How intuitive eating saved me from binge eating and gave me a healthy relationship with food – and it might help you too
Nurse Sinéad Crowe battled unhealthy eating behaviours for many years. When she became a mum, she began to question her whole attitude towards food and found salvation in intuitive eating, training as a counsellor to help others
Now 38, Sinéad Crowe is four years into recovery from binge eating. The Galway-based mother of four, whose full-time job is in nursing, and who is now also an intuitive eating counsellor, traces the origin of her problems back to attending a slimming club as a teenager.
Sinéad found herself comparing her size to that of friends. The celebrity culture of the time sent the message that “being thin was what I needed to strive to be to be attractive, successful, and worthy.”
“I can remember the exact weight I was the first time I weighed in; it’s like these numbers get etched in your mind.” It felt exciting, she recalls, to be starting a diet.
“This sense of, I’m going to change my body, and this is amazing. It feels like you’re in control, and taking action.”
Very quickly, your mind “turns into a food calculator”, Sinéad recalls. “Everything that goes into your mouth, you’re counting it. At the end of the day, you’re doing a quick tally, like a calculator; you’re scanning your day to calculate the calories of your breakfast, dinner, tea, to see if there’s any wiggle room for an extra treat or two in the evening time.”
Several months after joining the club, Sinéad began binge eating. “Our weigh-in was always on a Thursday, so I would kind of binge on the weekend, with this idea of, ‘I’ll hardly eat anything then Monday to Thursday, and at weigh-in I’ll definitely be lighter’.”
She recalls how her life began to revolve around whether she was on or off a diet, and she became consumed by body image.
“What I looked like dictated a lot. If I was feeling good in myself, I wanted to be social and go out. If I felt like I’d gained weight, I would withdraw, and maybe avoid going to things. I’d always need notice if I was to be invited to something, because I would need time to restrict before the event. The restrict, the binge, the restrict; that was the cycle that I lived in.”
She has had a good life, Sinéad adds, describing how she and her now husband had their first child when she was 20, so she was busy with other things.
“Looking back, I feel very lucky that even though there was a lot of disordered eating behaviour, I had a lot of great things in my life as well that I’m very grateful to have had. But I would reflect and see that my disordered eating behaviours, how I perceived my body, stole a lot from me. Even in terms of intimacy, and allowing somebody to get close. Because on some level, believing that my body wasn’t good enough, and deserving of love, is something that I would have felt throughout my 20s and beyond. That’s really only shifted in the last number of years, which is such a shame to think I’m nearly hitting 40, and only feeling this now.”
She has tried everything. “Every slimming club, every fad diet that you could probably name, whether that was the cabbage soup diet, the cottage cheese diet, the three-day diet, the five:two diet, the intermittent fasting and the keto.”
Eventually, she came to the conclusion that the problem was that she didn’t sufficiently understand nutrition, and in 2014 she began to study the subject, hoping this would help her to finally achieve the perfect body.
“I felt like if I studied nutrition, I’d then know how to eat perfectly, and that would help me lose weight. There was a code that I just hadn’t got a handle on. If I just kept working at it, I would figure it out.”
Instead, what happened was, while she did learn a certain amount from the course, she became hyper aware of what was in food. “Wanting it all to be wholesome and natural and organic. I became very fearful of anything processed, anything that came in a packet, with ingredients, and any numbers.” She feels she veered into orthorexia; “perfectionistic thinking around food, having to have everything perfect and clean and organic. It came to the point where I was like, ‘if I eat that, it’s going to make me sick’,” she says of food that did not reach these standards.
In fact, becoming consumed with what she was eating was causing her a huge amount of stress.
“What I really learned was it’s not so much about what’s on our plate. Of course, nutrition matters, but it’s our relationship to that food that is really key. And my relationship to all food at that point was really distorted and problematic.”
It got to the stage where it was impacting Sinéad’s relationship with her family.
“I was, in later years, quite critical of what my husband would eat; like if he would eat a biscuit. Really it was just a reflection of how I was feeling about myself and my food choices, and the fact that I would have been bingeing on the biscuits at the weekend but keeping that to myself.”
She became very rigid and critical around her children’s diet. “I would have been pushing a gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free, everything-free diet on them. Believing that I was doing the right thing.”
“I wasn’t a very fun parent, I would imagine, for a good few years. There was no ease being in my company, if there was food present. I could never enjoy a 99 with the kids at the beach in the summertime. There was no balance — it was all very rigid.”
A wake up call came when she noticed it was affecting the eating patterns and behaviour of one of her children.
It opened her eyes to her own situation, “because it was a mirror for what was going on for myself. It really shone a light on my own relationship with food, and made me wake up and question, what’s going on here? I was like, ‘what am I doing wrong?’”
Gradually, Sinéad began reading material which awakened her to ideas around our body’s ability to regulate food, consumption and energy.
“But I wasn’t ready at the time to let go of dieting, because I needed to lose weight, I needed to pursue that.”
The turning point came when she reached “diet bottom”.
Sinéad Crowe: "I definitely would say I’m more relaxed now." Photo: Ray Ryan
“Diet bottom is, you’re damned if you do, you’re damned if you don’t. You feel trapped. You can’t diet, but you kind of feel like you can’t not diet. That’s often a really good place to start intuitive eating, and that’s where I was. That does not mean that I still didn’t want to lose weight; I still wanted to lose weight when I started. And that’s OK; it’s OK to still want weight loss. What is key, though, is that you’re not acting on that, so I wasn’t restricting myself. I wasn’t engaging in any kind of physical behaviour. And I was also working on why I wanted to lose weight. What did I ultimately believe it was going to bring me?”
It was Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch’s book Intuitive Eating: a Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach, which really changed Sinéad’s life. “I devoured it. Intuitive eating is a self-care, mind-body framework, comprised of 10 principles that guide you through how to disconnect from diet culture rules and external noise around what we should and shouldn’t be eating, and it guides us to connect with our inner wisdom, innate cues that we all have. And it’s a process of learning how to eat in a way that feels good, and that gives you a sense of peace and contentment with the food on your plate, but also with your body.”
The idea that intuitive eating is eating what you want, when you want, is one of the misunderstandings around the concept, Sinéad says.
“What that myth does is it makes this black-or-white statement, and it negates the nuance. And there’s always nuance. The nuance with that is, yes, it is true that we need to allow ourselves to have unconditional permission to eat all foods. And it’s about attunement to your body, so listening to your hunger, your fullness, your satisfaction. It can be portrayed in the media that it’s about eating doughnuts for breakfast, dinner and tea.”
She doesn’t want to give the impression that intuitive eating is not about health. “It couldn’t be more about health; it really is about health and wellbeing, but sometimes it’s not portrayed like that, it’s portrayed as just go ahead and eat whatever you want.”
Sinéad has pursued intuitive eating with a family member. Their mutual support has been very helpful, as was the Instagram page Sinéad set up, @intuitive.eating.ireland, which allowed her to build a community around intuitive eating.
She has since gone on to train with Tribole to become a certified intuitive eating counsellor, and as well as running workshops, is setting up the Intuitive Eating Hub with a colleague, Shauna Gibson, where they are in the process of putting together a 12-week course.
Within months of pursuing an intuitive eating approach, she began to notice changes. “I felt like I had more time to think about other things. Doing it with others, we kind of made a pact to stop talking about food and dieting and weight and body. That was really freeing, just to put that boundary in place. I felt like I was enjoying my food more. I was more satisfied with my choices, and really getting to sit down and soak in eating nice food, and not feeling guilty about it.”
“The first couple of times that I realised I don’t need willpower to not eat something that my body actually doesn’t need was life-changing. It was phenomenal. I never thought I would be a person who could eat two squares of chocolate and happily leave the rest there. I always thought that would involve some form of discipline and willpower. So when I realised that that’s not a thing, and that intuitive eaters, and normal eaters, can just eat what they need, and then they know it’s always available to them, that was pretty groundbreaking for me,” Sinéad smiles, adding that she feels a greater sense of ease, contentment and peace in her life.
“I definitely would say I’m much more of a fun, playful parent,” she laughs. “I’m more relaxed. I’m more attuned to their needs. And yeah, it’s definitely less stressful.”
If you are affected by issues mentioned in this article, see bodywhys.ie
Ten steps of intuitive eating
⬤Movement: Feel the difference. It’s possible for us all to find movement that we enjoy. If you only exercise to earn or burn your food, you won’t feel the real benefits of movement. ⬤Gentle Nutrition. Nutrition is important, but you have to first work on having a healthy peaceful relationship with food. When you do, integrating helpful nutrition information is fantastic for optimising your wellbeing. ⬤ Discover the satisfaction factor. Allowing yourself to eat foods that truly satisfy you is a game changer. It allows you to move on with the rest of your day, not constantly consumed by thoughts of food. ⬤ Cope with your emotions with kindness. Everyone emotionally eats, eating is inherently an emotional experience. But if you turn to food to consistently soothe your emotions, it’ll become ineffective and often, problematic. ⬤ Feel your fullness. You will always have to be eating enough food and food that satisfies you to be done with eating. Most people eat past fullness because they are attempting to restrict their food intake.
