Intuitive Eating 101 with Christy Harrison | Get Fit Sanely Listener Picks

We asked listeners to tell us about some of their favorite episodes from our Get Fit Sanely series, and we'll be bringing you some excerpts of those episodes on Fridays this month. Today, we're hearing from listener Traci who was introduced to the transformative concept of intuitive eating through our episode with dietician Christy Harrison. Paid subscribers of DanHarris.com will have exclusive access to a set of all-new guided meditations, led by friend of the show Cara Lai https://www.caralai.org/#/, customized to accompany each episode of the Get Fit Sanely series. We're super excited to offer a way to help you put the ideas from the episodes into practice. Learn all about it here. https://www.danharris.com/p/a-month-of-guided-meditationsjust How To Embrace the Anti-Diet | Christy Harrison https://www.danharris.com/p/how-to-embrace-the-anti-diet-christy-fa8?utm_source=publication-search The Anti-Diet | Evelyn Tribole https://www.danharris.com/p/the-anti-diet-evelyn-tribole-210?utm_source=publication-search How To Take Care of Your Body Without Losing Your Mind https://www.danharris.com/p/how-to-take-care-of-your-body-without Get Fit Sanely: the podcast playlist https://www.danharris.com/p/get-fit-sanely-0f2 Join Dan's online community here http://www.danharris.com Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:19Dan Harris?

  Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How we doing? Happy Friday. As you know, or I think you might know, we're in the middle of our month-long Get Fit Sanely series where we talk about how to take care of your body without losing your mind. This is the third year we've done this series, and we've been curious to hear from you, our listeners, how the previous episodes have impacted your life. So we put out a call over on Substack at danharris.com, and we asked for people to tell us about an episode from our past iterations of Get Fit Sanely that really resonated with you and how it inspired you to make a change. And we got a great response. So all month, we are sharing your feedback and then an excerpt from the podcast that impacted you so much. So today's listener

• 1:00Dan Harris?

  is Tracy, and she was inspired to find a new way of eating after listening to our episode with the dietitian Kristi Harrison. So we'll be right back for that.

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• 1:38Speaker 02

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• 2:15Speaker 03

  My name's Tracy and I wanted to share a little bit about the incredible benefits that the intuitive eating concept that Dan Harris spoke with Kristi Harrison about several years ago. I was more skeptical than Dan, for sure, when I was listening. And to give you a little background, I was a really active kid. When puberty hit and I felt like I had a few pounds to lose, I went straight into dieting, fasting, and exercising, always as an attempt to be thin. It had nothing to do with health or lifestyle change. I just wanted to be skinny. And I never was built to be skinny.

• 2:59Speaker 03

  In my early 30s, at some point, I had learned about Atkins, which was a weird thing. I thought that was freedom. I could eat however much I wanted, as long as it wasn't carbs. So while it didn't keep me "thin" for a certain phase, I was never satisfied. I wasn't relating healthfully to food, for sure. In my 50s, I heard Dan and Kristi on the 10% Happier podcast talk about intuitive eating, and I couldn't believe it could be true. I was also reading about meditation and practicing.

• 3:40Speaker 03

  And like Kristi said, the concept really did play nicely in with what I was learning. So I thought I'd give it a try. And I've never looked back, and I am forever grateful. So, thank you, 10% Happier, Dan Harris, and Kristi Harrison, for all that you're doing. Keep up the good work. Namaste.

• 4:06Dan Harris?

  Thank you, Tracy. Appreciate you. Many listeners have heard me mention how intuitive eating has been huge for me as well. Okay, so now let's hear the part of the interview where Kristi Harrison talks more about her own history of eating and the changes she made to help her find a little bit more sanity around food. I'd love to hear a little bit more, if you're comfortable, about how you went through a period of time where your relationship to food and body image was, I think the term of art here is disordered. Are you comfortable talking about that?

• 4:38Speaker 04

  Absolutely, yeah. So, you know, my background is that I actually was an intuitive eater growing up. I had a really peaceful relationship with food. I was fortunate and privileged, really, to have enough food growing up. So we never had that food insecurity piece interfering in my relationship with food. And I was always in a smaller body. So I never had anyone telling me I needed to lose weight, putting me on a diet. So I was able to sort of have that intuitive relationship with food that we're all born with, that lasted until I was about 20 years old, actually. And so I was able to eat when I was hungry, stop when I was full, eat what satisfied

• 5:17Speaker 04

  me, figure out what that was, just sort of discover foods that I liked and make my own snacks when I got old enough. So it was a really lucky sort of upbringing, I think, because a lot of people don't get that. But when I was 20, I went and studied abroad in Paris and gained a little bit of weight while I was there. I had switched birth control pills, so I think that was part of it. And also just all the baguettes and the cheese, you know, delicious. So I gained some weight and then suddenly, like, everything that I had been hearing about diets and the need to lose weight and how you lose weight and calories, like, all that just sort of came rushing to the fore because I had grown up around it.

• 6:00Speaker 04

  You know, I'd grown up around people who were dieting and talking about that stuff. So even though it was never imposed on me, it was sort of like filed away in the archives, ready for me when I did gain some weight. And so pretty quickly, I started restricting what I was eating, started exercising to try to lose weight and got into some pretty disordered stuff fairly quickly because it was the early days of the internet. This was like 2001, 2002. I got into calorie counting. I got into Atkins, which was sort of becoming a big trend in the US at the time. And when I got home from my study abroad, I was really like in it with diet culture

• 6:41Speaker 04

  and pretty quickly tumbled into what I now know was a diagnosable eating disorder. I never actually got diagnosed at the time, but, you know, I was in this pretty Toxic relationship with food in my body of restricting, under eating during the day, often binging at night. And the binges would sort of get more and more intense the more I restricted, and then over exercising to try to compensate, and then wash, rinse, repeat, basically, the next day, and the next day, and the next. That was all at the beginning of my career as a journalist. And so, at the time, I was so obsessed with food and nutrition and health, that those were the beats I gravitated towards. And

• 7:22Speaker 04

  that's what I sort of built my career around. And so, I started working in different magazines, and food media, environmental magazines as well. But the real turning point, I think, for me was discovering the book Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elise Rush. And I know you had Evelyn on the podcast before, and she's a friend of both of ours, and she's a wonderful person. And I discovered the book because I was starting to research my own book that I never ended up writing about emotional eating, because at the time, I identified as an emotional eater. Felt like, you know, I'm just out of control with food. And so, through that research, I discovered intuitive eating. I brought

• 8:05Speaker 04

  that into my own therapy with a therapist who was really more specialized in like anxiety, somatic experiencing, sensory motor psychotherapy, and a lot of mindfulness. And so, that's where I really first discovered meditation and self compassion. And I think intuitive eating just sort of plugged right in with those practices and made a lot of sense to me, both as someone who had been an intuitive eater, growing up, and sort of practiced that for 20 years of my life, and as someone who's newly discovering self compassion, and meditation, and mindfulness. Like, it just really resonated with where I was.

• 8:44Dan Harris?

  Let's talk about intuitive eating. What is intuitive eating?

• 8:49Speaker 04

  So intuitive eating is, I always say, the default mode. It's that really easy, peaceful relationship with food that we're all born with, where we honor our hunger, we feel our fullness, we trust our sense of satisfaction and pleasure. We're able to enjoy our food and really not second guess our choices with food and not feel guilty or ashamed or stigmatized for our food choices. That's the mode that I would love to see everyone be able to get back into in relating to food in their bodies, to just have that peaceful, self compassionate, easy, free relationship with food where it doesn't take up so much headspace, where it's, you know, maybe a thought in your day, maybe you have to think about what to make

• 9:34Speaker 04

  and what to eat, but that it's not an obsession. It's not something that's requiring a ton of planning or self abnegation or deprivation, that you're able to actually enjoy food and be flexible with food and be present with people and connect over food, have food as a part of celebrations and pleasure, as well as being used for energy and fuel.

• 10:00Dan Harris?

  I know you hear this all the time, and this was my beef when I first met Evelyn Tribole, who you discussed before. She's one of the progenitors of this notion of this approach called intuitive eating. If you go back and listen to that podcast, I think it was January of 2020, I believe. You can hear me, I go in super skeptical. By the end, I'm utterly converted and actually have been working personally, one on one with Evelyn since then. It's completely changed my approach to eating and my approach to, you know, how I talk about food with my son, too. But what, one of the skeptical notes I was hitting in that interview, which I know you hear all the time, is, wait a minute. If you tell me there are no good foods and no bad foods, I can eat whatever I want,

• 10:44Dan Harris?

  whenever I want it, well, I'm just gonna have my face in an Oreo box forever.

• 10:50Speaker 04

  Right. Yeah, and that is a phase that people sometimes go through. I sometimes call that the honeymoon phase with particular types of foods, right? That you're so excited to have access to those foods again, that it's all you want, that it's, you know, you want to be with those foods 24/7, like the honeymoon phase of a relationship or something. And that also it's part of what I call the restriction pendulum, where when you've been restricted, and you're sort of pulled over to the side of restriction, there's this other side of the pendulum that you swing to that's sort of make up eating or rebound eating. You can't just sort of expect to settle in the middle at a place of peace when you've been really pulled over to the side of restriction because physics doesn't work like that with

• 11:35Speaker 04

  a pendulum, and our bodies don't work like that either. So I think it's definitely really scary, and I want to empathize with the fear that that can bring up of, oh, my God, I'm going to never eat anything but Oreos again, or whatever your food of choice is that was maybe previously forbidden. And I'm living proof that you can get to the other side of that, that that's not forever, that you can actually have those foods in your house for months sometimes and not feel like you have to dive to the bottom of the box. Like, foods that I thought I could never keep in the house when I was in my disordered eating days are now regular parts of my everyday menu and in my pantry for as long as they

• 12:20Speaker 04

  want to be, sometimes for months. And not that that's a badge of honor, right, to not eat the food either, because that's just turning intuitive eating into a diet as well, to say, oh, yeah, intuitive eating, I'm an intuitive eater, and I just never want this stuff. Like, sometimes you genuinely won't want it, but in a lot of cases, you do still want the foods that were previously forbidden, and then you sort of had the honeymoon phase with. You still eat them, but you're just not eating them in this sort of frenzied or compulsive or like someone who's just crawled through the desert and sees water sort of way. It's a much more balanced, low-key, kind of take it or leave it sort of way that you relate to those foods.

• 13:02Dan Harris?

  To really address people who are listening, who are new to intuitive eating, can you talk on the most basic sort of blocking and tackling level? What is different in the mind of an intuitive eater in a meal? How are you approaching the meal differently than the rest of us?

• 13:21Speaker 04

  Such a good question. I think the first word that comes to mind is just ease. Like, there's just so much more ease with it. There's so much more of a sense of like, not a big deal. This is food. Maybe I'm excited about it. Maybe it smells good. Or maybe I'm curious but wary. You know, it's a new food that I'm, I've never tried before and someone else made it. Or, you know, there might be other sort of feelings going on, right? About the food and about the meal. But there's not this sense of guilt or the sort of self-control that goes into, you know, when you're a dieter, sitting down to a meal. It's like, oh, I'm gonna eat this, but I'm not gonna eat that. I'm only gonna have half of this. I'm gonna set this portion aside to take home with me.

• 14:03Speaker 04

  Whatever little rules that you've sort of picked up along the way in diet culture. There's just not that sort of sense of calculation of intellectualizing with it. It's much more of a, I guess, again, embodied experience, right? Where it's like, this smells good. What are the flavors? You know, how hungry am I? How much do I want based on my hunger? Sensing your satisfaction with the meal. Sensing when you're starting to get full. Not having any sort of self-judgments about that too, right? Or I think sometimes with intuitive eating in the early stages, people who start to sense fullness will start getting sad and sort of have this feeling like, no, being full means I have to stop, means I have to like, give this up,

• 14:46Speaker 04

  or I'm not allowed to have anymore, or something like that. But with intuitive eating, there's not that sense of guilt. There's, once you've gone through maybe this sort of mourning process of like, allowing your fullness to sort of drive how much more you're gonna eat. There's not a sense of sadness necessarily when the meal's over. Although if it tastes really delicious, of course, there's probably gonna be some sense of like, oh, I wish I could keep eating this. It's so good. But yeah, it's really just a much more relaxed approach to food. And it doesn't require as much intellectualizing, planning, self-shaming, guilt. There are not as many voices that maybe come from a scolding parent or from...

• 15:31Speaker 04

  A diet that you were on a million years ago. Or with diet culture, I think there's often this accumulation of different diet rules. So even if someone's not on a particular diet now, they have all these rules in their head from diets they were previously on, or even if they are on a particular diet now. It's like, I'm doing Atkins, but I'm also still counting calories, but I'm also still trying to eat low fat, or whatever it is, right? There's just much less noise in your head.

• 16:02Dan Harris?

  Thank you to Christie, and thanks again to Tracy, our listener, for suggesting that excerpt. We'll put a link to the full episode in the show notes here. And don't forget, for this year's version of Get Fit Sanely, every episode includes a bespoke meditation, a guided meditation that comes from my friend and the friend of the show and Dharma teacher Cara Lai. Those meditations are only available to paying subscribers over on Dan Harris, so get on over there and sign up if you haven't done that already. Before I go, just a quick thank you to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer.

• 16:47Dan Harris?

  And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.