Who says you can’t? Why being neurodivergent shouldn’t stop you from becoming an Intuitive Eater

For neurodivergent individuals, Intuitive Eating may seem like a distant dream or an unattainable reality. Neurodivergent individuals might experience food-related barriers such as inconsistent or non-existent hunger and fullness cues along with sensory sensitivities, executive function challenges and food-related trauma. All of these things could seemingly get in the way of becoming an intuitive eater. It’s easy to wonder: Is Intuitive Eating possible for a neurodivergent person like me?

Simply defined, Intuitive Eating is a self-care eating framework that honours mental and physical health by teaching you how to listen to your body cues, while using common sense around food and nutrition to take care of your health and wellbeing. [1] You can read more about what the 10 Intuitive Eating principles are HERE on the Original Intuitive Eating Pros Website.

Intuitive eating is built on the foundation of flexibility and gentleness, making it highly adaptable. The KEY is to adapt Intuitive Eating to the neurodivergent person, and NOT expect a neurotypical experience! [1, 2]

As a neurodivergent individual, intuitive eater, Registered Associate Nutritionist and Certified Intuitive Eating Counsellor myself, who has experienced eating-related barriers, I can confidently say: it is possible to be a neurodivergent intuitive eater!

How being an intuitive eater can improve your health and wellbeing as a neurodivergent individual.

The Intuitive Eating framework integrates instinct, emotion and rational thought. This makes it a flexible framework that can easily be adapted to meet sensory, emotional and cognitive needs that neurodivergent individuals might have[1].

In addition to the well-known benefits such as improved cholesterol levels and blood pressure, increased body satisfaction, reduction in emotional eating and stress levels [3-5], Intuitive Eating, which has been adapted, can also support neurodivergent individuals by [2, 4, 6, 7]:

• Improving mental and emotional well-being.

• Supporting cognitive and executive function.

• Reducing overwhelm.

• Increasing body cue awareness and body trust.

How the 10 Intuitive Eating principles can be adapted to be neuro-affirming.

When adapting the Intuitive Eating principles to be neuro-affirming, the focus should be on curiosity and acceptance:

Why are we doing a specific behaviour? And how can we accommodate our surroundings to make ourselves more comfortable and safer?

When we adapt things, it is often to change behaviours. While behaviour change can be important, sometimes shifting the focus to how we view specific behaviours can be equally important.

Sometimes the goal isn’t to change, but to accept and accommodate our uniqueness.

Principle 1: Rejecting diet culture - Rejecting neurotypical culture

The majority of people have been affected by diet culture, telling us that we need to look, weigh or eat a specific way to be healthy.

Being neurodivergent might add further layers of ‘shoulds’ and ‘musts’, making it harder to feel accepted when you have eating habits that don’t fit the norm.

Rejecting these so-called “rules” society has created for us around food and our bodies is the first step toward becoming an intuitive eater.

 

Principles 2 and 5: Honouring hunger and feeling fullness -Flexible structured routines and practicality

Forgetting to eat, always feeling hungry or suddenly too full? Intuitive eating is not a hunger and fullness diet, which means that you do not have to be able to rely on your internal hunger cues to be an intuitive eater if this is something you struggle with.

This is because:

1. Being able to feel your hunger and fullness cues is a skill that you can learn [8].

   
   

2. Being practical about hunger, creating consistency around meals and working with your body and your lived experience are tools that we can use when our hunger and fullness cues are hard to navigate.

   
   

3. A big part of Intuitive Eating is finding out what “barriers” are keeping us from feeling our internal body cues (also called interoception). Learning about how we experience food, hunger, and sensations in our bodies can be extremely helpful when dealing with various challenges related to hunger and fullness.

Even if the ability to recognise your hunger and fullness cues feels impossible, intuitive eating is flexible in that it can be adapted to make you feel comfortable and learn new things that can positively impact your eating experience.

Principle 3: Make peace with food - Embracing your neurodivergent eating style.

Intuitive Eating teaches you to release moral judgment around food. No food is inherently “good” or “bad”.  Making peace with food means allowing yourself to eat foods that diet culture in the past told you were off limits!

In a typical Intuitive Eating practice, this could include:

• Eating the ice cream

• Having another portion of food

• Leaving food on the plate

• Having full-fat dairy products

When you’re neurodivergent, making peace with food might also mean embracing the way you eat and the foods you eat, even if they're outside of the mainstream.

This could include:

• Embracing sensory meals

• Embracing repetitive meals

• Avoiding eggs because of the egg Ick

• Avoiding food textures that make you feel uncomfortable.

  
  

Embracing your neurodivergent eating style is a personal journey. While we can enhance the nutritional content of a diet, which principle 10: Honour Your Health with Gentle Nutrition partly explores, finding acceptance and peace with your eating style, without judgment, is just as important.

Principle 4: Discover the satisfaction factor - Sensory-friendly food choices.

Satisfaction is often a big part of eating. Finding foods you like and incorporating them into your meals and daily life can improve your relationship with food. However, enjoying and finding food satisfaction does not have to look conventional.

Some neurodivergent individuals don’t find experiences with food enjoyable. It is therefore crucial to find ways to make eating manageable and as stress-free as possible, rather than focusing on satisfaction and enjoyment.

Alternatively, exploring sensory-safe foods with textures, temperatures and flavours that feel safe might be how you find satisfaction.

This is about feeling safe and comfortable, and can be anything that YOU want.

Principle 6: Challenge the food police - challenging the neurotypical police.

Challenging internal or external rules you have and hear about food and eating by reclaiming ways to eat that feel safe, satisfying and manageable to you.

This could mean, but is not limited to, having the following as part of your routine:

• Repetitive meals

• Convenient meals/food

• Comfort food

• Rigid structure    

Often, these accommodations help us in daily life, making eating easier, as they require less energy and create less stress around eating.

Principle 7: Cope with emotions with kindness - Unmasking around food.

Recognising how masking, overstimulation, dysregulation, and burnout might affect how, when and what we eat.

As neurodivergents, emotional eating can be lifesaving! Showing compassion and keeping an open mind can help us discover when and how we need to take care of ourselves in situations where things are challenging or when eating is used to distract or stimulate ourselves.

Principle 8: Respect your body à Comfort in your own space.

Learning to listen to what our bodies are telling us about comfort can be life-changing. Showing compassion towards your body is the first step towards respecting your body.

As neurodivergents, feeling comfortable in our bodies can be even more complex because of sensory sensitivities, making principle 8 even more important for our well-being. Respecting your body isn't only about body image, but about making sure you feel safe and supported.

A classic first step in Intuitive Eating is learning what clothes are comfortable. This might be choosing soft fabrics and loose clothing instead of the newest trend or tight jeans. Do you know those tags that feel like they are going to cut your skin, or socks that feel like a cage on your feet? Finding clothing that doesn’t put you in sensory hell can be extremely freeing!

If you feel bad every time you weigh yourself, throwing away the scale is a classic way of showing yourself more compassion as well. Stopping defining our worth by external measurements or how we look can improve how we feel about ourselves and the comfort we have in our bodies.

Principle 9: Movement – feel the difference - Relearn what movement means to you.

Adapting movement to neurodivergent individuals can mean recognising that movement often might not feel great. This could be due to co-morbidities that make movement limited or sensory overload when moving.

Discovering how movement does not have to be done in one specific way can change the way it is approached. Movement can be everything from stimming, cleaning your space, going for a walk, to combat sports, weight training or dancing in your living room.

Sometimes movement is more functional, sometimes it is fun.

Principle 10: Honour Your Health with Gentle Nutrition

This is where nutrition comes in. Learning what to eat, and with everything we have learned through the last 9 principles, trusting our bodies to offer us some (if not all) the guidance we need to feed our bodies with the right nutrients in a way that keeps us full and is simple and stress-free.

Executive dysfunction barriers, such as experiencing difficulties planning, initiating, following through with shopping, cooking, and eating, can sometimes feel at odds with listening to your body, which is why being practical is an important part of making intuitive eating neuro-affirming.

Learning how to take care of your nutrition in a way that feels safe and accessible is important. If you are following guidance for neurodivergents, this should be accommodated to support your goals and lifestyle.

Becoming an intuitive eater can often improve and support executive function by ensuring that you are eating enough food for your body. At Yasmina Louise Nutrition, we also help build strategies to address executive dysfunction barriers and other nutrition challenges you might be experiencing.

If you are considering 1-1 nutrition guidance, please get in touch HERE.

Intuitive eating is highly adaptable and not reserved for neurotypical bodies or the perfect ability to read body cues.

If parts of this blog post resonate with you, or maybe don’t fit your experience, please know that being or feeling different does not mean that you can’t become an intuitive eater. You are not too much or too complicated to find peace with food. Adapting intuitive eating and nutrition to your lived experience is essential.

This blog doesn’t cover every accommodation or adaptation that might be made for a neuro-affirming intuitive eating experience.

Written by Yasmina Louise Abbas MSc, ANutr, CIEC

References:

1.         Tribole, E. and E. Resch, Intuitive eating: A revolutionary anti-diet approach. 2020: St. Martin's Essentials.

2.         Longhurst, P. and C.B. Burnette, Challenges and opportunities for conceptualizing intuitive eating in autistic people. Int J Eat Disord, 2023. 56(12): p. 2189-2199.

3.         Van Dyke, N. and E.J. Drinkwater, Relationships between intuitive eating and health indicators: literature review. Public Health Nutr, 2014. 17(8): p. 1757-66.

4.         Tylka, T.L. and A.M. Kroon Van Diest, The Intuitive Eating Scale-2: item refinement and psychometric evaluation with college women and men. J Couns Psychol, 2013. 60(1): p. 137-53.

5.         Linardon, J., T.L. Tylka, and M. Fuller-Tyszkiewicz, Intuitive eating and its psychological correlates: A meta-analysis. Int J Eat Disord, 2021. 54(7): p. 1073-1098.

6.         Smith, M.A. and A.B. Scholey, Nutritional influences on human neurocognitive functioning. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2014. Volume 8 - 2014.

7.         Costello, S.E., E. Geiser, and N. Schneider, Nutrients for executive function development and related brain connectivity in school-aged children. Nutrition Reviews, 2020. 79(12): p. 1293-1306.

8.         Fiene, L. and C. Brownlow, Investigating interoception and body awareness in adults with and without autism spectrum disorder. Autism Research, 2015. 8(6): p. 709-716.