Are You an Intuitive Eater If You Use The Time to Know When to Eat? Answer: It Depends
By Katherine Metzelaar, MSN, RDN, CD
Do you ever feel like you’re not hungry when the clock says you’re “supposed” to be? Or that you’re hungry when the clock says you aren’t “supposed” to be?
This often is because dieting and restricting foods involves focusing a lot on the clock, i.e. the timing of your meals. I know you understand because you have been there before.
With prescribed diets, even those that claim that they are “not diets”, there tends to be a lot of focus on the timing of meals. This includes rules or guidelines around things like how long you “should” go without eating, how often you “should” be eating, when it’s too early to eat, when it’s too late to eat, and much more. The clock becomes the external parameter that you are encouraged to use to control your food intake.
Because of this focus on the clock/time you start to get confused or feel like your meals need to coincide perfectly with a certain time of day. And after years of feeling like you need to be rigidly using the clock to determine meal and snack times, it can feel hard to know any other way of eating.
This is where intuitive eating and its framework can be really helpful to use.* Intuitive eating teaches ways to use the body as a guide to address hunger and fullness cues while removing external guidelines as parameters for decision making.
What happens when you’re not connected to your hunger cues?
This is where the nuance comes in with intuitive eating that is often missed on social media and in public conversations about intuitive eating. While using the clock/time to guide hunger can indeed be rigid and disconnect you from hunger, using the the clock/time can also be helpful and intuitive… I know, a little confusing right?! Hear me out.
There are so many things that can disrupt your hunger cues such as falling in love, eating disorders/disordered eating, mental illness, undernourishment, anxiety, depression, disability, trauma, chronic dieting, injury, functional gut disorders, accessibility to food, and so much more.
Because of all the things that can disconnect you from your hunger cues, depending exclusively on hunger cues (meaning waiting until you know you are hungry because your body is telling you so) is not 100% reliable. And in knowing that there are lots of things that interrupt, disrupt and disconnect you from your hunger cues, using the clock/time can be helpful at times.
Use the clock as a loose guideline, not a hard and fast rule.
Your body, and all human bodies, generally need to eat food every 2-4 hours and eat within the first few hours of waking up. This is not a hard and fast rule, but rather a guideline based on what we know about basic physiology of the body. 2 to 4 hours is about the amount of time that it takes for your body to digest the food you have consumed, send the glucose (your cells’ fuel) out, to absorb the glucose, and then need more glucose again (we are basically cars).
After dieting or restricting food for years, it can feel helpful to have structure and permission to eat more rhythmically and to eat enough. And for others (nuance here again), they may have followed very strict diets in the past where they had to dogmatically adhere to only eating food at certain times. For the latter experience, working toward building skills around not using the clock may be really helpful. No matter your experience, there are ways that you get to uniquely use the framework of intuitive eating to navigate what might work best for you.
The time of day that you eat your meals may vary each day, which is a great place to use intuitive eating as a tool to honor your needs.
The time of day that you eat can be an opportunity to practice intuitive eating even if you are using the guideline of working on eating every 2-4 hours. Sometimes on the weekend you might sleep in and your first meal might be later in the day. Other times you might wake up earlier, say during the week, and your first meal might be earlier in the day. Simply put: the times that you eat each day may not be the same and that’s ok. This means that you get to practice honoring your hunger even when it happens later in the evening or comes up during a time in the day that you hadn’t expected it to.
This is often really hard for most people because most diets and eating disorders dictate very strict rules around when you “should” be eating, demonize snacks in between meals, and offer advice around not eating after a certain time. This can leave you feeling like you cannot honor hunger or eat beyond a certain time.
Don’t make intuitive eating a “I only eat when I am hungry” diet.
Intuitive Eating is a framework and not a diet. It offers the tools that over time allow you to be able to learn how to reconnect with your hunger (and fullness) so that for the most part you are able to use your body as a source of wisdom. It’s ok though that if for some time, as you heal your relationship to food and re-nourish your body, that you use the time/clock as a loose guideline to “cue you” into the fact that it’s time to eat. In fact, this is also intuitive eating and it comes in handy at any point if there is something that comes up that disrupts your hunger or your connection to your hunger.
There is nuance to becoming an intuitive eater, and in that nuance using the clock as a loose guideline can sometimes be the most intuitive thing you can do.
*When in eating disorder treatment, intuitive eating will not be appropriate for some time due to the impact of disordered behaviors on hunger cues. Please consult with your treatment team to check to see if some of these practices are appropriate based on your stage of recovery.
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