What Does Intuitive Eating and Health at Every Size Really Look Like?

Content Warning: Describes disordered eating habits.

Exactly five years ago, I was deep in the trenches of my last diet ever. For 30 whole days, I obsessed about bagels and croissants. My mental health suffered and it was debilitating to be in social situations, go out to dinner, and attend parties. I know I wasn't fun to be around, too, because all I could think and talk about was my diet.

Fast forward to last night. As I was getting ready for bed, the realization dawned on me that I did not eat a single sweet thing all day nor did I think about eating a single sweet thing or crave sweets at all for the first time in my entire life. I was, as the kids say, shook.

In her podcast, Food Psych, Christy Harrison explains as restriction and binging as two ends of a pendulum that swings from one extreme to another. The more you restrict, the more you binge. But eventually, with trust in your own body and the intuitive eating process, the pendulum settles into equilibrium. After five years, my pendulum has finally found balance. This is what the process looked like for me:

My Intuitive Eating and

Health at Every Size Journey

Year 1: September 2018 - November 2019
Eat All the Things

From the moment I discovered intuitive eating in September 2018, I fully embraced the methodology. It made sense to me as someone who had spent a lifetime trying to alter the size of my body, restricting and obsessing over my food, using exercise as punishment, and after all that, had only succeeded in weight cycling. In November 2018, my husband and I took an incredible trip to Europe with our son, which was the perfect way to celebrate eating whatever I wanted.

For most of my life, I had believed, as many people do, that if I allow myself to eat anything I want, I would exclusively eat fries and pizza and never want to touch another fruit or vegetable again. My first debunking of this myth was during finals week of my senior year of college. I spent an entire weekend holed up in my room, eating only things that come in bags. By the time my parents picked me up on Monday, I could think of nothing but the fresh crispness of salad.

In the first year of intuitive eating though, I wanted fruits and vegetables in small and infrequent quantities. For most meals, I ate things I hadn't allowed myself to eat for ages. Breakfast looked like fruits caramelized in butter with oats cooked in milk, non-whole-grain sourdough or French baguettes with crème fraiche soft scrambled eggs. I got cereals I hadn't eaten since childhood. I rediscovered my love of baking. For lunch and dinner, I made meals with white rice and white pasta instead of cauliflower rice and zoodles. There were some elaborate cheese boards and cooking with wine. We dined out at restaurants a lot more than we used to. I don't remember if I ate a single fruit the summer of 2019.

The pendulum stayed on the extreme side of "eat everything" until about November 2019. In this first year, I was reading every anti-diet and intuitive eating book I could find, listening to podcasts and following body positivity influencers and HAES nutritionists on Instagram. There were two decades of healing and unlearning to be done.

Years 2 and 3: November 2019 - October 2021
I Forgot a Chocolate Cake in the Car

The pivotal moment between "eat all the things" and feeling a shift toward balance came in November 2019 when I forgot a chocolate pound cake in my car for two days.

This was unfathomable to me, as a person who loves chocolate pound cake. And chocolate anything in general. All my life, if there was chocolate cake anywhere in my vicinity, I would either be eating it or be thinking nonstop about whether or not I should eat it because I wasn't letting myself eat it.

A few other life events around this time made this an interesting season for food. In December 2019, my daughter was born; in early January, I received the Nexplanon birth control implant; in February 2020, I started a job as the marketing manager for CSUN Dining so I was thinking about, writing about and photographing food all the time; and in March 2020, the pandemic hit.

Life and my eating habits were pure chaos. I was eating cereal every night/morning at 3 or 4 am when I was awake with my newborn. My birth control was wreaking havoc on my appetite, my mood, my mental health, my body, my energy, and my marriage. I got laid off in late March 2020 and with restaurants closed, I was cooking all of our family's meals. I was taking two walks per day (one with our dog in the morning and one in the evening as a family to get out of the house). I was frequently nauseous and had no appetite. And despite all of this, my body gained nearly a third of its weight in a year and a half.

The one positive of this year in terms of food was that, because I no longer worried about only eating organic or whole grain foods, I was more flexible with our groceries during the pandemic when people were hoarding everything and the pickings were slim. I also had more time to experiment with recipes, like sourdough bread and homemade ricotta cheese.

I started the process of trying to get my Nexplanon removed in March 2021 and it took 7 months, countless phone calls and doctors appointments, and a couple changes in my insurance before I was finally done with that nightmare. Body neutrality saved my self-confidence.

Year 5: July 2022 to Present
Rediscovering Ways to Truly Care for My Body and Holistic Wellbeing

My body in July 2022 did not feel good. After rapid weight gain from my birth control, a rolled ankle in October 2021 that made it difficult to walk let alone be active, and one sickness after another from reemerging into society, I felt lethargic and weak.

I struggled to carry my kids and to spend a day running after them at theme parks or the zoo. My joints ached. I felt much older than 33.

I tried to picture myself in five to 10 years, envisioned the kind of life I wanted to lead, traveling around the world, hiking and exploring. But the reality was that it was difficult for me to carry my body up a flight of stairs. That was not what I wanted for myself.

After countless years of using exercise as a way to shrink my body and repent for "too many calories" eaten, I found my way back to the joy of moving my body on my own terms. I set strict guidelines to protect myself from regressing back into a weight loss mentality. I don't weigh myself, I don't force myself to exercise a set amount of time if my body has reached its limit, I move my body in ways that feel good and that I enjoy (that mean no treadmills or elliptical for me), and I listen to my body and take breaks when I need it.

My goals are different too: I want to feel strong. I want my arms to carry my kids for as long as possible. I want to have endurance to go on adventures and keep up with my kids, my friends and my family. The more I prioritized movement, the more benefits I found. I also discovered more types of exercise that I love.

I rediscovered my love of swimming, the weightlessness and ease with which I glide through the water, the challenge of using my muscles to get from one end of the pool to the other. I take advantage of every opportunity to ride a bike and feel the wind in my hair. I tried a HIIT class for the first time and found one in particular at my gym that combines martial arts, HIIT and hip hop; it makes me feel like a badass ninja in a movie. Kickboxing also makes me feel invincible if only for the one hour I am in class.

When I first started exercising again, it was for only 15 minutes at a time. I couldn't jump. I had to stop swimming after every lap to catch my breath. But day by day, I added a few more minutes, an extra pushup, an extra lap.

I haven't lost or gained a single pound since I rediscovered my love of exercise. But now, I can do jumping jacks with ease, I can do 10+ pushups at a time, I can go hard in my favorite classes for the full hour. I can forget about my day's stresses while I live out my superhero battle fantasies. I can spend an entire day running after my kids at a music festival or Disneyland and carry them home at the end of the day when they fall asleep. I can hike and ride a bike for hours through the Canadian forest.

My food choices are a happy balance that make my body and mind feel good. I eat when I'm hungry, stop when I'm full. I enjoy the food offered at parties without a moment of anxiety or hesitation. Most days, food is simple: oatmeal with a dash of salt, collagen peptides, fruits and nuts for breakfast, salad or sandwich for lunch, a Buddha bowl or soup for dinner. I have rediscovered the beauty of fresh fruit and my go-to snack is a smoothie.

Some days, I might forget to eat cake. Or I might enjoy a huge slice. I might never return to my pre-baby weight. And that's okay. Because I will continue to cherish and care for my body and my mind. I will live a life I love in the body I have.