U
AT?
was splashing in the pool late this summer,
a bottle of slightly fizzy cool red wine from
Emilia-Romagna sweating and perched
precariously on the deck, when I first heard
of intuitive eating. “I’ve been intuitive eat-
ing” was the sentence that grabbed my
attention—not least because the speaker
was Nekisia Davis, inventor of Early Bird
Granola, the most delicious granola I have
ever tasted. Nekisia is eminently trustworthy
in all things food-related, a committed epi-
cure and industry veteran.
Glass extended, I asked her to elaborate.
Don’t we all intuitively eat? We do not, she
said—and explained that intuitive eating
was a kind of insurrectionist anti-wellness
strategy, a countermovement
to the restrictive diets, fast-
ing trends, and other dubious
self-improvement strategies so
many of us are committed to.
But how does one...do it?
I asked tentatively, and her
answer caused me to spill some
of my wine. “I eat what I want when I want.”
And she had never felt better in her life.
I almost argued with her. Haven’t we
learned that we must eat more of this and
less of that? That we should remain scrupu-
lously thin and health-minded at all costs?
I sipped my wine instead. Nekisia was
brimming with apparent health and serene
confidence. What did I know?
Besides, following so-called wellness regi-
mens has never left me feeling particularly...
well. Up until now, whenever bouts of anxi-
ety or weight gain or noticeable drops in my
energy level have spurred me toward try-
ing to achieve greater well-being—perhaps
by eating raw vegetables or renouncing
pizza—I’ve hit an unmovable object. Of
course I want to be happy, healthy, calm, and
beautiful. I also cook and write about food
for a living, and I want those little white
cabécou cheeses from Gaillac, numerous
bowls of Pasta alla Gricia—the unsung
hero of Roman pastas—and slices of the
nutty cured lardo made in Colonnata, Italy,
in white marble basins, draped over grilled
bread. Pleasure in food and drink is at the
center of my life, and I’ve never been able
to reconcile my impulse to give in to it,
with the countervailing but no less press-
ing instinct that somehow—some way—I
really shouldn’t.
But it was obvious that Nekisia, creator of
ambrosial granola, felt very well! She seemed
to have happiness, health, calm, and beauty
in spades. Over potato chips whose crumbs
we swept furtively into the pool, I wondered
if it could all be so simple. Tell me more, I
said, about your laissez-faire health philos-
ophy, with its seductive and succinct motto.
Six months ago, Nekisia had followed
only restrictive forms of eating: the paleo
diet, keto diet, juice fasts—whatever was
au courant among the wellness set. “I was
in the middle of ‘Whole30’ or no carbs or
something,” she told me. Since the onset of
puberty, she’d been trying such programs,
ranging from Jenny Craig to intermittent
fasting and everything between. Each led to
weight loss followed by weight gain. Then,
Nekisia happened upon the Instagram
account of Caroline Dooner, a cult food
author whose apostasy about trusting one’s
body has attracted a legion of fans. From
there, she found her way to a
landmark book by two dieti-
tians, Elyse Resch and Evelyn
Tribole, called Intuitive Eating:
A Revolutionary Program That
Works. (A new edition will be
released in June.) The authors’
credentials were unimpeach-
able—and they were heretics. “If you’re
interested in health,” Nekisia told me, with
the vigor of a convert, “you have to be inter-
ested in the shame and hurt that come with
diet culture.” When she discarded her list
of forbidden foods, her mind began to brim
with space. “It’s like you get out of a bad
relationship and you can’t believe you were
ever operating that way.”
Once the effects of drinking wine all day
in a pool had begun to subside, I did some
reading. Nekisia had not simply been spew-
ing sun-stricken inventions. The internet
was abuzz with the benefits of intuitive
eating, which had been endorsed by no less
than the Ellyn Satter Institute of Madison,
Wisconsin, the gold standard in eating theo-
ry. And London has its very own Centre for
Intuitive Eating, where a staff of topflight
nutritionists train clients and clinicians.
The IE movement—as I learned to call it—
was widespread.
SOME OF THIS, A
LITTLE OF THAT
In the intuitive-eating
movement, no food
is better or worse than
another. The goal is
satisfaction—not excess.
ADAM
VOORHES/GALLERY STOCK
I
CONTINUED ON PAGE 357
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