There are two types of eaters:

Intuitive - intuitive eaters naturally listen to their body cues about hunger and satiation

Controlled - controlled eaters are motivated by external, environmental and/or emotional influences

​

It's ideal to eat intuitively, but I've yet to meet a purely intuitive eater; even those who predominantly follow body cues are still occasionally influenced by external stimuli. 

Unfortunately, most of us fall into the controlled eating realm and are heavily influenced to eat based on outside factors.  These types of influences are our motivations for eating and identifying those motivations is critical in being able to set achievable goals to improve our relationship with food.

​

There are four types of eating motivations:

Social - eating times and choices revolve around socialization, events, special occasions

Emotional - eating times and choices are influenced by moods, ie. stress, anger, sadness, happiness

Habitual - eating tends to be more distracted/unconscious based on time of day or routine activities

Healthy - eating times are intuitive, based on body cues and food choices are mindful

​

Of course, we should strive to be Intuitive Healthy eaters, but are human and there are times where all of us are motivated by Social, Emotional or Habitual cues.  Use this worksheet or answer the following:

• Think about your own food motivations on a daily basis. . . is there one area that stands out or do you find you are influenced by all of them? 

• Write down examples of how each of these motivations has influenced when and what you ate.

​

Being conscious of what motivates when and what you eat is critical to making changes for long term health.  Most diets don't tackle eating motivation, but rather revolve around making one or more macronutrients the enemy; however, the strongest reasons for obesity and poor health are directly tied to how we eat and the quality of the food we eat.  Being a Controlled, Social, Emotional or Habitual eater not only makes it more likely that we will eat when we aren't hungry or keep eating long after we're satiated, but also tends to result in making poor food choices.

​

What often leads to our eating motivations are also our biggest stumbling blocks as we try to make incremental changes to move towards Healthy eating.  Those blocks can be Time / Availability or Access to Healthy Foods / Nutritional Restrictions / Addictions / Education. . . in the next section we will talk about strategies you can implement to make healthier choices and set yourself up for long term success.

​