Is Alcohol a Healthy Choice for Everyone?

Before we talk about Intuitive Eating and alcohol, I want to point out that alcohol isn’t necessarily a healthy choice for everyone. It’s important to assess your personal relationship with alcohol before considering how it fits into your practice of Intuitive Eating.

Another point to mention is that some people choose to not drink alcohol. Whether that’s for religious reasons or personal reasons such as a history of addiction in the family, addictive tendencies, or misuse.

This article isn’t trying to encourage alcohol consumption. The point of this post is to discuss how alcohol, if you choose to drink it, can fit into your personal practice of Intuitive Eating.

Diet Culture’s History of Demonizing Alcohol

For years, diet culture has been demonizing alcohol. It has created a large list of dos and don’ts around it. Below are some examples.

  • Choosing a low-calorie drink over your favorite drink because it doesn’t fit into your diet plan
  • Refraining from drinking with friends due to fear of “liquid calories”
  • Choosing to not celebrate an accomplishment or event with an alcoholic beverage because it doesn’t fit into your daily calories
  • Not wanting to develop a “beer gut” or “beer belly”
  • Alcohol is “too high” in carbs
  • The fact that “light” beer options exist
  • The creation of hard seltzers such as White Claw and Truly. One of their main marketing themes is low calories and low carbs.

Do any of these sound familiar? Diet culture’s rules around alcohol can make it difficult to navigate alcohol consumption. However, viewing alcohol through the lens of Intuitive Eating can be helpful.

Integrating Intuitive Eating and Alcohol

The best way to understand how alcohol can fit into Intuitive Eating is to go through all 10 Intuitive Eating principles. With each principle, ask yourself how it can be applied to your personal relationship with alcohol.

Principle 1 – Reject the Diet Mentality

How has diet culture impacted your view on drinking? Has it created arbitrary rules around alcohol? Has it made drinking into a guilty pleasure or a way to “treat” yourself? Have diet culture’s rules made you feel out of control around alcohol?

Principle 2 – Honor Your Hunger

Do you allow yourself a drink when you want one? Do you allow yourself to choose the drink you’re craving? Are you honoring your hunger before, during, and after drinking? Are you saving up calories, even though you’re hungry, for drinking?

Principle 3 – Make Peace with Food

Do you feel like you have peace with alcohol? Do you feel guilty about having a drink? Can you have a drink and then move on? Does alcohol have any form of control over you?

Principle 4 – Challenge the Food Police

What are your internal rules and thoughts about alcohol? How have family and friends shaped your view of alcohol? How has society shaped your view of alcohol?

Principle 5 – Discover the Satisfaction Factor

Can you truly enjoy a drink and savor it? Are you satisfied once you drink what you were craving? Are you drinking to satisfy or drinking just to drink?

Principle 6 – Feel Your Fullness

Are you able to tell when you’ve reached your limit with alcohol? Do you know when to stop? This principle is especially important to evaluate. Just as Intuitive Eating doesn’t encourage binge eating, it also doesn’t encourage binge drinking.

Principle 7 – Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness

Are you using alcohol to suppress emotions? Do you have coping mechanisms that don’t involve alcohol? Intuitive Eating encourages finding ways to cope that don’t focus on food and the same applies to alcohol.

Principle 8 – Respect Your Body

Does drinking alcohol respect or disrespect your body? How does drinking alcohol make you feel about your body? Do you lose respect for yourself when you drink?

Principle 9 – Movement – Feel the Difference

Are you exercising to burn off the calories from alcohol? Are you using exercise to earn your alcohol? Intuitive Eating discourages using exercise as a compensatory behavior.

Principle 10 – Honor Your Health with Gentle Nutrition

How are you honoring your health when you drink alcohol? How is alcohol impacting your health? Is it negatively impacting your mental and/or physical health? Would your health improve if you stopped drinking?

Quick Summary of Intuitive Eating and Alcohol

In summary, it’s important to know whether or not you have a healthy relationship with alcohol before seeing if it fits into your Intuitive Eating practice.

It can be hard to navigate alcohol because diet culture has created rules around its consumption. A great place to start is to view alcohol through the lens of Intuitive Eating. This can be done by going through the Intuitive Eating principles and assessing how each applies to your relationship with alcohol. By doing this, you can identify what areas you can grow and what principles you’re already succeeding in.

Lastly, I want to reiterate that the point of this article is not to encourage drinking. The point is to evaluate whether or not alcohol can fit into Intuitive Eating, if you choose to consume it.

In the end, I hope this article helped you in the process of figuring out where or if alcohol fits into your Intuitive Eating practice.

Dig Deeper

If you would like to dig deeper into Intuitive Eating, I recommend grabbing a copy of Intuitive Eating – A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach, 4th Edition by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. It can be found where books are sold, including Amazon. The official Intuitive Eating Website is also a great resource.

For additional reading, check out the Intuitive Eating section on my website. Whether you’re a newbie intuitive eater or a seasoned one, take a look at my anti-diet themed store for fun Intuitive Eating products!

Thanks for reading!

Rachel Beiler, MHS, RD, LDN

References

Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach, 4th Edition by Evelyn Tribole & Elyse Resch