Intuitive Eating Studies
In 2005, researcher Linda Bacon published the first two-year long study demonstrating the effectiveness of Intuitive Eating. Later that year, Steven Hawks, a professor of Community Health at Brigham Young University, made headlines when he claimed to have lost 50 pounds following his version of an intuitive eating program. Hawks claims the underlying philosophies of intuitive eating are thousands of years old and exist in most eastern and some western religions. Intuitive eating is designed to be a "common sense, hunger-based approach to eating," where participants are encouraged to eat when and only when their body tells them it is hungry.
In 2006, Ohio State University researcher, Tracy Tylka, published a study which accomplished two key outcomes. First, Tylka developed and validated an assessment scale to define key traits of Intuitive Eaters, which are: unconditional permission to eat, eating for physical rather than emotional reasons, and reliance on internal hunger/satiety cues. Lastly, Tylka used that assessment scale on over 1400 people and determined that intuitive eaters have a higher sense of well being and lower body weights, without internalizing the "thin ideal".
Currently, University of Notre Dame psychology researcher, Lora Smitham, is recruiting people with binge eating disorder to study the effectiveness of the intuitive eating process for treating this problem. Smitham's premise is that dieting triggers binge eating and learning to become an intuitive eater can be therapeutic.
Read more about this topic: Intuitive Eating
Famous quotes containing the words intuitive, eating and/or studies:
“If mothers are told to do this or that or the other,... they lose touch with their own ability to act.... Only too easily they feel incompetent. If they must look up everything in a book, they are always too late even when they do the right things, because the right things have to be done immediately. It is only possible to act at exactly the right point when the action is intuitive or by instinct, as we say. The mind can be brought to bear on the problem afterwards.”
—D.W. Winnicott (20th century)
“After eating hundreds of rats, the cat is on a pilgrimage.”
—Punjabi proverb, trans. by Gurinder Singh Mann.
“These studies which stimulate the young, divert the old, are an ornament in prosperity and a refuge and comfort in adversity; they delight us at home, are no impediment in public life, keep us company at night, in our travels, and whenever we retire to the country.”
—Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.)