How Intuitive Eating Works: Interoceptive Awareness - The Science of Intuition
Intuitive Eating is not a random list of rules. The principles were developed to help you better sense, understand, and respond to your body’s internal cues. They help you improve your body awareness or remove obstacles that make it harder to have body awareness.
Intuitive Eating Principles that improve body awareness:
Honor Your Hunger
Feel Your Fullness
Discover the Satisfaction Factor
Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness
Movement – Feel the Difference
Intuitive Eating Principles that remove obstacles to body awareness:
Reject the Diet Mentality
Make Peace with Food
Challenge the Food Police
Respect Your Body
Honor Your Health with Gentle Nutrition
What is the key to body awareness? Your senses!
Your Body’s Sensory Systems
Your senses are the way your body experiences and processes both the external world and its internal workings. You are likely familiar with the five basic senses: sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. These are mostly externally focused, sensing how the body reacts to stimulus from the outside coming in.
You may be less aware of three other sensory systems in your body:
Vestibular sense helps you keep your balance and coordinate movement and body position in relation to your surroundings.
Proprioceptive awareness, or proprioception, allows you to sense where your body parts are in relation to each other. It allows you to move and complete tasks without having to rely on your vision (like getting dressed without a mirror).
Interoceptive awareness, or interoception, allows you to sense the internal state of your body and feel things like your skin and organs.
That last sense, interoceptive awareness, is vital to intuitive eating.
Interoceptive Awareness: Sensing Body States and Emotions
The goal of your body is to maintain an internal balance, aka homeostasis. The brain choreographs this by taking all the incoming sensory messages and creating an urge to respond in a way that helps the body return to balance.
Interoception specifically helps to detect, understand, and respond to two main categories of feelings: body states and emotion states.
Body states include things like hunger, thirst, sleepiness, a full bladder, sexual arousal, temperature, and muscle tension, to name a few.
Emotion states are just that—your emotions. Things like excitement, sadness, anger, happiness, or fear.
Interoceptive awareness is what tells you a rumbling stomach and difficulty concentrating means you are hungry. Your brain responds by giving you an urge to eat, which will reduce the feeling of hunger.
Interoception is what tells you that butterflies in your stomach, shaky hands, and an increased heart rate mean you are anxious. You might feel the urge to take a few deep breaths, pace around, or stretch; these actions will reduce your body’s sensation of anxiety.
Interoceptive awareness has been gaining interest in the past decade, especially in research related to neurodivergent communities. Folks with ASD and ADHD can show less activity in the insula, the part of the brain that processes body state and emotion messages. One of the researchers, Kelly Mahler, talks about it as a “brain-based explanation” for certain behaviors or reactions. Whether you identify as neurodivergent or not, everyone has varying levels of interoceptive sensitivity.
Good interoceptive awareness generally translates to effective self-regulation, or the ability to control or change the way we feel.
Why Interoception Matters: Go with Your Gut
There are two ways to make a decision: with your gut or with your mind.
Gut feelings, or emotion-based decision-making, are based on interoception and past experiences. They have the advantage of being faster, easier, and more automatic. Intuitive, if you will.
Using your mind, or cognitive decision-making, takes a lot more effort; it factors in rules, plays out hypothetical situations. It is deliberate and logical.
Being able to rely on gut feelings saves time and energy, especially when they are based on strong interceptive awareness (the combination of sensing and understanding internal signals).
But that doesn’t mean cognitive-based decision-making isn’t important too (more on this in a minute).
Does Your Struggle to Identify Body States or Emotions Impact Your Eating?
Perhaps you find it challenging to know when you are hungry, not eating until you are ravenous, or maybe until someone else tells you to eat.
Maybe it is tricky for you to know exactly what you are feeling. Take the anxious description from before; those same body cues could apply to feeling excited. How can you tell the difference?
The fact that the same part of the brain that tells you if you are hungry also tells you when you are anxious means it unsurprising that so many people struggle with emotional eating. Or that eating soothes a myriad of emotions.
Strengthening interoceptive awareness will make it easier to notice and respond appropriately to your body’s internal signals, including hunger, fullness, and tricky emotions.
How to Improve Your Interoceptive Awareness
Like I mentioned before, everyone had differing levels of interceptive awareness and sensitivity. It is a complex process. You both need to sense the internal signals and understand what they mean in order to respond in a way that supports homeostasis.
The good news is that interoception can be improved!
Improving interoception falls into two categories: adaptations and builders.
Interoceptive Awareness Adaptations
Adaptations are tools like alarms or strategically placed notes to prompt you to practice needed self-care, like eating lunch, drinking water, or standing and stretching. Adaptations like these do take cognitive decision-making to set up and support you when gut feelings aren’t as strong.
In the early stages of intuitive eating, this could look like eating on a time schedule because your hunger cues aren’t strong enough yet to reliably tell you when to eat. Setting times to eat and reminders, like an alarm on your phone or a block in your calendar, help to keep yourself nourished.
Interoceptive Awareness Builders
Builders help you practice interoceptive skills. For example, taking time to do a body scan or body check to see how you feel in your body in the moment can be a helpful practice to tune into your body states and emotions.
How do you feel before you start eating? Are you lightheaded? Is your stomach rumbling? Is there a sensation in your throat? This can help you learn how hunger feels in your body.
How do you feel before going to bed? Do your limbs feel heavy? Do your eyes blink more slowly? This can help you learn what it feels like when you are tired.
In addition, meditation has been found to activate the area of the brain responsible for interoception, which can aid in strengthening it. Journaling or reflecting on experiences can also help build your body awareness.
It takes repeated practice and experience to learn a new skill. It will take time to reach a point where the action is automated or guided by intuition. Be patient and use adaptation as needed in the meantime.
Intuitive Eating and Interoceptive Awareness
Evelyn Tribole, one of the creators of Intuitive Eating, describes intuitive eating as cultivating body awareness and removing obstacles to body awareness (or interoception). So, one way to strengthen interoceptive awareness is to learn and practice the principles of intuitive eating.
For additional support, learn more about nutrition services or check out my 12-week online Intuitive Eating for Skeptics course.
The information provided is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not intended to be medical advice or to diagnosis, treat, cure or prevent any disease. This information does not replace a one-on-one relationship with a physician or healthcare professional. Dietary changes and/or the taking of nutritional supplements may have differing effects on individuals.
To learn more about how working with a nutritionist could help you, schedule a free 15-minute call.