The Wise Mind Intuitive Eater

In Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), there is a concept known as the Wise Mind. The Wise Mind lies halfway between the instinctive and rational minds or, rather, it is a blending of the two. We can use this idea to frame mindful and intuitive eating and avoid the extremes of eating patterns.

Understanding Mindless Eating: Instinctual Patterns

When we eat mindlessly, we are in pure instinct. While this approach ensures that we respond to our physical hunger, it also leads us to use food for other reasons. Food is more than fuel and our brain knows that.

For most of us, food is readily available — especially things high in fat, sugar, salt, and other components our brains crave. So we will instinctively use food for reasons other than bodily hunger. We will crave high-sugar foods when stressed or tired for a quick hit of energy. We might crave salty, fatty, or calorie-dense foods for their comfort and mood-boosting properties. We crave foods that have positive memories and associations.

But these instinctive responses are not necessarily mindful or fully aligned with our needs.

The Limits of Rational Eating

Many people attempt to avoid the challenges of mindless eating by relying on rational eating — but that has significant pitfalls as well. Every body is different; every individual has unique nutritional requirements, making a one-size-fits-all approach ineffective. The recommended dietary allowances for vitamins and minerals are designed to meet the needs of 97-98% of the general population.

By definition, this means that if every person ate the recommended intake of all vitamins and minerals, 2-3% of people would not be getting enough.

The second problem of attempting to eat by purely rational rules is that our brains are not purely rational. We are emotional creatures. Our emotions play a major role in our decision making, even if we can later rationalize those decisions. This is not a bad thing.

Food is more than fuel. It is culture. It is enjoyment. It is connection. It is self-care.

Intuitive Eating Balances Emotions and Rationality

Intuitive eating blends emotional awareness with rational thought. Eating foods that are pleasurable and that make your body feel good is the root of intuitive eating. It is about making decisions that work now and that help you feel good later.

We can unlock this balance through mindful eating, assuming we can avoid one of the major pitfalls of the new mindful eater:

“Being mindful of what you are eating” versus Mindful Eating

You might have thought before that you should “be more mindful of what you are eating.” You probably meant that you believe you need to think about your food choices more. But many people who have attempted to improve their diet have already overdeveloped the rational side of our mind when it comes to eating.

You think too much about eating.

Mindful eating on the other hand is more about experiencing what you are eating. It is about engaging all your external senses: the sights, smells, tastes, sounds, and textures of your meal. It is also about engaging your internal senses. Taking a deep breath before you begin and feeling your chest expand. Sitting with good posture so you feel balanced, engaging your proprioceptive sense — your innate knowledge of where your body is in space. It is about feeling and honoring your senses of hunger and thirst, as well as your more nuanced cravings and desires.

Mindful eating, in other words, is about being in your body rather than your mind. It’s your body wisdom — your instincts — that you have been ignoring ever since your first diet.

Overthinking Nutrition

So many of us have over-developed our nutrition knowledge — and that is my professional opinion as a dietitian — at the expense of understanding our body’s signals. We spend so much time thinking about food, recipes, macros, what is “healthy” or “unhealthy,” what is junk food, what foods will prolong our health and our life… We try to analyze our way to the perfect diet, never acknowledging that perfection is an unattainable goal.

We are human.

We are not robots. We will get sick. We will be too tired to meal prep. We’ll have a long day at work. We’ll be more active one day and less active another — which impacts our hunger and nutrition needs. We’ll travel and eat out with friends and family.

Every day is a little bit different. Our needs, desires, situations, environments, and abilities change over time. Sometimes these changes are sudden and sometimes they are subtle, but they are always happening.

So when you rely on your analytical brain, you quickly fall into anxiety and stress, and frequently fall short of “the plan” — even if “the plan” was actually what you needed in the first place.

The Limitations of Nutrition Knowledge

After my first nutrition class, I thought I knew nearly everything. A 4-year degree would be a piece of cake. I couldn’t comprehend what we would be doing in all that time.

After I got my degree and was licensed as a dietitian, I was in shock that I was being allowed to work by myself as the sole dietitian in the hospital and clinic of a small town. I felt like I knew next to nothing because I had realized how much we simply do not know about the human body or what nutrients we need.

Consider this: the FODMAP diet, which has helped so many people with IBS and is now a gold-standard treatment for many cases, was developed while I was still in university. Things are being researched right now that will dramatically improve people’s lives in the future. Things that may eventually be as obvious as the fact that vitamin C deficiency causes scurvy.

There is a lot we don’t know but the basics are very basic

Have you ever heard of the Dunning-Kruger Effect? As popularly described¹, it is the idea that novices tend to be over-confident in their knowledge and abilities whereas experts tend to seem less confident to those outside the field because they speak about nuances and gaps in our knowledge.

The reason why I felt so confident at the end of my first nutrition class, aside from having a fabulous professor, was that the basics are pretty easy to understand.

Most people do well eating a diet:

• based on plants — lots of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, seeds, and beans
• with adequate intake of fats — particularly from fish, nuts, seeds, avocado, etc
• including high-quality proteins — fish, meat, beans, tofu, etc
• and minimally processed — whole foods most often, cooked at home

Whether you are following the plate method, Mediterranean diet, Canada’s Food Guide, or the traditional diet of your culture, the basics are very similar.

However, as I learned more — and continue to learn — I see the gaps and nuances. I see many of the debates and I know there must be even more that I am not even aware of yet.

Here is just a short sample of questions and debates I know about and am actively monitoring:

• Why do some people develop intolerance to certain foods?
• How much sugar and processed food is too much? And how do we define ‘processed foods’?
• What level of processing is unhealthy for humans — and why? Is something missing? An excess of something? Something else?
• How does our gut microbiome affect our health? Can we use it to diagnose conditions? Can we improve health by manipulating it?
• What exactly is inflammation? What is causing chronic inflammation? How does inflammation interact with health? How do your food choices and lifestyle affect inflammation?
• Can we suppress the parts of the immune system related to chronic conditions while maintaining essential functions? What is the role of diet or lifestyle?

We know part of the answers to these questions (or at least we think we do) but we don’t know the full picture. We might never know the full picture. There is always another secret to uncover².

Unlock your Wise Mind

In dialectical behaviour therapy, the concept of the wise mind refers to the space between your analytical brain and your emotional experience. When it comes to eating, the wise mind is the place where your nutrition knowledge (even with all the limitations discussed) meets your lived experience (with all the complexities involved).

When you eat mindfully, fully experiencing your external and internal senses, it feeds your intuition. Your intuition is unconscious pattern recognition. It is the reason why you see shapes in the clouds and can sense when it is about to rain.

By being fully aware of how it feels to eat, your unconscious mind is able to predict how you will feel in the future if you eat or drink something now. It is a gut reaction of “if I eat this, I will feel good” (or not).

Your analytical mind can also come in and recognize those patterns. For example, you might realize that you feel more satisfied with a high-protein breakfast or a high-fibre breakfast. You can then use this knowledge in the future to help you make plans.

This is how mindful eating evolves into intuitive eating.

The Importance of Mindset: Why you eat matters

An intuitive eater and a chronic dieter might both eat a salad the day after a night of pizza and ice cream but one is reacting and one is responding.

The chronic dieter is feeling guilty and ashamed. They feel bloated and unwell as a result of over-indulging and believe it means that they cannot be trusted around those foods. They eat the salad to do penance against their sins. An instinctive reaction to an emotional feeling.

Or the chronic dieter might be more in the “rational” mind and decide that the salad would counterbalance the pizza and ice cream. However rational this may be, it might not be appropriate for their body. They may need more calories, fat, carbs, or protein than the specific salad that they have selected. Their body may be sending them hunger signals that they are ignoring in favour of the “rational” decision.

The wise mind intuitive eater eats the salad because they recognize their body feels out of balance. They are craving something light and fresh to come back to center. If they are a recovering dieter, they might initially think the same things as the chronic dieter, but they are able to recognize that those thoughts are untrue and unhelpful. They can rewrite the script and remind themselves that they can trust their body’s signals and use the fact that they want to eat the salad today as proof. They can have compassion for their past self’s lack of trust and move forward in a more positive way that actually allows them to take care of themselves.

The wise mind can also take advice from the rational part of their mind and ensure that their salad includes some protein, fat, and high-fibre carbs to round it out, rather than a plate of just veggies that wouldn’t fully satisfy them.

In short, the wise mind intuitive eater recognizes the importance of balancing emotional satisfaction with nutritional needs, ensuring that their meals are both enjoyable and nourishing — they taste good now and feel good later.

Bottom Line

Intuitive eating doesn’t mean abandoning nutrition knowledge; it means integrating it with your body’s wisdom. Recognizing that the basics remain the same but the details vary from person to person gives you space to personalize your habits and routines. Then, mindful eating helps you reconnect with your body and develop your intuition. By paying attention to both your external and internal senses, you can develop a balanced, wise, intuitive relationship with food.

Bringing rational knowledge and lived experience together is where you will find the wise mind. The Wise Mind guides you to eat in a way that feels good. When you feel good, and have the energy and motivation to do the things you want to do, you can live your life.

Ultimately, intuitive eating helps you live a good life, however you choose to define it. And isn’t that what it’s all about?

Additional Resources & Reading:

Wise Mind – Dialectical Behavior Therapy: https://dialecticalbehaviortherapy.com/mindfulness/wise-mind/

The Dunning-Kruger Effect, explained – The Decision Lab: https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/dunning-kruger-effect

The Dunning-Kruger Effect Isn’t What You Think it Is (the other side): https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-dunning-kruger-effect-isnt-what-you-think-it-is/

Last but not least, if you are a fan of fantasy and somehow haven’t heard of Brandon Sanderson, I have a new hobby to suggest (he is ridiculously prolific); consider picking up Mistborn.

1. While there is some academic debate about the actual results of the original study, it does describe the phenomenon that I experienced. If you want to get in the weeds, this is a great article: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-dunning-kruger-effect-isnt-what-you-think-it-is/ I’d also recommend checking out this one: https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/dunning-kruger-effect ↩︎
2. Gold star to anyone who emails me with the name of the character who said this. Hint: I’m a Brandon Sanderson fan ;) ↩︎