a lot, a lot of food.
It's like, well, let's unpack this and see what's going on. Oh, well, they had an early lunch at 11.
They got pulled into a meeting after work. Then they went and worked out and they got home at eight o'clock.
They haven't eaten in eight hours. And it's like, you know, I understand it was really annoying for you.
And yet what I want you to see is your body's working. Your body's like, I haven't had enough to eat.

Feed me, please.

And what's really needed besides the trust is consistency for the most part on a regular basis that if you want your body to trust you, when even all this time of deprivation,

it needs to be fed consistently, nourished consistently to the

degree that that's possible. We don't have to be perfect.
I want to emphasize it's not a perfect process. Okay.
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And do you think, I just read this thing today that said that if you eat at the same times around the same times every day, is that would you instruct people to do that? Or is it just like eat when your body's hungry? You know what, it really depends when I'm working with someone, they're usually seeing me because they're having more challenges than the average. And so sometimes I might create together joint create some scaffolding to help them honor their hunger.
And so having regular meals can be really helpful. I'll never forget back when I was training, I was back in my competitive days of marathon training.
I would go over to my grandma's who lived out in a rural area and because I could train with no stoplights and stuff. And she would eat dinner every day at five o'clock.
And I'm like, I'm not hungry. But by the end of the week, I was hungry at five because our bodies get used to this.
So yeah, that can be a method if that's helpful. I would certainly, you know, check that out and experiment and see.
In my early days of recovering this time around, I started to understand that my anorexia was a bit of a oppressive religion that I was following. And like all oppressive religions, it was there to protect me from myself, that I thought I was bad.
And so I needed this set of dogma or to follow to protect me from my own badness, which as an aside is also was I could have been describing my evangelical experience, but very similar, right? What I remember talking to my doctor at that time and saying, I have great news. I figured out what I'm going to replace the anorexia with.
And I excitedly just told her a bunch of new rules that I was going to keep for myself. And I thought she was going to be like, she's nailing it.
Yeah. And she said to me, you know, that's interesting, Glennon.
I'm hearing what you're saying. What I want you to know is a lot of people who do not have an internal locus of control continue to depend on outer locus of control.
Now, Evelyn, what I need you to know also is that everything was so confusing to me in early recovery that I thought she was telling me for one solid year that I needed to have a locust inside of me. and Evelyn not until I read it in a book was I like

oh that I needed to have a locust inside of me. And Evelyn, not until I read it in a book, was I like, oh, it's a locust.
It's a center. So can you explain what is an internal locust of control? Basically, I would say it's having self-efficacy.
You trust yourself and you don't rely on external or other people to make decisions, whether it's around your eating, career choices, all of those kinds of things. So it's trusting your inner guidance.
Yeah. And so many of us learned not to do that.
It's like we all learned that the way that we can survive is to find a map, like a map that someone else. A magical map.
Yes. Like, here's my religion map.
Here's my work map. Here's my.
And the problem with maps is that someone else made them. Right.
Oh, that's so true. Absolutely.
Yeah. And it might work for that discoverer, but not for you, not your body.
Yes. Only you know.
Yeah. So this idea that, okay, no more maps and just an inner compass that will guide you one step at a time.
That's even a better description, an inner compass. Yeah.
I like that. So the wild thing I'm finding a year and a half into recovery is that the food is the least of it.
Yeah. Yeah.
Because if one starts trusting one's hunger and discovering that one is not broken, then one starts trusting all of their other bottomless pits. One starts trusting their need for rest.
One starts trusting the validity of their anger. One starts trusting the need to slow down and feel the sadness.
A magical discovering of unbrokenness is utterly life-changing. Is this something you see happening that it just goes so beyond food and then you start trusting the compass for everything and then your entire outer world shifts.
I see it all the time. In fact, at least I get unsolicited emails and DMs that this has changed my life.
Back when I was talking about the intercept of awareness, you know, that is our body's way of self-regulation at a biological level, but it includes emotions. And when you are in touch with that, it helps get your needs met.
And what ends up happening is it clears up brain space. So yes, you trust yourself in your decisions, but now you have more ease, ease in living, ease in eating.
You're present at conversations. I can't tell you the amount of patients I've worked with where, yeah, they were there at the dinner with their girlfriend or their partner or their family, but their mind was somewhere else.
Their mind was calculating how they're going to compensate. And so they're not present in the relationship.
So that's the other thing that ends up happening. There's more presence in the relationship, which is incredible.
Absolutely. That is so true.
I mean, it makes a lot of sense to me. And coming from my background, food was fuel.
And I think that I have always had an overeating problem since retiring, because that's what I became accustomed to. And I actually remember early on in my sobriety, I spoke with this one woman.
She said, what are you using to supplement alcohol? And I said, I drink so much coffee. And she said, what I want you to remember and what I want you to do is drink as much coffee as you possibly can drink as long as you don't drink any alcohol.
And I said, what do you mean? She said, if it's nine cups a day, drink it. Eventually your body will stop needing the caffeine, will stop thinking.
And I think so much of what you're talking about with this intuitive eating is of the same mindset, right? Like give your body the fuel, especially if you have been limiting the food. So I don't know, I think that everything what you're saying is like, so important for me to hear, especially because as an athlete, because I'm still an athlete, I just work out much less than I used to.
Yeah. Thinking about food as nourishment instead of fuel, because it was like, I sat down at a meal and I'm like, did I earn these calories? Did I work hard enough to earn the food? Like to me, I had to previously work hard to earn the food.
Oh, wow. Wow.
And that was hard for me to unravel in my retirement. Well, and I'll tell you what, I've worked with a fair amount of elite athletes who then retire.
And what ends up happening many times is, well, many people take them aside, like, well, you better watch it. You can't eat the same amount of food you've been eating now.
And it creates this doubt. And it creates this vigilance about the eating when this person never had an issue with food before.

But because of all of this mistrust, you're back to the fear again.

You start second guessing yourself, you know.

Evelyn, what are we so vigilant about?

Like trying to get to the root of all of this.

I did an episode about my original anorexia diagnosis, which shocked me.

I just thought I was nailing it as a woman. I didn't know that I was anorexic at all.
Um, yeah, I'm always figuring out that I'm things that I didn't know I was, but that's another story. Um, what I remember some, after an hour of talking about anorexia, somebody said, God, you're so fat phobic.
And I wanted to be like, no shit, Sherlock.

What the hell do you think anorexia is?

Clearly, I am revealing that I am terrified of growing, right?

Like, yes, I am saying that that is true.

What is the root of fat phobia?

Why the hell are we also, why have we been conditioned and trained to be afraid of it? It's, and you're right, it is a conditioning. It's a social conditioning.
And if you want to really trace back the roots, we can get into slavery, fear of the black body, misogyny, capitalism. There's all kinds of things.
And there's this fascinating framework called Bobby Harrow's cycle of socialization. And it shows how we are born into this world, you know, in a sense, we're not hating our body.
But as we start getting these messages from our trusted family, caregivers, and so on, as it gets into our institutions, in our schools, in our policies, and so on, then there are rewards and punishments if you, you know, conform to what they consider the norm, and people don't want to be treated badly. You know, if you're in a larger body, it's awful and stressful to wonder, am I going to be able to fit on that airplane? Is that seatbelt extender going to work for me? If I go to a roller coaster ride and amusement park with my kids, will I be able to go on the ride with them? Because the world was not built for people in larger bodies.
So the anti-fat bias is unfortunately alive and well, and it's in healthcare. And it just, oh my gosh, the medical fat phobia that creates even bigger problems and gatekeeping in terms of getting care, it's a very, very big issue.
Huge. And the mistreatment of people in the prejudice and the horrific abuse, really.
It is abuse. Of people in bigger bodies.
And mistreatment. Yeah.
And someone says, I don't want to be treated that way. So I'm going to conform as if we can mold our body like it's clay.
And that's the shocking part to a lot of people, you know, that they get sucked into all these diets thinking, well, this one's going to work. And yet there's a body of research showing it doesn't work.
It predicts actually more weight gain. If there's anything wrong with that, it predicts weight stigma.
It predicts eating disorder risk, predicts weight cycling, which in of itself has its own health risks in terms of cardiovascular mortality and all kinds of issues around there. And sometimes I think it's like a form of virtual signaling.
Look how good I am because I eat this way. You know, it's like the day, I don't remember when this was because now it's happened so much.
It's a sad norm that you go to have a meal with family and friends and someone's apologizing for what they're eating or they're explaining. You don't need to explain to anyone why you're eating or why you're not eating.
Let's just break bread and enjoy the conversation and catch up with ourselves and so on. So it's a cultural neuroses that we have.
It's global. I see it all over the place.
And in white women, it's such a signal of goodness. It's like- Oh, it is.
And worthiness and power, power. I always think about the quote from Naomi Wolf, who, let's admit it, has seriously lost the plot.

But she did say something very smart, which was that thinness is never been about beauty. It's always been about obedience.
Yes. Right.
It is my living in a tiny body and denying hunger, denying appetite, denying power, denying all of it is my signal to patriarchy that I am a good girl. Yeah.
And denying your exhaustion. And you know, Abby, you mentioned this earlier about primal exhaustion, because another trend I see a lot with people who are especially over exercising.
And one of the ways I ask about this is, you know, if you're feeling an injury coming on, can you take a break? If you're feeling sick, can you take a break? And if the answer is no, no, no, then I will ask, do you have a fear that if you stop working out, you're never going to work out again? Yes. How did you know? And then I said, well, because I think your body's exhausted and I see you smiling, Abby, with that.
And what I see is if someone's had the love of sport or the love of movement, it will come back. But your body just needs this big old rest.

There's nothing wrong with you.

It's just you're exhausted.

I actually had to do an entire year, like almost a self experiment on on reteaching myself what suffering meant, because to me, I attached the amount that I was able to suffer to my self-esteem. If I was, if I was able to suffer deeply, you will get this as a marathoner.
Then that brought me an incredible amount of self-esteem. And it's, you know, it's this illusion of power that I thought that I was stronger, better, faster than everybody.
And so I did an experiment that I spent an entire year of not doing anything to suffer and to see what would happen with my self-esteem. And the irony is that I actually started to trend to do things more that I enjoyed doing.
Ah, beautiful. So I got into surfing.
I would go on. Oh, no kidding.
Yes. And P.S.
I'm on the Facebook Girls Who Can't Surf. Oh, I love that group because it's so much fun.
There's no performance involved. Exactly.
So I found these little niches of things that I was getting into. And I think the same can be said for, for food.
Cause like, I do think that there's a self-esteem quotient involved. Was I a good girl during this meal? Did I follow all of my perceived rules prior? I read something that you, I think it was a New York times article where some, somebody was having dinner with you and you had had a big dinner and then you ordered cake and you had one bite of it.
And then you pushed it awake or you invited the table to have some because you were full. And the person said, oh, you're so good.
How did you have one bite of that? And you said, no, I'm not good. I'm satisfied.
Can you talk to us about good, bad, sin, discipline? Yeah. And we're talking about the morality of eating versus satisfaction.
Yeah. And so aiming for satisfaction is a great way to center your eating.
And by the way, I want to also say, you know, I've had some people think that eating has to be a 10 every time that the meal has to be nirvana. It's like, no, sometimes

it's a pair of boring, sensible shoes. It's going to get the job done and that's okay.

But when you can eat to the point of satisfaction and, you know, you can have that food again,

I knew that wasn't not going to be the last time I was going to have cake. It's not a big deal.

And sometimes, honestly, I feel a little sad. It's like, oh, by the way, I forgot to mention, I'm here in Hawaii working remotely so I can surf.
And you might be hearing waves in the background. And there's a restaurant here that I love.
It's got my favorite dessert. It's hula pie.
It's Miss Macadamia Nuts ice cream with chocolate fudge. And I get sad when I'm full because like, oh, it tastes so good.
But I'm not willing to feel uncomfortable to eat the rest of it. And I know I can have it again whenever I want to.
And I realize there's privilege in that as well. I want to state that as well.
Yeah. Yeah.
But because you know you trust yourself, you know you're not going to future deprive yourself of this thing. So you don't have to eat till you're past full because you know you're going to give it to yourself whenever you want it in the future.
Absolutely. And by the way, I will say that when people are newish into intuitive eating and have a long history of deprivation, what sometimes can happen is that sadness of feeling full because you still want to eat can feel devastating.
It's me. Oh, yeah.
Okay. So that is actually more of a reflection of the year spent in deprivation.
And so what I say is that will ease up as your body mind gets to see, oh, you're going to have that food again. You're going to have that food again.
And, you know, you can still eat it right now if you want to. But do you want to feel that way that you might be feeling? And maybe you can, you know, save it.
Maybe you can make a promise you're going to have it again. You go back, you know, the next day or whatever it happens to be what that food is.
So that's it's normal. There's nothing wrong with you.
You're not aberrant because you're so sad that I'm so full, you know, or you're so excited about trying a new food. I get patients so excited.
I get to eat really, I really get to eat the cake. It's like, yeah.
And then they feel guilty. They're so hard on themselves.
Then they feel guilty because they're excited. It's like, you know, you have freedom maybe for the first time.
And that's pretty exciting. Nothing wrong with that.
It's normal to feel excited and anxious, all the feels, all at the same time. Nothing wrong with you.
It's the human experience.

Yeah, your writing partner said this, which is so ridiculously simple, but made me very emotional. She said, you can have whatever you want.
You can have it for the rest of your life. pod squatters

like what

we could actually have the rest we needed. We could have our sadness.
We could have our anger. We could have our appetite.
It's like what the work is to figure out all of the things that have been set up against us believing that. Yeah.
And you know, and part of it is figuring out something really basic. What am I feeling? What do I need? And then sometimes I'll do even want to call the universal attunement question.
And that is one of three answers. How do you feel right now? Pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral? And our brain naturally organizes that way in terms of like, don't like, or kind of neutral.
And if the description is, oh, I'm feeling unpleasant, then the question, oh, why might that be? Maybe they're hungry. Maybe they're sad and need companionship.
But starting to get into that. And so many, we've been talking about women have been so other focused at the expense of not getting your own needs met.
And that's where the problem happens. There's nothing wrong with being service oriented, but when your own needs are not being met, that's when it becomes

a problem. Yeah.
And what I've discovered in this year of recovery, where I start to see everything

differently is people who don't meet their own needs, selfless people are very dangerous.

I truly am starting to see that I was a dangerous person like being not a person who can feed myself in all different ways makes you so controlling of the outer world when you don't trust yourself you don't trust anyone else and that makes you dangerous That's a good point. Yeah.
You know, so I don't, I have shifted from seeing selflessness or martyrdom or obsession with the other and not the self. I've gone from seeing it as, um, just a harmless woman thing to actually quite dangerous.
Like I don't want to be around people who don't take care of themselves because I don't trust it yeah and you know what's interesting when people are sucked into diet culture whether it's an eating disorder or just diet culture dieting or trying to eat the healthiest way that you can there's and this doesn't get talked about enough there is a profound level of self-absorption that goes on yeah and it's a oh thank you you get it so whenever I bring it up to my patients, I'm really delicate because I don't want to sound like I'm criticizing them. But when you're so self-absorbed, first of all, it's understandable to survival response on some level, but that means you're not aware of what's going on around you.
And it's, it becomes really problematic. And there was this famous study done during World War II where they took men who were conscientious objectors, they were very healthy in mind and body, put them on a semi-starvation diet.
And what they found is that these men became incredibly self-absorbed. They became obsessed about eating.
Again, this is during World War II. There was no TV food network and chefs, celebrity chefs running around.
And all they could talk about is food and collect recipes and cookbooks. And some of those men developed eating disorders.
Again, they started off very, very healthy in mind and body. So it's an example of what food restriction can do to your mind and body.
It's really profound. We can't underestimate it.
That is the story that my doctor told me to finally convince me that I was anorexic in my very adamant insistence that I was not.

When she read me that study and all the details about what happened to those men,

it was absolutely devastating to me because I felt like I was discovering that what I thought

was my personality or my personhood was actually just a bundle of symptoms of someone who was

a hungry brain. Yeah.
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There's 10 principles of intuitive eating. It's not the same at all in any way, but a little bit it reminds me of recovery, like AA, because it's like a set of things that helps you live a little bit differently.
But I know it's not rules. I know we're not doing that.
Thank you for knowing that. We're not doing that.
But I know you choose to lead with the ones that you feel like a person needs to hear. What tenets of intuitive eating do you feel like would be good to share with us or start with us for this? Yeah, I want to do at least two.
It's so hard. It's like asking to name your children, which one should we start with? And one of the ones I want to start with is rejecting diet culture, rejecting diet mentality.
There has been a misperception that you can't do intuitive eating if there's a part of you that still wants to be in a smaller body. And my response is, you know what? You're a human being.
We're living in a weight-obsessed culture. Of course, you can come in.
You can come into this and be confused and not sure. This is not a journey of perfection.
This is not a journey of pass or fail. All are welcome.
The issue becomes what you're willing to act on is can you center the work of intuitive eating? And yes, we acknowledge that this desire of weight loss is in the room. And we'll talk about that as much as you need to.
But in other words, like on a computer, the active screen is the intuitive eating because that's inner base, as we were talking about earlier. And the moment you start focusing about weight, that becomes external and the work needs to be really internal so that you can start to experience and hear and respond in a timely manner and trust those messages in the body.
And I think the other one, I think Elise would agree with me on this. Probably the most organizing principle of all of them would be aiming for satisfaction because ultimately it's not satisfying to under eat.
Ultimately, it's not satisfying to eat to a point where you're past comfortable full. And so in a really weird way, aiming for satisfaction gets you into balance.
And it's pleasure based. Most people I have worked with have not ever come across that as a way to start working with their eating.
And so you get to get curious. It's very, very personal.
And so often I will say, you know, when I'm doing interviews, if you want to take one step, that could be a step. What would be a satisfying meal for you? What would be a satisfying snack? And I've had patients say, I have no idea.
And they start crying. They don't know what their favorite foods are because they have been so conditioned to follow the plan, to follow the guru.
And it's important that we have a lot of self-compassion on this journey. As you had been describing your own story, Glenn, and there's a lot of revelations that end up happening like, oh my God, I was like this, you know, and that's okay.
You didn't know. You didn't know any better.
Now you're starting to know differently. And when we know better, we do better.
So those are two I'd be working with. Another one, and this gets a lot of misunderstandings, is making peace with food, which basically means you can eat whatever food that you want to.
And I have patients that are terrified of that. And I don't push that when they're not ready to work on that.
And so sometimes I might look at, and there's a big psychology on this, a lot of research on habituation. And habituation is this phenomenon dealing with novelty.
So if you think about, you know, the first time you had a new pair of shoes that you just couldn't wait to have, or a new car, it could be an old car, but it's a new car to you and how exciting it is. And after a year of having, it's like, ah, it's my ride.
And the best way I've ever heard it described by a researcher was, you know, imagine you're falling in love for the first time with somebody. And at some point they say, I love you.
And it's amazing. It's magical.
You're floating on air. But five years later, you're in a committed relationship.
They say, I love you. And it's wonderful to hear, but it's not that same magical feeling.
And so with making peace with food, it's about having the habituation process. Because when you're constantly on some food plan, some dieting plan, some restriction, food stays exciting and food stays scary.
The habituation process hasn't taken place yet. And then there's this whole other area.
It's known as the restraint theory, but what it's known as, it's nickname, it's the what the hell effect of eating. And that is when someone has a lot of restraint around eating, they have rigid rules, something comes along to break that restraint.
And it could be an event, it can be an emotion, it can be a food. And all of a sudden, it's like, oh, I'm never gonna eat that food again.
So I'm gonna get it all now while I can. And it ends up becoming an all or none kind of food feast.
So making peace is really about the psychology of having ease with your eating, whatever that food happens to be. It's amazing in that process.
Yes, I have a follow up question. I think, because I'll speak for myself here.
I think that I am probably more addicted to sugar than maybe anything that I've ever been addicted to. And so my question is, in terms of this idea of this philosophy of intuitive eating, what do I believe in my urges? Because I do have that urge after dinner, every night to finish it up with something sweet.
And I know that we're not trying to, I just am curious at like this idea of intuitive eating, listening to your body, but I have this real what I think is probably a real sugar thing that's happening inside of me. How do I differentiate healthy versus addiction? Because we're addicts.
This is problematic. Well, and you know what? We can get into the weeds on food addiction theory.
The interesting thing is, is when you look at what are the causes and conditions that might create this, it could be a belief system. I shouldn't have sugar or I shouldn't have too much sugar.
I can have a quote, moderate amount. If I follow just the portion size, and then the moment you have like two cookies instead of three, then what happens? If you haven't been getting enough to eat, that's going to increase the intensity of desire for sweets because our body survives by carbs.
I've never met anyone who's contacted me and said, Evelyn, I have this issue with kale. I can't stop eating it.
It's usually a carb thing and often sugar because that's what the body needs in order to survive. In fact, we even have a carbohydrate storage form in the brain.
We have glycogen in the brain. It's so important.
So biological deprivation can fuel that sweet desire. Psychological deprivation, meaning I can't have it or I shouldn't have it too much.
And these things can cause you to cross the line. And then there's also just patterns of eating.
Some cultures have a sweet or sweets after finishing a meal. And there's actually really nothing bad with that.
But if you believe that what you're doing is wrong, that you're one bite away from a sugar binge, that creates kind of a scarcity mindset to some level. What do you think about that? That's probably where I live is that I'm afraid that I'm one step away from just like going into the freezer and emptying out every like I do think that I have a trust issue with myself, with my hunger, because I have a voracious appetite.
I think that I could have, I could be helped in this way. Do you, are you scared of your appetite? Yes.
I mean, I am for a lot of reasons, I grew up in a family that was more overweight. I grew up in an environment where your body was the mechanism to income to your safety and security in the world.
And I also grew up in a bigger body as a woman. So I have all of these things that have kind of played a role in this, especially in my retirement, where I'm, you know, I start eating at noon, because I intermittent fast, because I don't, I don't think it's that healthy.
And I don't even like when you talk about that intermittent fasting around me, I've asked her not to do that because I just feel like so much, I have a bottomless pit of anger at diet culture. Yeah.
Yeah. I'm with you.
I'm with you. It's everywhere.
It's everything. It's so much.
I think even all look, I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, but I think even being scared that you're addicted to sugar is probably just from diet culture, right? Like why does everyone suddenly think they're addicted to sugar? Like why is it just that we like sugar? Yeah. So Abby, can I ask you? Yes.
You know, appetites speaking one athlete to another former my case. Marathon training, I had tremendous appetites.
People used to tease me. I've had people say, oh my God, you're eating a lot of food.
And my response would be, I'm an athlete, I need to train like one. And so my experience has been people not seeing a woman eat, first of all, and they eat in quantities that can rival what a man's eating because I'm training like a lot.
And so I'm wondering when you talk about your appetites, if that's also a byproduct of your

training. Yeah, it's normal.
In other words, to have the appetite. Yes, for sure.
It is normal. I think the way I'm engaging in my not that I'm on a diet, but in the way that I eat, has a control function in it that I pass off as well, I just want to live longer.
And I don't want to carry excess weight. I am also looking at the fact that I have, you know, heart disease in my family and my, you know, keeping my cholesterol at bay, like all of these things, scientifically speaking, are also in my consciousness around it.
But I do want to feel like I can trust myself more. Yeah, so I want to offer a suggestion just for you to think about.
And it's been my experience that the people I work with who engage in intermittent fasting has been the stepping stone into problematic eating. I've seen a lot of binge eating.
There's been studies now with binge eating correlated with that. You lose muscle mass when you do that.
At least that's what some of the studies have shown. So it's just something to think about.
And then remember I was saying earlier about anti-fat bias being in health care and institutionalized. When you start looking at all the research around weight, it's all of this epidemiological research, meaning it's association, not causation.
And when you start getting into the weeds on this, which is a hobby of mine, they don't control for really important things like social determinants of health, like trauma, like weight cycling, like weight stigma, this all can have an impact on

that. And then having this fear quote of weight gain because of health, that gets you into diet

culture, but now it's holy, it's noble, you know, and regardless of the reason to be concerned about

weight, it doesn't change the outcome data. So those are some things I'd have you just take a

look at. And I'm not your, you know, nutritionist or anything, but that's something I would be wondering if that's kind of feeling a little bit of the sugar desire.
The desire is there. I love sweets, by the way.
There's nothing wrong with enjoying sweets, but the fear is what I'm hearing there. You're one bite away from mayhem.
Yes. Yeah.
Yes. For me, it's like a removal of all of the things that I have been told will protect me from myself.
That's the journey I'm in right now. Like I am suspicious of every single thing in my life.
Every person, every dogma, every intermittent fasting feels to me like just another thing that somebody is telling me is going to protect me from this dangerous appetite that I have. Right? What am I, what are we all protecting ourselves from? That's the big question, isn't it? You know, there was a study published, oh my God, over 20 years ago, kind of looking at this focus that we have on this desire for health and protection and this desire to not be killed by what we eat.
That's my paraphrase and the researcher didn't say it that way. But one of the things the researcher said that really to me was really ahead of his time was like, you know, we're so worried about what's going to kill or cure us in terms of the food.
We need to start looking at what is the impact of this worry or this anxiety? That's not healthy on our body. You know, that increases stress, which is not a positive thing also.
And I think we really need to get back to enjoying our food. And one of the things I see is that there seems to be, oh my gosh, every decade, almost every year even, there's always a new food that's going to save you.
And there's some food that's going to be demonized. We certainly saw it with the low fat craze.
Then we saw it with the keto, all those kinds of things. And now it's like, oh my God, watch out for ultra processed foods and all those kinds of things.
And yet, in those conversations of fear mongering, we don't hear how most vegetarian foods are actually are one of the highest categories of ultra processed foods. So we're vitamins, so are supplements.
And so there's a lot of hypocrisy that I see or one-sided arguments on this. And what it's doing is scaring people.
And with that fear, then you turn that inside. You don't trust yourself because of all these things that are happening.
And I share with you, Glennon, having a healthy suspicion, skepticism. I said to my patients, like, oh, I wish you would have had that when you started dieting.
But you didn't know any better. And everyone gets all excited about the latest and greatest and so on.
So latest and greatest. I'll never forget seeing an advertisement for cigarettes that said gluten free.
Oh, I've not seen that. Oh, my gosh.
That's not the perfect illustration of it is don't trust what's really good for you. Just trust the latest craze that wellness tells you to avoid gluten, smoke these cigarettes, gluten-free.
Oh my God. Wow, wow, wow.
Are there any people that are in such trauma places or for whatever reason, this doesn't work? Like, are there people that should be that don't have the inner locus of guidance? I think it's a really good question, actually. And to me, it's not an issue that it's not working.
It's an issue of you probably need support. If you're going through trauma, oh my gosh, in order to feel connected to the body, you need to be present and you need to feel safe.
And when you're undergoing trauma therapy, you're often not in that place. And so we might be using things like nourishment as self-care, kind of some scaffolding into some of the principles of intuitive eating.
It's not that you can't access it. You just might need more support in doing so.
That's what I would be looking at. And so if anyone at a pod squad is listening, it's like, oh my God, this sounds amazing.
And yet I'm terrified. Well, maybe it'd be helpful to, you know, to work with somebody in this, because if you have an eating disorder, for example, this would be, you need to be working with your treatment team in terms of working with intuitive eating eventually and so on.
So it's, that's such an important thing to say, because when I'm listening to you say that, I'm thinking, yeah, that's what I needed. Like, and I'll tell you what, I've been avoiding you.
Like, it's weird. I have been.
I was not ready for this for a very long time. Okay.
And I think not because of you. No, because of her.
No, because I didn't take it personally. No, because I knew that this was the goal.
But I also knew that I couldn't do it yet. Like, I, you need to be ready.
I needed to be ready. And I had someone said to me in early recovery,

just eat intuitively. I would have lost my damn mind.
Like I, I didn't know what they were saying.

So I needed, like in the very beginning, I did have my doctor's head rules.

You need, you need a plan. Absolutely.
You're in the nutrition rehabilitation phase. And by the way,

I love that term. Cause we know, you know, to me in that phase, and eating just sort like a broken arm or a broken bone and you need a cast, you need structure to support the healing.
The goal is not to have the cast on for the rest of your life. And when this sufficient amount of healing has gone on, you remove the cast and you're more into the freestyle aspect.
And, you know, depending on the complexity, the more complex someone's situation is, you know, trauma history, eating disorder, history or eating disorder, it's going to be complex to work through. It's workable.
And I think, Glennon, you're a really good example of that. You give hope to a lot of people out there thinking that they're beyond hope.
It's a powerful message that you have after all these years to be in recovery. It's wonderful.
Right back at you. And I just love you because you've been doing this for a a long time like if any pod squatter is thinking that this is like a trendy new thing it's just trendy that people are actually talking about it in a wider i mean evelyn has been doing this for decades right it is yeah the book came out in 95 so we're looking at almost 30 years it's's just, it's wild.
It's really wild. And I

think because diet culture has gotten just so harmful, it's making our work even more needed. And so that's why I like to say that diet culture creates suffering.
Intuitive eating is a path out of suffering. If you want out of that suffering, there's a way for you to do that.
You don't have to suffer. I have one last question.

Yeah. And it's about suffering.

I

suspect There's a way for you to do that. You don't have to suffer.
I have one last question. Yeah.
And it's about suffering. I suspect that we're always talking about how there's so much at the root of all of this diet culture, all of it that has to do with capitalism.
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
I don't what I find in my recovery is that the more that I am honoring and trusting myself the less productive I am being the less hamster wheelie Serving every Doing all the things Social media

Working

I just, I'm, I'm, I'm doing less of that. And I just, do you think that there's a reason why culture wants women to be suffering and not trusting themselves? Because we talk about its capitalism from a high level.
But what I'm telling you is I am seeing it. I am seeing recovery make me less of a pawn.
Yeah. And less willing to grind.
You know, it is a byproduct of your wisdom of all the years and these kinds of things. And I don't think anyone sets out to say, oh, we want women to suffer with who we're going to create diet culture.
It's more insidious than that. And that's often why I like to use the term suffering, because no one wants to argue about suffering.
You know, even if someone's not ready to get into intuitive eating, most will say, yeah, I am kind of tired of suffering. And so it kind of, you know, piques their interest in that possibility.

But yeah, getting more into, you know, honest to gosh, it took, in your case, it was an

eating disorder.

It sounds like in my case, it took a diagnosis of breast cancer and treatment to finally

say, I am done with, you know, grinding, staying up to three in the morning to get other things

done for other people.

It's the first time in my life I don't feel guilty saying no. And it's almost embarrassing to say that, but it's, yeah, I'm not willing to do that anymore.
It's like, yeah, the, when you learn to say yes to yourself, then you, the next step is you learn to say no to other people. Yes.
And then you're just a big yes, no machine. And then you're good and you're satisfied.
Yeah. And it sounds so easy.
So easy. It's not.
Look at me. Look at me.
I'm 48 and I'm on step two or whatever. So Evelyn, just thank you for doing this work for so many people for so long.
We're just grateful for you. And I just feel like if you want proof that Evelyn, that this works, Evelyn is in fucking Hawaii about to go surfing.
That's right. It's what I'm doing after this.
Yeah. I literally am seeing in the reflection of the window behind you.
I see the, look at the wave. I'll duck.
I'll duck. Can you see it? Are you riding the wave right out front or do you go to a different break? It's right next door.
Sometimes I go out front, but next door I like. It's wrecking three to four today too.
And it's looking pretty nice. Perfect.
We'll have what she's having. Pod squad, we love you.
We can do hard things. Thank you.
Thank you, Evelyn. Bye-bye.
Thank you for having me on. See you next time, pod squad.
If this podcast means something to you, it would mean so much to us. If you'd willing to take 30 seconds to do these three things.
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I got what's mine And I continue to believe That I'm the one for me And because I'm mine I walk the line Cause we're adventurers And heartbreaks on map A final destination We're glad We've stopped asking directions In some places they've never been And to be loved we need to be known

We'll finally find our way back home

And through the joy and pain

That our lives bring

We can do a hard thing.

I hit rock bottom, it felt like a brand new start. I'm not the problem sometimes things fall apart and I continue to believe the best people are free and it took some time But I'm finally fine Cause we're adventurers and heartbreaks on map A final destination we lack They've stopped asking directions To places they've never been And to be loved we need to be known We'll finally find our way back home And through the joy and pain That our lives bring

We can do our thing We're adventurers and heartbreaks on that We might get lost but we're okay That we've stopped asking directions To places they've never been And to be loved we need to be known We'll finally find our way back home And through the joy and pain

That our lives bring

We can do hard things

Yeah, we can do hard things

Yeah, we can do hard things Yeah, we can do

hard things