Why Intuitive Eating Fails the Women Who Need It Most (And Why ‘Just Listen to Your Body’ Isn’t Enough) (Outweigh)

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Join the pack and start feeding your best self. Listen to the one you feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Joel, the holidays are a blast, but the financial hangover. That can be a huge bummer. If you are out there and you're dreading the new statement email that reveals the massive balance that you may have racked up, well, you could use our help. That's right. I'm Joel.

I am Matt and we're from the How To Money podcast. Our show is all about helping you make sense of your personal finances so you can ditch your pesky credit card debt once and for all. Make real progress on other crucial financial goals that you've got and just feel more in control of your money in general. You know it for money advice without the judgment and jargon. Listen to how to money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

People, my people, what's up? This is Questlove. Man, I cannot believe we're already wrapping up another season of Questlove Supreme. Man, we've got some amazing guests lined up to close out the season, but, you know, I don't want any of you guys to miss all the incredible conversations we've had so far. I mean, we talked to A. Marie, Johnny Moore,

Hey everyone, I'm Madison Packer, a pro hockey veteran going on my 10th season in New York.

And I'm Anya Packer, a former pro hockey player and now a full Madison Packer stand. Anya and I met through hockey and now we're married and mom to two awesome toddlers, ages two and four. And we're excited about our new podcast, Moms Who Puck, which talks about everything from pro hockey to professional women's athletes to raising children and all the messiness in between. So listen to Moms Who Puck on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro, host of the hit podcast, Family Secrets. How would you feel if when you met your biological father for the first time he didn't even say hello? And what if your past itself was the secret and the time had suddenly come to share that past with your child? These are just a few of the powerful and profound questions we'll be asking on our 11th season of Family Secrets. Listen to season 11 of Family Secrets on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I won't let my body out mate I'll weigh everything that I made I won't spend my life trying to change

I'm learning to love who I am. I am strong, I feel free. I know every part of me is beautiful. And I will always, always, if you feel it, put your hands in the air. Show some love to the mirror while you're there. Let's take it one day at the top, because you can die, always.

Happy Saturday Outway, it's Leigh Ann here and today I want to talk about something that is going to hit home for a lot of women who've been on the food and body roller coaster for probably what feels like their entire adult life. And so we're going to talk about intuitive eating and why for so many of us it doesn't just work the way it's supposed to. And I know that's a bold statement, but stick with me because if you've tried it or failed at it and ended up feeling more broken than ever, then I really believe that you need to hear this.

Because, let's be honest, intuitive eating is often held up like the holy grail of post-diet or recovery life. And it promises freedom from rules and from obsessing and from punishing your body. And it sounds almost too good to be true, like just listen to your body and honor its signals. And, you know, like they tout it as, you know, no more counting and no more guilt and no more shoulds.

But what if you've spent decades ignoring those signals or have no idea what they feel like anymore? Because just think about it, if you've been using food as a comfort blanket or a stress ball or a way to anesthetize pain or anxiety, then air quotes listening to your body doesn't help much when your body's not speaking in a language that you understand.

your brain has been rewired to reach for chocolate when you're lonely or chips when you're panicked and bread when you're bored. And hunger and fullness cues aren't just faint. They might be completely scrambled. And so I've seen this play out with countless clients who come to me, you know, tears in their eyes saying, Leanne, I tried intuitive eating. Like everyone said it would be my savior, but I just ended up feeling more confused and ashamed.

And so let me tell you about one client. Her name is Lisa and she arrived at my virtual doorstep after her fifth attempt at intuitive eating. And she'd read all the books and listened to all the podcast and she desperately wanted to trust her body and to break free from the diet culture shackles. But every time she got stressed about work or fought with her husband, she found herself elbow deep in a bag of M&Ms, hardly, you know, the picture of intuition that she had in her mind.

And so Lisa said, I'm failing at intuitive eating, which I thought was gonna finally be the thing for me. Like, there must be something wrong with me if I can't even work with intuitive eating or if that even that doesn't work. And my heart broke for her because that's the real tragedy here. Like, women blame themselves for not getting intuitive eating right as if it's this simple concept and they're just too defective to apply it.

But intuitive eating can't fix what's happening deep in your brain's wiring. And Lisa didn't need more affirmations about body wisdom. She needed to address the roots of her emotional responses and the food seeking circuits that had been firing away in her brain for years.

And so this isn't just anecdotal, but the struggle isn't logical. And if it were logical, we'd all just say like, oh, I'm not hungry, I won't eat. Or, you know, I'm feeling sad, I'll just breathe through it. But our brains don't operate that way under stress. And so years of dieting and self-loathing form neural loops that tie emotions directly to food. And without tools that directly address these loops,

telling someone to just listen to their hunger is like telling a person who's never driven a car to just hop on a highway. Like, it is overwhelming, it's dangerous, and it sets them up to crash, right? And so I had another client, Joanne, who was convinced that if she could just tune into her hunger queues,

intuitive eating would just suddenly click. And Joanne had spent decades silencing her body signals. So she went from trying to silence them to trying to learn them. And she was starving and binging and restricting herself again, right? And her brain learned that genuine hunger cues were not to be trusted or maybe even that they didn't matter. Like she believed that hunger was the enemy and fullness was a moving target that never got reached.

So when I said, Joanne, like, maybe intuitive eating isn't what you actually need right now. Tears actually welled up in her eyes. Like, she got quiet on the other side of the phone. And I asked her, I was like, what? What just came up for you? And she's just like, I feel so much relief because for the first time somebody gave me permission to step back from this impossible standard, right?

That's how personal we make this. And so here's the deal. Intuitive eating, it can be great for some people, right? But it's based on this idea that you can interpret and honor your body's signals. But if your brain is wired to solve emotional turmoil with food, those signals are muddled. It's like trying to pick out a whisper from a crowd of screaming voices.

and you don't need to try harder at intuitive eating, you need to quiet the crowd and rewire your brain so that you're not in a constant state of stress and shame or fear that prompts you to reach for something edible as an escape hatch.

And so another thing that we need to talk about is the emotional weight that comes with failing at intuitive eating. And of course, I'm putting failing in air quotes, right? And diets are one thing. You know they're restrictive so that when you fail at them, you sort of expect it. But intuitive eating is marketed as kinder and more compassionate. So if you think you fail at that, it feels like you're failing at kindness itself or something, right? It feels like failing at being a normal human who can trust herself.

And it can be kind of soul-crushing. And one of my clients told me she literally goes, Leanne, I feel like a monster. Like, I can't even do the gentle approach. Like, I must be beyond help, right? And that's the kind of despair that we're dealing with here. Like, women thinking that they are beyond help because a well-meaning approach didn't address their deeply rooted patterns.

And so I just want to lovingly call BS on that despair. Like you are not beyond help. Intuitive eating's not flawed. It's just not the right tool for everyone at every stage of healing. And so if your brain is yelling at you to eat or not to eat because you're hungry or but because you're lonely or stressed or desperate for any kind of pleasure,

No intuitive principle is going to magically redirect that impulse. Like you need something that acknowledges the brain's role in emotional eating. And so that might mean exploring brain rewiring techniques, like learning how to detect and sue the motions before they reach the point of no return and identifying patterns that trigger overeating and learning how to be emotionally available to yourself without involving food.

And it's about unfiring those old neural paths and just creating new ones. And this isn't just mindset work. It is deeper. And it's not just therapy or positive thinking. It's blending brain science with emotional healing and practical tools that help you handle life's up and downs without punishing yourself with food. Okay?

And so I've guided so many women through this journey, like Sarah, who just comes to mind who she came to me after years of yo-yo dieting and one failed attempt at intuitive eating after another. And she felt so much shame. Like I can't even do the nice, you know, non diet approach, I remember she'd say, like this is supposed to be non dieting and I can't even do the non dieting thing. But once we started addressing her brains wiring, everything changed.

And instead of trying to listen for hunger cues that had long been buried, like she really buried them deep, we focus on recognizing emotional triggers and giving her alternatives. So in her case, and again, this is like beyond the scope of this conversation because it sounds easier said than done.

There's beliefs that had to get unraveled. We have to walk through this, but then after that, it's like, okay, what do I really need when I'm stressed, right? What do I really need when I'm feeling anxiety? What do I really need when I get off the film with my mom and I had a big fight with her, right? And so it's like recognizing those emotional triggers, giving alternatives so that you're able to release that tension without eating your feelings away, right? And so within weeks, she noticed that she wasn't diving into the fridge every time stress hit.

And in time, her body cues got quieter and calmer and she could finally sense hunger and fullness and not because she, you know, mastered intuitive eating, but because she healed what was blocking it, right? And so if you've been telling yourself that intuitive eating isn't working because you lack discipline or you're too broken,

Please, please, please. I am just inviting you to stop telling yourself that. You are so not broken. Your brain just, it's been through a lot, right? And it learned to protect you with food. And so thank it for doing its best to keep you alive and sane all these years. But now you know it's time to teach it a new language.

A language that starts with identifying why you eat when you're not hungry and why you feel safer with a spoon or a fork in your hand than with a feeling in your heart, right? So, what do you do now? Well, start by acknowledging that intuitive eating alone isn't going to be the magic bullet. And it's okay to feel disappointed in that, like maybe even angry. I know I was.

that this gentle approach didn't give you freedom, right? But also let that disappointment free you from the blame game. Like, you're not failing because you're lazier hopeless. You're failing because the tool doesn't match the complexity of the problem. And it's never truly a failure. It's not failure with a couple F. It's a short term setback, right?

But I also want you to consider that you might need actual brain-centered strategies, like tools that show you how to cope with sadness without stacking, and tools that teach you how to dismantle those old habits and build new neural pathways, like tools that walk you through the messy middle of feeling real hunger and real fullness for the first time in years.

And so over time with these strategies, you might find that intuitive eating principles are actually more accessible to you after you've healed the real problem because the static in your head will have cleared.

And so this process takes patience and courage and often guidance. And maybe it's a coach who understands the brain body emotion triad or maybe it's a support community or a more specialized type of therapy or program that doesn't just say trust your body, but like teaches you how to trust it by first rewiring your brain.

And remember, you're not wrong for wanting this. It's noble to want peace with food and to trust yourself. But peace might not come from intuition alone. It might come from understanding and reshaping your brain's blueprint. And that's okay. Let this be your permission slip to step off the path that's been making you feel broken.

and onto one that acknowledges how complex and beautifully human you are. Like you deserve a solution that fits your reality, not a reality that you wish you had. So thank you for listening. I hope that this message frees you from the chains of self blame and just inspires you to explore deeper, more brain-centric solutions. And intuitive eating might not be your golden ticket right now, but that is not a failure. Like it's just a clue that what you need is some different tools.

And the journey to peace and freedom with food and your body, it's still possible. I promise you. And it starts with honoring your truth, not just your hunger. Okay. So that's it for today, ladies. I hope you really got something valuable out of today. Even if it's really just a reminder that you're not broken or a lost cause and you are certainly not alone in your struggles, well, that in itself would make me very happy.

And if you want to learn more about how I teach my own clients to turn off the part of their brain, that's obsessed with food and start wiring their brain so that they can work with it rather than against it, then head on over to stresslesseating.com. And I've literally peeled back the curtain and walked you through the exact strategy that I teach my clients to do that. So you can access that over at stresslesseating.com. So thanks for listening and we'll be back with more outway next week. Bye.

Joel the holidays are a blast, but the financial hangover. That can be a huge bummer. If you are out there and you're dreading the new statement email that reveals the massive balance that you may have racked up, well, you could use our help. That's right. I'm Joel and I'm Joel.

I am Matt and we're from the How To Money podcast. Our show is all about helping you make sense of your personal finances so you can ditch your pesky credit card debt once and for all. Make real progress on other crucial financial goals that you've got and just feel more in control of your money in general. You know it for money advice without the judgment and jargon. Listen to how to money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

People, my people, what's up? This is Questlove. Man, I cannot believe we're already wrapping up another season of Questlove Supreme. Man, we've got some amazing guests lined up to close out the season, but, you know, I don't want any of you guys to miss all the incredible conversations we've had so far. I mean, we talked to A. Marie, Johnny Moore,

Hey everyone, I'm Madison Packer, a pro hockey veteran going on my 10th season in New York.

And I'm Anya Packer, a former pro hockey player and now a full Madison Packer stand. Anya and I met through hockey and now we're married and mom to two awesome toddlers, ages two and four. And we're excited about our new podcast, Moms Who Puck, which talks about everything from pro hockey to professional women's athletes to raising children and all the messiness in between. So listen to Moms Who Puck on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro, host of the hit podcast, Family Secrets. How would you feel if when you met your biological father for the first time he didn't even say hello? And what if your past itself was the secret and the time had suddenly come to share that past with your child? These are just a few of the powerful and profound questions we'll be asking on our 11th season of Family Secrets. Listen to season 11 of Family Secrets on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Did you know that 70% of people get hired at companies where they already have a connection? I'm Andrew Seaman, LinkedIn's editor at large for jobs and career development. And on my podcast, Get Hired, I bring you all the information you need to, well, get hired. Landing a job may be tough, but Get Hired is here for you every step of the way with advice on resumes, networking, negotiation, and so much more.

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