What Kind of Eater Are You?
Welcome to National Nutrition Month! Today’s post is fitting as we will be exploring different eating styles or personalities. Whether you are a [Careful] Clean Eater, Unconscious Eater, or a unique combination of a few different styles, we have all the details!
What Kind of Eater Are You?
Before we dive in, please note that this post is for educational purposes only and should not be substituted for professional help. These Eating Styles or Personalities come straight from the Intuitive Eating book, with additional insights and considerations from the CCN Team. It is possible to identify with more than one eating style/personality, though there might be one style that resonates with you most. Life events and seasons can also influence the personality you identify with.
The [Careful] Clean Eater
Clean Eaters appear as the ‘perfect’ eaters, making highly nutrition-conscious meal choices, while prioritizing exercise, health, and wellness. Let’s examine Joanna’s Clean Eating Style.
Outwardly, Joanna appears confident and disciplined, eating cleanly and exercising daily. However, much of Joanna’s time is spent thinking about food and planning her next meals and snacks. She scrutinizes food labels, refuses to eat anything deemed ‘unhealthy’, including fatty or sugary foods, and rigidly monitors the quality and quantity of foods. Joanna allows herself to ‘splurge’ on the weekends if she can stick to her food and exercise schedule, but any deviations during the week will impact how much of a ‘splurge’ she allows on the weekend, if any. Joanna is praised for her discipline and people often wish they could have just a smidgen of her willpower. Though Joanna is proud of her identity as a Clean Eater, guilt and shame are two ever-present emotions, especially if she struggles to stick with her meal and exercise plan.
In our culture (aka diet culture), Joanna has it ‘figured out’! Joanna has worked hard to be able to fit into the image that diet culture has for everyone (no matter how unrealistic). While it’s okay to be interested in making healthful choices for your body, the trouble lies in the rigidity and rules. Joanna’s strict adherence to external cues for her food intake and exercise keeps her from tuning into her interoceptive awareness. This not only impacts her relationship with her body and food, but it can even cause challenges with other relationships in her life. Joanna is also on the slippery slope of Clean Eating that can shift quickly into Orthorexia. Remember the difference between Disordered Eating and Eating Disorders?
The Professional Dieter
Professional Dieters are perpetually on some kind of diet or food plan. A Professional Dieter can tell you all their ‘dieting tricks’, and is well-versed in counting calories, macros, and portioning out food. Let’s examine Karen’s Eating Style.
Karen has been trying to lose weight via dieting since a teen and is hopeful that the diet she tries after celebrating her 50th birthday will finally do the trick. Diets have helped Karen lose weight in the past, but it always came back, and sometimes it was more than she originally lost. Like other professional dieters, Karen goes through the occasional binges and usually engages in Last Supper Mentality before starting something new. If she ever slips up and eats a ‘forbidden food’ on her diet, she enjoys all she can before confidently stating she will never eat that food again and will start fresh the next day! Karen finds herself stuck in the diet cycle frequently: diet, lose weight, gain it back, intermittent binges, then back to dieting. This cycle looks a lot like the Restrict/Binge Cycle.
The trouble with Karen’s cycle is that it’s an exhausting, unsustainable way to live. If weight loss is the main focus, even if is veiled under the guise of ‘wanting to be healthier’, when it doesn’t happen, people can turn to different ‘diet aids’ like diuretics, diet pills, or laxatives, which can be very dangerous. Chronic dieting is also a common stepping stone to a full-blown eating disorder. Weight cycling and chronic dieting are strong predictors of eating disorders.
The Unconscious Eater
The Unconscious Eater is someone who often engages in paired eating** and can struggle with awareness of what they are eating, how much they are eating, and their internal body cues. The Intuitive Eating book outlines a few different types of Unconscious Eaters, so let’s explore Jordan, Bailey, Jess, and Philip’s Eating Styles.
As a Chaotic Unconscious Eater, Jordan is busy! Between work, school pick-ups/drop-offs, kids’ sports, social events, and family time, their eating style is chaotic and haphazard. Due to a full schedule, Jordan struggles to honor their biological hunger until they are ravenous!
Bailey, a Refuse-Not Unconscious Eater, is vulnerable to the presence of food. Whether it be grabbing a few pieces of candy from the jar on her way to her desk at work or snacking on a cookie from the cookie jar each time she passes the kitchen, Bailey struggles with awareness around what she’s eating and how much.
Jess wants to get as much food as they can for their money and they do not like wasting food. As a Waste-Not Unconscious Eater, Jess exhibits Clean Plate Mentality almost daily.
As an Emotional Unconscious Eater, Philip’s main coping tool when he feels uncomfortable emotions is food. When his emotions feel too big and too intense like sadness, loneliness, or stress, food is his comfort.
While each person’s style is a little different, again, the main characteristic is a lack of awareness around food and body sensations, aka Interoceptive Awareness. I’m sure many of us have been so occupied with other things that we didn’t eat a meal until we were beyond hungry. Who hasn’t enjoyed a few peanut M&M’s on the way to the living room from the kitchen (just me?!?!)? Financial considerations are important, especially when it comes to food. And, who hasn’t used food to cope with emotions?
On the surface, all these scenarios seem reasonable. The trouble is when it becomes a pattern, that negatively impacts your relationship with food, exercise, your body, and others.
** While paired eating can decrease interoceptive awareness for some, others, especially those on the neurodivergent spectrum, can actually benefit from paired eating, such as watching a TV show or reading a book.
The Intuitive Eater
The Intuitive Eater honors their internal hunger and fullness cues, finds pleasure in eating food, and is not guided by rigidity or external suggestions (when to eat, how much to eat, how often to eat, and what to eat). We will talk more about what it means to be an Intuitive Eater, how to become an Intuitive Eater, and some common misconceptions about being an Intuitive Eater.
Now what?
This post is meant to provide information, increase your awareness, and build curiosity, three of my favorite first steps when wanting to make a change. How does your eating style/personality impact your life? Does it feel easy and sustainable? Is it a struggle to let go of rigidity? Is the fear of body change so significant that it feels impossible to stop dieting?
Moving Forward
Does having this information change how you feel about your relationship with food or your body? Do you need support as you work on making changes? If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disorder or disordered eating and needs help, please fill out our contact form.
Sources Used: Tribole, E., & Resch, E. (2020). Intuitive Eating, 4th Edition (Updated). St. Martin’s Essentials.
Collaborative Counseling & Nutrition is an outpatient nutrition and body image counseling center, with locations in Indianapolis and Carmel, that provides compassionate, holistic eating disorder treatment. Through practicing mindfulness, intuition, and Health At Every Size, we are on a mission to help you find a true state of well-being! We take an anti-diet, weight-inclusive approach with all our clients and work to help guide you towards a way of healthy living designed by you, just for you! This post is for education purposes only and should not be used as a substitute for treatment for an eating disorder. If you are looking for a registered dietitian or therapist to assist you on your recovery journey, please reach out today!
