The Four Eating Personalities
As a weight-inclusive dietitian, whose work is guided by the Intuitive Eating Framework, my goal is to bring you, my client, closer to becoming an intuitive eater.
We are all born intuitive eaters. As babies, we cried when we were hungry and stopped eating when we were full. We refused to eat food that we didn’t like and ate more of the food we enjoyed. But at some point, between childhood and adulthood, we lost trust in ourselves to make the “right” food choices. We came to believe in the idea that external food rules could satisfy our psychological and physiological needs better than the biological mechanisms that have kept modern humans alive for hundreds of thousands of years. Dismissing hunger as weakness is now the norm. We would rather trick our bodies into thinking they're full. This distrust of ourselves is what has diminished our natural-born intuition around food. It has invited other insidious ways of relating to food into our lives.
So, if you aren’t an intuitive eater then what kind of eater are you?
In their book, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program that Works, authors and registered dietitians, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, identified four types of eaters that they could categorize their clients into based on distinguishable eating patterns:
The Intuitive Eater
The Professional Dieter
The Careful Eater
The Unconscious Eater
These eating personalities are not static, so it is possible for them to change over time depending on your life’s circumstances. It is also likely that there will be some overlap between the different personalities.
Understanding the different eating personalities and which one you relate to most can increase awareness of your eating behavior and bring you closer to becoming an intuitive eater.
The Intuitive Eater
Intuitive eaters rely on their internal cues to make food choices based on what they feel their bodies need. If an intuitive eater is hungry, they eat. If an intuitive eater doesn’t like the way a food tastes, they usually choose not to eat it. Intuitive eaters make food choices based on satisfaction, hunger, and fullness and they do so unapologetically. They do not rely on meal plans, points, or calorie restrictions to tell them what their bodies need.
The Professional Dieter
The Professional Dieter is usually planning their next diet. They are painfully familiar with the “diet, lose weight, gain weight, intermittent binges, back to dieting” cycle. They have tried almost every weight loss trick, quick fix, or “lifestyle change” and are usually well-versed in calorie counting and portions sizes. However, the reason that this eater type is always on a diet because the last one didn’t work. This eater type is mostly guided by weight loss.
The Careful Eater
Careful eaters aren’t officially on any diet, but they tend to overanalyze their food choices. They view nutrition labels with scrutiny and will refuse to eat a food if it contains, what they consider to be, too much fat or sugar. They attach morality to food and feel guilty if what or how much they eat doesn’t meet their standard of what is considered healthy. Careful eaters appear to genuinely be interested in their health but oftentimes, it’s their body image that they’re trying to manage.
The Unconscious Eater
In the age of information and multitasking, it’s no wonder that there’s such an eater as the unconscious one. The Unconscious Eater is usually eating while being engaged with something else, so they aren’t usually fully present. There are four types of unconscious eaters:
The Chaotic Unconscious Eater: This type of unconscious eater has way too much on her plate (no pun intended). She is too busy doing other things to worry about having a satisfying meal, so she eats whatever is available. She is so busy that she often-times goes long periods without eating and usually only recognizes hunger once she is ravenously hungry.
The Refuse-Not Unconscious Eater: This unconscious eater will eat just because food is in her presence. It doesn’t matter if she is hungry or not. The Refuse-Not Eater isn’t even usually aware of what or how much they’re eating.
The Waste-Not Unconscious Eater: This unconscious eater is driven by the need to get the most for their money. Waste food? Not in the house of a waste-not eater.
The Emotional Unconscious Eater: The Emotional Eater usually uses food as a coping mechanism in times of stress, boredom, loneliness, or anger. At some point in the life of the emotional eater, they learned to rely on food for temporary alleviation of their emotions.