Intuitive eating

Intuitive eating behaviour is based on physiological hunger and satiety cues rather than situational and emotional cues. Its central premise is that individuals innately are able to stay in tune with their bodies' natural signals about hunger and fullness. From this perspective, individuals are thought to be able to regulate their food intake in a healthy manner, eating what they want, when they want it, beginning when they become hungry, and stopping when they feel full. Intuitive eating enables individuals to choose more nutritious foods. For this reason, intuitive eaters prevent weight fluctations and maintain their proper weight. Intuative eating also plays a part in improvement of physical health. It is associated with lower body mass (BMI), cholesterol, blood pressure and decreased cardiovascular risk. In addition, intuative eating is also negatively correlated with chronic dieting and binge eating, which is an important counterproductive effect  in rigid restrained eaters. Intuative eating also causes beneficial outcomes on both psychological and physiological variables slightly. For example, intuitive eaters showed greater unconditional self-regard and body satisfaction (or appreciation) and lower levels of depression and disordered eating behaviors.

Advocates of intuitive eating caution that engaging in restriction of certain foods or limiting portion size can lead individuals to feel deprived, which can then place individuals at risk for experiences of counterregulatory eating in which they violate dietary rules and binge eat . Preventing the influence of environmental factors such as plate and portion sizes is a necessary characteristic which should be comprised by a succesful intuitive  eating behaviour. It is suggested that foods are choosen for the purposes of satisfaction (i.e., taste), health, energy, stamina, and performance in intuitive eating. Preoccupation with food and dichotomization  of foods  as good and bad are prevented by intuative eating. 

Intuative eating influences on various populations differently according to some researchs. For example, elevated awareness to internal cues may differentially relate to eating behaviors among healthy weight individuals, as compared to overweight or obese individuals. Therefore, positive effects of intuative eating on different population and weight classes should investigated. Restraint eating focuses on external and environmentally-based solutions (i.e.limiting calories or portion sizes). However, disordered eating behaviours may occur in this solutions. On the other hand, intuitive eating focuses on internal cues (i.e. increasing awareness and response to hunger and satiety). This internal cues determine hunger and fullness. For this reason, intuative eating appears to be negatively correlated with disordered eating .If intuitive eating works as hypothesized, environmental cues (i.e., plate and portion size) should have less influence on food consumption among individuals who report high levels of intuitive eating, as compared to those who report low levels of intuitive eating. However, it was showed that mindfullness does not provide adequate level of prevention from external variables (plate or portion size effect). For this reason, this situation causes to researchers to suggest that external cue effects may act independently from internal cues. In their current research, Anderson et al. suggested that hungry individuals who report high levels of intuitive eating, as measured by the Intuative Eating Scale (IES), are more likely to eat an objectively larger amount when presented with larger plate and portion sizes, compared to individuals  who report lower levels of intuitive eating.

However, according to them,  it was also possible that particular facets of intuitive eating (i.e., unconditional permission to eat when hungry) influenced participants' eating behaviors in the laboratory which is an environment in which they were given permission to eat as much pasta as they wanted.