After struggling with her weight and failed diets for decades, Darcy Letourneau said desperation drove her to try something completely different about three years ago.

“I had done every diet known to man. And I’m in a bigger body, so I thought something was wrong with me,” said Letourneau, 39, of Mechanic Falls. “I was so ashamed of myself and my weight, I wouldn’t even look in the mirror while I brushed my teeth in the morning. I was obsessing about the scale. When I got on and the number went down, I was happy. But when it went up, I was miserable.”

Letourneau decided to work with Portland dietitian Amy Taylor Grimm to discover how she could ditch ineffective diets in favor of a newer, more holistic wellness approach now gaining traction both in Maine and nationwide: intuitive eating.

“I was desperate, and intuitive eating was the one thing I hadn’t tried,” Letourneau said.

Letourneau was shocked to hear Grimm tell her at their first meeting that her assignment for the next two weeks would be to eat whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted.

“I thought, if I do that, next time I talk to her, I’m going to be 700 pounds heavier because I just went to every fast food place from Kennebunk to Presque Isle, because I’m going to go big and go home with big sandwiches. And because I had restricted myself for decades.”

And so for two weeks, Letourneau went on a junk food bender. “I was so deep into a diet culture spiral, I just needed to get it all out of my system,” she explained. “I was eating Burger King for breakfast and Dunkin’ Donuts for a snack. I felt like I was 10 years old, alone in a toy store, and my parents weren’t coming back for two weeks.”

But then a funny thing happened. Not long after the cathartic binge, fast food eventually lost its allure for Letourneau because it was no longer taboo.

“When I legalized all food for myself, there was no more need for a deprivation response,” Letourneau said, noting that her major weight fluctuations stopped as well, since she was no longer following a regimented diet.

“My body has maintained the same clothing size for a couple of years now,” Letourneau said. “If it gets bigger, awesome. If it gets smaller, cool. As long as I’m still being true to myself, being kind and honest and intuitively eating, we’re good.”

TRUSTING OURSELVES

Traditional diets – including everything from keto and paleo to the South Beach diet and Weight Watchers – are, at their core, about restriction and rejection of certain foods and food groups, an approach that proves ineffective for most people in the long term. Research indicates that 80 percent of dieters will not maintain their weight loss for 12 months. Grimm cites statistics from the Council on Size and Weight Discrimination that 95 percent of dieters regain their lost weight within five years.

Worse still, weight cycling up and down frequently over the years can lead to eating disorders and metabolic disease.

By contrast, the intuitive eating approach holds that we can actually trust ourselves and our bodies to make the right food choices in the moment, even when those choices seem to defy conventional dieting wisdom. The effectiveness of intuitive eating in improving overall mental and physical health is supported by a growing body of scientific studies, including a 2013 meta-study in the Cambridge University journal, Public Health Nutrition, that concluded, “Extant research demonstrates substantial and consistent associations between intuitive eating and both lower BMI and better psychological health.”

There appears to be no formal opposition to intuitive eating within the health profession, but skeptics of the approach say it may seem to some like a license to eat pizza and doughnuts every day and that it’s not necessarily an effective weight-loss program, particularly in the short-term. Proponents point to studies and personal experiences in which the urge to eat recklessly drops off after a few weeks, and counter that the holistic approach is about weight management, not weight loss.

Intuitive eating – the term first coined in 1995 as the title of a book by dietitians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch – is not a diet or regimen, but rather a way to learn to identify your body’s hunger and satiety cues and work in harmony with them without depriving yourself of any food, particularly those you enjoy most.

“We’re all born with those internal cues,” said dietitian Joan Lavery-McLaughlin, head of Nutrition Works in Portland. “As young children, we’re able to be much more in tune with intuitively knowing when we’re full or hungry and responding to those cues. Diet culture follows self-imposed food rules, which over time leaves us less able to identify and work in harmony with those internal cues.”

“Punitive and restrictive eating behaviors can lead to excessive hunger and losing that ability to differentiate when you’re hungry and when you’re not,” Lavery-McLaughlin added. “Intuitive eating goes against a lot of what we’ve all learned and see day in and day out. It gets people to respect their bodies and what their bodies need in the moment.”

Letourneau’s fast food fest was not unusual for people starting an intuitive eating journey, Grimm said. “You are going to go crazy at first, and that’s just normal,” said Grimm. “But after a while, if you have (a particular tempting food) in your house regularly, it just becomes another food that’s in your house.”

Grimm and other dietitians stressed that the intuitive eating approach requires some trial and error, particularly at the beginning, before you come to discover your particular body’s sweet spot. They also noted the importance of working with a health professional when adopting the approach.

SELF-CARE, NOT SELF-CONTROL

In her first few months of intuitive eating, Letourneau had frank discussions with Grimm about her eating habits, which helped her identify triggers like boredom and stress that would instantly lead her to emotional eating. She learned to read her internal body cues for hunger and satiety more accurately, and to recognize when she was eating not for hunger or pleasure but to avoid unpleasant thoughts or emotions.

“Food doesn’t control me anymore. Weight doesn’t control my days anymore,” Letourneau said. “Once you no longer have restriction on something, (the strong temptation) just goes away.”

“The dieting world is very black and white,” said dietitian Grace Violette-Hill of New Roots Nutrition in Yarmouth. “When you start to follow an intuitive approach, the world gets much more colorful. Because you’re making choices based on self-care, not self-control.”

“Dieting is such a fear-based way of approaching health,” said dietitian and New Roots Nutrition founder Lauren Withers. “It takes away the joy of life.” Withers and others cautioned that intuitive eating requires patience and introspection, and that weight loss isn’t guaranteed or even the main point of the approach. But the way it improves general wellness over time can be dramatic, even transformative.

“I hear clients say, ‘I know myself better now than I ever thought I would,’ ” Withers said.

“We hear a lot of joy and confidence from the clients,” said New Roots dietitian Courtney McHenry. “It’s almost like their minds are blown, because they didn’t think they could get to this point.”

The last few years of life during a pandemic has worsened the situation considerably for people struggling with weight or eating issues. Withers said she has seen more people, some young as 8 years old, coming to New Roots with eating disorders they developed since the pandemic.

“People were lonely, bored and isolated for so long, and so I think a lot of people turned to food,” Withers said. “We hear from people who gained a bunch of weight and became mentally unstable, depressed or anxious and are still digging out from it.”

Grimm was moved enough by the pandemic effect to open Kaleidescope Eating Disorders and Recovery Center in Yarmouth in 2020 with partner Rhonda Lee Benner, where for the first year or so they saw 40 patients a week, about twice the typical workload.

JOURNEY OF HEALING AND GROWTH

“I try to remind clients that food isn’t going to fix your feelings,” said Lavery-McLaughlin. “And get them to accept they have a genetic blueprint, and that bodies are meant to come in different shapes and sizes. This a whole lifestyle change, and it’s about finding the healthiest version of your body.”

“Intuitive eating is a whole different mindset,” agreed Grimm. “People can be a higher Body Mass Index or weight and have no health issues. Being of a higher weight is not necessarily bad for you, if you’re active, managing stress and getting good nutrition. You can be healthy at any size you are.

“This is not about losing weight,” Grimm added. “This is about having a good relationship with food, not having to diet anymore and working on your health, not your weight. It’s liberating for people.”

“People are feeling tired of depriving themselves,” said Lavery-McLaughlin. “We’re working with many everyday Mainers on adopting these principles in ways that make sense for them. It’s a different process for people to try to wrap their heads around, for sure.”

Letourneau calls her ongoing experience with intuitive eating “life-changing.” She stopped seeing Grimm regularly last year, but continues to apply intuitive eating principles in her daily life.

“For 35-plus years, I was horrible to myself. Amy and intuitive eating got me to see that I’m not the problem. I’m incredible just the way I am. Now, I don’t go past a mirror without being like, ‘Hey Darc, how you doing? Looking good,’ ” she laughed.

“When you have something consuming your brain all the time,” Letourneau added, “and then you realize you don’t have to do that anymore, then another journey of healing and growth happens.”

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THE CORE PRINCIPLES OF INTUITVE EATING

The following 10 tenets of intuitive eating, developed by Resch and Tribole for their “Intuitive Eating” book, serve as guidelines for the approach, not hard-and-fast prescriptive measures like with traditional diets. “If you approach this like a kind of 10-step program, then it just becomes another diet,” said Withers, echoing other area dietitians.

1. Reject the diet mentality. “We look at diet culture as a failed paradigm,” said Lavery-McLaughlin. Withers and her New Roots Nutrition colleagues said rejecting diet culture – the books and programs promising fast, easy, long-term weight loss – begins with recognizing how pervasive it is, and that we encounter it everyday in the marketplace and media, even in casual talks with friends and family.

2. Honor your hunger. This is about keeping your body adequately fueled with energy and carbohydrates and avoiding deprivation, which can lead to overeating. “People often wait to start eating during the day, skip breakfast, have a tiny lunch. And then they feel really, really hungry at dinner because they’ve been hungry all day,” said McHenry. “This is a chance to get back in touch with your body to understand hunger cues.”

3. Make peace with food. This principle is about giving yourself “unconditional permission” to eat – whatever, whenever. “The more something becomes forbidden, the shinier that food becomes, and you end up wanting it more,” said Lavery-McLaughlin. Recognize that all foods can fit – it’s your overall pattern of eating that’s going to impact health far more than any single meal or type of food. That’s a really big shift for most people.”

4. Challenge the food police. Withers said it’s key for intuitive eaters to question society’s food commandments – all the shoulds, shouldn’ts and over-generalizations like “carbs are bad.” McHenry recalled explaining the importance of carbs to a client who wasn’t gluten intolerant, but for years had avoided starchy foods and the home-baked bread she loved because of the misleading conventional wisdom around carbohydrates. “She literally threw her hands up in the air, like, ‘Oh my God, I can have bread again!’ ”

5. Discover the satisfaction factor. This is hard to do for people accustomed to scarfing down meals in a hurry while standing, driving or at their desks. “We need to learn to sit at the table,” said Withers. “Our feeding environment matters. The how of the eating is equally important to the what of the eating, if not more.” She advises clients to start by sitting at the table for a meal once more than usual per day. And when eating, slow down, chew, taste and appreciate.

6. Feel your fullness. As with hunger pangs, your body gives you cues to let you know when you’re comfortably full. Like the previous guideline, this works best when you are aware and fully present while eating, not lost in thought or distracted by external stimuli like phones or televisions. Another factor to help determine if you’ve eaten enough but not too much: “Check if a meal gives you a supply of ready energy,” Withers said. “That means when you stand up from the table, you have energy and aren’t needing to sit down and rest.”

7. Cope with your emotions with kindness. And importantly, without using food if possible. “Often times there’s an emotional hunger people feel, not a physical hunger. I try to remind clients that food isn’t going to fix your feelings,” said Lavery-McLaughlin. Still, as Violette-Hill pointed out, “We’re not demonizing emotional eating. It’s going to happen sometimes.”

8. Respect your body. This principle is about radical self-acceptance that many people haven’t felt for much of their adult lives. “Unfortunately, people try to diet their way into a body size that really is not appropriate for them, and the diet culture celebrates that,” said Lavery-McLaughlin. “But the body positivity movement is definitely gaining traction, and it’s great.” She said she works with clients first to establish an attitude of body neutrality, or simply being OK with their bodies as they are. Then they work toward building positivity.

9. Movement – feel the difference. Rather than the high-impact, calorie-burning, intense types of exercise that diet culture promotes, this tenet is about enjoying the simple pleasure of feeling your body move throughout the day, whether it’s walking while out on errands or dancing at home at night. The types of movements will differ from person to person, but enjoyability is the common thread. “There’s science to prove that movement of some sort, even a slow walk, helps the brain signal the body if it’s hungry or not,” Withers said.

10. Honor your health – gentle nutrition. Intuitive eating “is not about perfection,” said Lavery-McLaughlin. “One meal, or snack or one day of eating is not going to make you unhealthy or nutrient deficient in any way. What you eat consistently over time is really what matters most.”

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