calorie counting vs intuitive eating? which is better?
Recently the interest in mental health exploded, mainly due to the entire world’s population being locked down. Suddenly people could no longer use various
means of escape to deal with whatever is going on in their minds.
Being locked indoors, the majority of people lost their drive and motivation to workout.
No workout, means no watching what you eat. Anything-goes approach was adopted by almost every body.
Some saying they’re “waiting this thing out”, while others completely threw in the towel with a “what’s it all for anyway” mentality.
Social media blew up with people working out live on Instagram and YouTube.
Others posting “What’s your excuse” captions while sporting a sweaty body from home workouts.
Stuck in a comparison loop, a lot of people sunk deeper into their “quarantine bod” - and that’s okay. However, binge eating and lack of exercise became the norm - Not so okay.
Enter the attack on dieting and tracking your food intake.
Nutrition coaches could not say a word about staying on track with your nutrition during lockdowns without others biting their heads off talking about how tracking your calories is adding more stress to people’s lives, causing eating disorders, and flat out saying “ain’t no body got time for that”.
Fast forward into 2021, the quality of our food has dropped, binge eating has sky-rocketed, and no one is motivated to eat healthy anymore.
If you happen to “follow” fitness or nutrition on social media these days, you can’t help but be bombarded with conflicting messages left and right.
Eating food suddenly became the center of attention, and the most complex thing in the entire universe.
Some social media accounts push for an intuitive way of eating to their followers who are mainly average joes and janes.
While other accounts cater more towards the “athletic”, posting about tracking macros and calories, staying the course, and hitting your goals. Sometimes though, these messages find their way to the wrong audience and hence the confusion.
Mind you, with all the confusion out there, you never find advocates of calorie tracking attacking an intuitive eating approach, whereas the opposite is true.
Intuitive Eating came back to light and health coaches came after calorie tracking hard! As if it were the cause of the global obesity epidemic.
If you have not heard of Intuitive Eating, here’s a quick definition:
“Intuitive Eating is a self-care eating framework, which integrates instinct, emotion, and rational thought and was created by two dietitians, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch in 1995. Intuitive Eating is a weight-inclusive, evidence-based model with a validated assessment scale and over 100 studies to date.” - www.inuitiveeating.org/definition-of-intuitive-eating
Intuitive eating sounds like a great method right? Except that it’s not for every body, or at least not at certain stages. more to come on that.
Intuitive eating enthusiasts however, claim that calorie counting is not everyone’s cup of tea.
I totally agree. Calorie tracking is not for every one either.
So where does that leave us?
Well, hear me out.
Calorie tracking or counting is a specific tool and approach that has a few prerequisites and is not for every body. we’ve established that already.
What I mean by that is that before you start counting or tracking calories, you need:
Previous dieting experience (preferable but not necessary if you refer to prerequisite 2
A real DESIRE to change and LEARN.
Healthy eating habits or what’s known as (a healthy relationship with food).
In my opinion, Intuitive Eating could be used to start a weight change cycle, and end a weight change cycle. Working hand in hand with tracking calories.
I’ll discuss how in the examples below.
For athletes and people with healthy relationships with food:
Stage 1: Learn the basics of nutrition, food groups, calorie/macro tracking, what’s inside your food etc by tracking macros or calories or at least eating according to the palm of your hand.
Stage 2: Achieve a goal regardless of how small.
Stage 3: After having picked up the basics, you can now start to eat intuitively and “eyeball” your food.
Stage 4: Cycle through that however you please depending on your goals. Got competitions coming up and need to eat well for your performance? Want to run a marathon? Want to cut a weight class? That’s how you do it. The longer you track your macros the more precise your weight loss or gain will be.
However, it is preferable not to extend a cutting or gaining phase beyond a year. That’s where intuitive and mindful eating come into play.
Why can’t an athlete start eating intuitively and stick with it? Well it depends on the level of the athlete, but that’s for a different post.
For people who do not identify as athletes, do not really care for physical appearance, and may have terrible food addictions:
Then they could start with an intuitive eating approach:
Stage 1: Learn to eat intuitively by fixing your relationship with food.
Stage 2: As you get better and want better results, learn more about nutrition and tracking by following the palm guide or counting macros.
Stage 3: Go back to eating intuitively after having gained more knowledge in understanding food groups, and understanding your body.
Stage 4: Win.
So to me it looks like people, regardless of their levels, could use different weight management approaches to get to their desired results.
What bothers me however, is statements like this, taken directly off www.intuitiveeating.org:
“The process of Intuitive Eating is a practice, which honors both physical and mental health. Intuitive Eating is aligned with Health at Every Size, because the pursuit of intentional weight loss is a failed paradigm, which creates health problems: including weight stigma, weight cycling, and eating disorders. All bodies deserve dignity and respect.”
“intentional weight loss”? Really? So deciding to lose weight intentionally is frowned upon?
Athletes cutting weight intentionally are wrong and should just lose the competition? People who need to drop weight and keep it off for health purposes should NOT do that? People who are advised by a medical professional to drop weight as it’s placing undue stress on their joints should just ignore the professional’s advice and continue to do what they do? This is where “Health at Every Size” fails. You cannot always be healthy at EVERY size.
I get it, we’re not all fitness models, and we shouldn’t be. One could not, and should not be at low body fat percentages for extended periods of time. It’s unhealthy. Being healthy while being slightly overweight is, well, healthy. But when we start making statements like “Health at Every Size” while we’re having a global obesity epidemic, where people are dying due to terrible health markers, then we have a problem.
“All bodies deserve dignity and respect”? Umm isn’t that just common sense? or is it just written there to make macro tracking sound like straight up abuse?
To put an end to this long post, I truly believe it’s not US vs THEM as the above statement implies.
It’s not EITHER OR.
It’s BOTH.
This is not a boxing match. Put down your gloves, hug it out and work together for the betterment of humanity.
Both methods have their place, as both should be utilized in a successful weight loss, weight maintenance, or weight gain journey.
If calorie tracking alone worked, no one would cycle off it and the entire world would be able to control their weight.
If Intuitive Eating alone worked, everyone would be happier, no one would binge, and people would no longer eat until they’re 400lbs with terrible health and shorter lifespans. and does that mean that obese people’s intuition is broken?
A healthy mix of approaches is the way forward. Learn about food and your body, track intake for a while using whichever method you prefer, lose or gain weight, while maintaining a flexible approach, then eat intuitively. For an athlete, this is the norm. For the non athlete, this should become the norm.
The fitness industry is failing people. The divide is keeping people confused, making a mountain of a molehill.
Can’t we all just get along?
The dude abides.
*The statements in grey have been taken from random posts online “attacking” calorie tracking.
Author: Nizar Kaawache