Intuitive Eating 101: What is Intuitive Eating and How to Get Started
Intuitive eating is a topic that has gained popularity in recent years, and for good reason!
With more and more people searching for a sustainable approach to food outside of diet culture and weight loss tactics, intuitive eating has come front and center as the answer.
If you’re not totally familiar with the concept of intuitive eating or aren’t exactly sure where to start, this approach to eating can seem a bit daunting.
What exactly does it mean to eat intuitively or to make peace with food and your body? How can you give yourself unconditional permission to eat if you’re used to following rules to tell you what, when, and how to eat?
If you’ve been on the fence about intuitive eating or are just curious to begin learning more, my hope is that this post will help encourage and guide you as you begin your journey.
Becoming an intuitive eater completely changed my life and helped me heal from an eating disorder and a destructive relationship with food and my body.
Practicing intuitive eating has also helped me successfully navigate some of the most transformative seasons of motherhood, including pregnancy and postpartum.
I have also found that as I have rebuilt trust and confidence in my body through intuitive eating, I have been empowered to confidently feed my own children and build a positive feeding relationship with my kids.
No matter where you are on your journey, if you’re ready to learn more, I’d love to invite you to keep reading. This post is for you.
What is Intuitive Eating?
For starters, what exactly is an intuitive eating definition?
Intuitive eating is an approach originated by two brilliant nutrition therapists, Elyse Resch and Evelyn Tribole. Together, they founded this empowerment tool to help individuals like you create a healthy relationship with food, and honor your health, mind and body using 10 core principles of intuitive eating as a guide to becoming the best expert of your body.
This approach to eating is evidenced-based, meaning, it has been validated by research as an effective tool for helping those that practice it cultivate mind body health and wellness.
It’s also an inclusive approach to health that understands that our wellness encompasses so much more than just the food we eat or how much we weigh.
Health is determined by a variety of physical, mental, and psychological factors, and intuitive eating embraces the nuances and individualized approach to health and wellness.
So all that might sound great in theory, but what might this look like in real life?
To help you better understand what intuitive eating is, I always go back to babies as a great example of intuitive eating in action.
When you think about a baby - how do babies know when they’re hungry and need to eat? How do babies know when they’ve had adequate food and can stop eating?
Babies are born with innate hunger cues and fullness signals that help regulate their appetites and guide their food intake according to what their bodies need.
If you’ve had a baby or been around a baby, you can likely attest to the ways that babies communicate their physical need for nourishment when they need it.
Babies and toddlers don’t base their food choices or the amount of food they need on what they think is “healthy” for them or the latest fad diet or on what they think might change their aesthetic or size of their body.
Babies and toddlers don’t think of food in a good or bad lens. They simply respond to their innate hunger and fullness cues that naturally guide their appetites and help them understand when they’re hungry and need to eat, when they’re full, and what to eat from the foods they’ve been offered (older babies and toddlers).
This is what I like to refer to as our “factory mode”. Intuitive eating and the ability to self-regulate our intake is something that’s programmed into our bodies from the very beginning.
We were all born this way, but at different places in our lifetimes, many of us were influenced to believe that our bodies could no longer be trusted. Some of us may have had a traumatic incidence around food or our bodies that could have created distrust, too.
Much of this distrust is heavily shaped by diet culture, which promotes the idea that food and our body sizes are something to be rigidly controlled.
This is where diets come in, in their many different shapes and forms. This is commonly seen today as a “clean eating/wellness” culture, which still imposes rigid rules and ways of eating that are often unrealistic and unsustainable.
In the face of diet culture, it’s not uncommon to fear food, eating, and changes in our bodies. Many different factors can cause a person to become disconnected from their own body and look to external rules (AKA - diets) to tell them what and how much to eat.
The problem with this is that diets don’t take an individual’s needs, preferences, culture, and all the other important factors that influence eating needs.
Eating that is based on externality rather than listening to and respond to the direct messages of your own body can be a trigger for many adverse effects. This is why diets simply don’t work.
Intuitive eating, on the other hand, repositions YOU as the best expert of what your body and mind need to thrive and helps you reconnect with your body to understand your own needs.
Ultimately, becoming an intuitive eater can help you dismantle diet culture in your own life so you can be free to realign with and respond to your own body.
What is Diet Culture?
Part of learning about intuitive eating is having an awareness and understanding about diet culture.
You may have heard this term before, but what exactly is diet culture?
DIet culture refers to a belief system about food and health that is widely held and accepted by our society.
So for example, our society glorifies a certain body size as the objectification of health that is unattainable for the majority of people. This is part of diet culture.
The systematic beliefs that our health and value as people are strictly defined by the size of our bodies and how much we weigh is utterly damaging.
These beliefs are largely what fuels and reinforces a multi-billion dollar diet industry and perpetuates the vicious cycle of dieting, where individuals can get stuck with restrictive diets that may lead to the yo-yo of losing weight, followed by weight gain and a miserable relationship with food and body.
Other aspects of diet culture include moralizing food (i.e. you are “good” if you eat this way, or “bad” if you eat these foods). You can see this in many diets which outline good versus bad food. The trouble with demonizing certain foods while elevating others is that it sucks people into a guilt-shame cycle around food.
When you feel ashamed or guilty for eating something that has been labeled as “bad”, this can create a complete sense of chaos around food and unhealthy behaviors around eating.
Ultimately, diet culture gets people trapped into the pursuit of weight loss or trying to manipulate their body size or shape. If you are familiar with this, you can likely confirm how much time, money, energy, and effort can be wasted on trying to control your food or body size.
Diet culture puts you at war in your own body and can make you believe that you need to deny yourself your own basic needs for food.
Diet culture also distorts our innate hunger and fullness cues, making it seem like these are things that should be feared, controlled, or manipulated.
For example, you might hear about ways that you can “ignore” your hunger, so as to eat less than what your body really needs. But this is undermining your body’s innate biological needs, as well as creating fear around hunger and food.
Lastly, diet culture can strip away confidence in yourself, especially if you feel like you are constantly at war with your body. Dieting, in general, can make it difficult for you to connect with others, or you may have sacrificed much about your social life and relationships with other people in order to be compliant with your diet.
In summary, some of the physical and psychological side effects that can result from dieting may include (but are not limited to):
Preoccupation with food
Disordered eating habits
Chaotic eating patterns
Increased risk for eating disorders, like anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating disorder
Poor body image and low self-esteem
Weight cycling and fluctuations
Malnutrition
Mood shifts
Increased risk for anxiety and depression
Difficulty sleeping
Lack of energy, fatigue, and sluggishness
Gastrointestinal disturbances
Frequent and recurring headaches, difficulty concentrating
Irregular menstrual cycles
Strained relationships with others, disruptions in social activity
As you can see, diets often create the OPPOSITE effects from which they purport to have. While some individuals may experience temporary weight loss, the prescribed eating patterns are not sustainable over the long term.
It’s important to take an honest look at how diet culture can move you so far from the behaviors and habits that would be life-giving and healthy.
When you can start to see that dieting is in fact unhealthy and more detrimental for your overall health and wellness, you can start your journey toward becoming an intuitive eater.
How to Start Intuitive Eating
For this reason, rejecting the diet mentality is actually the first step in becoming an intuitive eater
It’s first important to be aware of the ways that diet culture or diet mentality may be present in your life in order to understand what is guiding your food decision and how you treat your body.
This is harder to do today, as many diets are disguised under the umbrella of “wellness” culture, where cutting out food groups is justified in the name of improving health or managing health symptoms.
The problem with this is that health gets watered down to the minutiae of nutrition and food that the more important things to be focusing on get completely convoluted.
The stress of hyperfocusing on what to eat or not to eat can become so stressful in itself, that the STRESS on the mind and body is actually more damaging than ANY one food you could eat.
On this token, it’s important to clarify a critical point about this: Rejecting diet mentality and diet culture doesn’t mean that you don’t care about health.
On the contrary.
It’s recognizing that your health is about so much more than JUST the food you eat, and if you’re sacrificing your mental health or jeopardizing yourself psychologically because of your diet or food choices, then this is not true health at all.
I think it’s necessary to distinguish that choosing to no longer diet doesn’t mean you’re letting yourself go or that you don’t care anymore about your health.
Rather, it’s understanding that the picture of your health goes beyond your weight, and your weight or body size alone doesn’t give the picture of health. Rejecting dieting means putting off the rules around food and eating so that you can learn to become the expert of your body again.
Bottom line: Dieting is harmful for your health, both physically and psychologically, over the short and long-term. If you’ve subscribed to your form of a diet for a long time, it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish your diet rules from normal eating.
Here are some ways to help decode if your eating choices are guided by a diet (whether subconsciously or intentionally):
If there are rigid rules in place that guide your food choices
If a majority of your mental energy and space is preoccupied with thoughts about food, wondering what to eat, etc.
If you find yourself becoming anxious, stressed, or upset because you were unable to eat according to your own diet rules
If you turn down certain social engagements or functions because the food choices may be overwhelming or you don’t want to eat in front of anyone
If you feel like you need to manipulate or control your food or body size
If you frequently weigh yourself and/or portion, weigh, or measure your food
If you make food choices based on the rules in your head versus what might sound good to you in the moment
If you’re unable to try or eat foods outside of what you’ve deemed acceptable by the measures of your food rules
It can be scary to let go of internalized rules that you may have had around food, especially if you’ve been on a diet or some form of a diet for years, even decades.
So give yourself some grace in the process. It’s hard work, but in order to learn how to trust your body as the expert of what you need to eat, you need to make space for yourself to listen to the signals your body is telling you from a place of curiosity and judgement. This can’t happen if you’re bound to dieting rules.
Many people might fear what might happen if they let go of dieting or food rules.
These are some of the common fears that might arise:
I might not be able to stop eating.
My weight might spiral out of control
I might binge on all the foods I don’t allow myself to eat
I won’t be able to control myself around eating certain foods
These are certainly valid fears and concerns to have. One thing that is important to understand is that these fears are the direct result of having a chaotic relationship with food.
Being at peace with food and your body means that these fears will in fact dissipate as you learn to trust the signals your body is giving you to help you eat and enjoy a variety of foods.
Learning to eat intuitively often means your body needs to go through a “honeymoon” stage, or a period of time where you’re relearning which foods truly do feel best in your body after a period of restricting or limiting your food choices with dieting.
The best way I can describe this period is with the analogy of a pendulum. When you think about restrictive eating or dieting, think about pulling a pendulum far off to one side.
Now when you decide to embark on the intuitive eating journey and give yourself permission to eat foods that were previously off limits, this might look like letting go of that pendulum that you were holding taught to one side. What happens when you let go of a pendulum? It swings off to the other side before stabilizing in the middle.
In the same way, you might find yourself gravitating toward and eating most of the foods that you previously restricted, inevitably so as your body recovers from a period of deprivation. This may feel scary and chaotic, but it’s a necessary part of finding food freedom and allowing your “pendulum” to stabilize.
You may notice weight fluctuations during this process, and that is okay, too. This doesn’t mean you’re out of control or doing something wrong. Remember that weight isn’t going to be an accurate reflection of your food behaviors and more importantly, your health.
If you have to previously severely restrict your intake or manipulate your food in order to maintain a certain weight, than this weight was not likely an ideal place for your to be at.
Intuitive Eating Weight Loss
On this note, what might be an ideal weight range for you? While no one can know for certain what your ideal weight range is, you will likely notice the following things when your weight has stabilized at a place that is appropriate for you:
No longer obsessing or overthinking food
No longer feeling like you need to compensate for eating
Able to participate in social functions and activities without stressing about food
Decreased anxiety around food
Mood stabilization
Improved physical symptoms, like increased energy, improved sleep and concentration, etc.
Regularity of menstrual cycle
Experiencing these symptoms is more telling of improved mental and physical health as opposed to where your weight might go. Trust that your weight will land where it needs to be for your optimized health, though also understand this may look differently from your expectations.
A common misconception is that weight is something we can manipulate or control, but there are so many factors that influence our weight. Dieting, in fact, is one of the most important predictors of overall weight gain AND disordered eating, and it’s more likely that your weight won’t land at a place that is right for you if you’re constantly on a diet.
On this note, it’s important to understand that intuitive eating is NOT another diet, nor is it something that should be promoted as a weight loss plan. (PSA: If you hear anyone trying to simultaneously sell you on intuitive eating and weight loss - run away, quick!)
The whole point of intuitive eating is to help you learn to trust your body as the best expert of what you need and to build a positive relationship with food. This means table-shelfing weight loss to help you focus on the MORE important goal. You may experience weight shifts through the process of intuitive eating as your body normalizes to where it needs to be. But unlike diets, intuitive eating does not have weight loss as the goal.
Intuitive Eating Tips
So in the absence of food rules and diets, how do you know what to eat?
What is KEY is to approach the intuitive eating process (and all parts of your journey) with the other guiding principles of intuitive eating.
The 10 Intuitive Eating Principles are as follows:
Principle 1: Reject the Diet Mentality
Principle 2: Honor Your Hunger
Principle 3: Make Peace With Food
Principle 4: Challenge the Food Police
Principle 5: Feel Your Fullness
Principle 6: Discover the Satisfaction Factor
Principle 7: Cope With Your Emotions Without Using Food
Principle 8: Respect Your Body
Principle 9: Exercise - Feel the Difference
Principle 10: Honor Your Health With Gentle Nutrition
Many people wrongly assume that intuitive eating just means eating whatever you want whenever you want, without any regard to what your body is telling you or the signals it’s showing. Do you have full permission to eat what you want? YES.
But it’s important to do so while also:
Honoring your hunger (listening to hunger cues intuitive eating)
Feeling your fullness
Respecting your body
Learning to cope with your emotions in other productive ways (outside of food alone)
Approaching health and nutrition in the context of understanding what foods feel best in YOUR body (intuitive eating gentle nutrition connection)
These are just some of the principles that put intuitive eating in the context it is meant to be in.
What does this mean? This is where you can begin to lean into the cues your body is giving you to help you determine:
What to eat
When to eat
How much to eat
How do you do this?
Remember how we talked about the “Factory mode” that we’re all preprogrammed and born with? That’s right - you still have the innate ability to self-regulate your food intake; it’s a matter of learning to listen, respond to, and honor your body’s internal cues and signals about food.
As you make the space to listen to your body after rejecting the dieting mentality, you can begin to understand what foods you actually like to eat, as well as the foods and amounts that feel best for YOU.
This is where things can get exciting as you begin exploring food without the lenses of diet culture and using yourself to help you navigate your own food choices.
Because remember - nobody, and I mean NOBODY, is living in your body except YOU. Which means that only YOU know YOU best, including the foods you like, how different foods might feel in your body, etc.
For an example, when I was struggling with an eating disorder, I had a tumultuous relationship with desserts. I restricted myself completely from eating these foods until I could no longer avoid them. When I did finally allow myself to eat desserts, I binged on them to the point where I made myself sick. Sadly, this restrictive mindset toward desserts made these foods even more complicated for me.
When I finally did give myself permission to eat desserts in the context of intuitive eating, the chaos around these foods dissipated. Interestingly, I found that there were a lot of desserts I had previously binged on that I didn’t even LIKE.
When you’re able to eat “forbidden” foods in a neutral setting, you can learn about the foods that you actually like versus the foods you’re eating simply because they’re off limits.
As you’re eating, think about what is guiding your food choices:
Are you choosing foods that you like and that are satisfying?
Do you enjoy what you’re eating?
Are you feeding your body when you notice the signs of hunger?
Are you able to stop eating when you notice that you’re feeling full?
Do the foods you eat keep you satisfied for enough time to help you focus on other things (outside of food)?
It might take some trial and error to learn how to eat in a way that best supports your body, and that is totally okay. There is no right or wrong way to do intuitive eating. It’s about getting curious and being open to exploring the experiences that come up for you as you allow yourself to enjoy food again.
Learning to Honor Your Hunger and Your Fullness
Under dieting rules, it can be easy to only know the extreme forms of hunger and fullness. In reality, hunger and fullness occur at much more subtle levels. In many ways, diet culture demonizes hunger, creating the idea that depriving yourself of food is a good thing.
When you strip diet culture away, it’s easier to remember that hunger and fullness cues are our body’s way of communicating with us, just like the signals we get when we need to use the bathroom. There is no sense of morality attached to hunger and fullness. In fact, when we ignore our hunger and fullness cues is when more problematic issues can arise around food and our bodies.
You may be used to ignoring your hunger and may not know what hunger feels like unless you’re ravenous or hangry. When it comes to fullness, you may experience something similar where all you know of fullness is feeling extremely uncomfortable or “unbutton-my-pants” type of fullness.
However, the reality is that hunger and fullness occur at levels that are much more subtle, yet significant, in that it begins to cue our brains that it’s time to eat.
Going back to babies (our prime example of intuitive eaters), you can see how hunger and fullness signals are shown in the same way.
When a baby is ready to eat, it doesn’t typically start screaming immediately. There are usually subtle hunger cues that a baby will show as signs that a feeding should start soon. That might look like a baby rooting, bringing her fists or fingers to her mouth, or sucking on her hands. These are her subtle cues to her caregivers that she is getting ready to eat.
Similarly, we have subtle hunger cues as well that are easy to become less acquainted with under years of chronic dieting or erratic eating.
Some early signs of hunger might include:
Feeling a slight emptiness in your stomach
Beginning to think about food or what to eat
Stomach is growling
Gnawing stomach
As you begin noticing these earliest signs of hunger, this is a good window to feed your body. Remember that waiting too long to eat is like pulling that pendulum up again. You may be more likely to overeat if you wait to eat until you’re starving.
On the flip side of things, the early signs of fullness should also feel subtle in yoru body.
Some of the early signs of fullness might include:
Satisfied feeling and contentedness
A subtle feeling of stomach fullness
Neutrality - not feeling hunger or fullness
Remember that these cues are general descriptors and will vary based on the individual. That means, as you go through the process and journey of becoming an intuitive eater, you will learn what your early hunger and fullness cues feel like in YOUR body, as well as how to best respond to them.
For more support on this topic, check out these resource: Learn How to Tune in to Your Hunger and Fullness Cues
Making Peace with Food
As you give yourself permission to eat “forbidden” foods and beginning including foods in your life that were previously restricted, you might be aware of the voice of the “Food Police”.
The food police can be past diet rules, people from your upbringing, or anything/anyone that created a negative association with particular foods.
For example, you might have learned that eating carbohydrates was a “bad” thing, and thus, strictly avoided them. However, as you begin eating intuitively and including an array of carbohydrates in your life, you might inevitability hear the food police in the process.
This can look like feelings of guilt or shame, as well as critical and harsh thoughts, such as:
“I’m such a bad person for eating these foods”
“This food is so bad for me, I shouldn’t be eating it”
“I don’t have any willpower because I can’t avoid eating these foods”
Making peace with food involves challenging these thoughts while giving yourself unconditional permission to enjoy and eat the foods that feel best for your body.
Counter the food police with some of these affirmations to help you make peace with food:
“I deserve to eat and enjoy foods that bring me joy and satisfaction”
“I deserve to fuel my body with foods that feel good and bring me energy”
“I deserve to find pleasure and satisfaction from eating.”
An important thing to remember through this process is that just because the cues you may be experience are foreign or feel different (which can trigger fear and urges to control) does not mean those cues are wrong.
Intuitive eating is giving your body permission to eat all the things to undo the trauma of restriction and deprivation.
Intuitive eating is also learning to pay attention to your own body cues and signals, unlearning old patterns and habits.
In order to do these things, it’s necessary to challenge the old and distorted thoughts you’ve had about food in order to create space to listen to what your body really wants and needs - without fear, judgement, and criticism.
What Intuitive Eating is Not
Intuitive eating has been misconstrued by many people in the media who might portray it to be something that it’s not. Sadly, these misconceptions can muddle the truth about what intuitive eating actually is and make it even more confusing to anyone who is learning about the process.
It’s important to outline that intuitive eating is NOT:
A diet or food plan
A fad
A way to manipulate or control your weight or body size
Something to be perfected or approached with a “pass or fail” mentality
A way to count or track macros, calories, or points
In fact, intuitive eating is the OPPOSITE of these things, which can truly enable you to live freely from the things that may be taking up much of your head space and mental energy.
Intuitive eating is a highly personal process that varies from one person to the next. It helps a person learn how to approach their health by listening to and responding to their body’s own messages to meet both physical and psychological needs.
Why Intuitive Eating?
As you’re reading through this, you might wonder: “Why should I learn how to become an intuitive eater?”
Intuitive eating acknowledges that nutrition and health are not one-size-fits-all approaches - it just can’t be. We are all different people, with different genetic make-ups and different life experiences, cultures, backgrounds, etc. The only person who knows what’s best for your body is the person living in your body - YOU!
Intuitive eating can help you live in alignment with what your body needs to help you thrive. When you’re at peace with food and your body, you will also have the mental space and capacity to focus on other more important things in your life. This is truly a sustainable way for living your best life, unlike dieting.
Remember that dieting and the diet mentality create incredible stressors on your mental health and inner turmoil as you feel at war with your own body.
When you are more stressed about food or worried about what you should or shouldn’t be eating, this is MORE unhealthy for your body that any food you could eat.
Intuitive eating helps you rebuild trust with your body again, allowing you to approach food and your body from a place of curiosity and compassion - not judgement, with rules,etc.
Trying to live your life while dieting or succumbing to the pressure of diet culture is like driving a car with a backseat driver. Ultimately, you are the only one who knows the road and who is actually in control of the car. When you can ditch diet culture/mentality, you can confidently DRIVE without the chatter of a back seat driver, or feed your body without second guessing everything you’re doing and eating.
It’s the inner conflict and struggle that occurs when what our body needs is contradicting what outside rules have told us what our bodies need or what we should be feeding ourselves.
Everytime we give credence to the outside noise over the innate wisdom of our own body, we suffer physical, emotional, and mental consequences and find ourselves more at war and in inner turmoil with ourselves.
We’re made to believe that our bodies cannot be trusted, that hunger and eating and wanting to feed ourselves and enjoy food is wrong but that is DIET CULTURE hijacking and talking.
When you learn to eat intuitively, you will experience many benefits of intuitive eating, physically, mentally, emotionally, and socially, including but not limited to:
Increased body kindness, compassion and respect
Improved self-esteem and body image
More trust in yourself in other areas of your life, outside food
More mental space to focus on other things in life
Improved mental health
Reduced physical and mental stress
Decreased rates of disordered eat
Decreased risk of eating disorder
Improved metabolism
Increased satisfaction and contentment
Increased satisfaction and improvement in social relations
Why Intuitive Eating is Important for Mothers
As moms, we are most vulnerable to dieting tactics and diet culture, especially those that target women during pregnancy and postpartum. It’s easy to believe that a diet might help us regain some sense of control during a time of our life that is filled with nothing but changes and transitions.
However, this is a LIE that will only hurt us and our kids for generations to come if we allow it to dictate our lives.
Learning how to become an intuitive eater as a mother will not only help you have an improved and positive relationship with you and your body. Becoming an intuitive eater will also help you in raising an intuitive eater and model a healthy relationship with food for your kids.
YOU have the power to stop destructive cycles of dieting from continuing through future generations, and intuitive eating can become foundation for your family’s overall health and wellness.
Here are some benefits of intuitive eating for mothers:
-Help you more confidently navigate seasons of motherhood where your body/appetite might be changing, including pregnancy, postpartum, breastfeeding, etc
-Help you more confidently feed your kids as you build trust with your own body and around food. Building trust in the feeding relationship is a crucial component to raising kids who have a good relationship with food and respect their bodies
-Help break the generational cycle of dieting so that it stops with you and doesn’t pass on to your kids (let’s raise of generation FREEDOM together)
-Significantly decrease risk of eating disorders, poor body image, low self-esteem, etc, for yourself and your kids
Here are some more resources to help support you on your intuitive eating journey in motherhood:
Intuitive Eating For Moms: Honoring Your Hunger and Fullness
How to Heal the Feeding Relationship With Your Child By Becoming an Intuitive Eater
Compulsive Exercise Addiction: How Intuitive Movement Can Help You Heal (For more on intuitive eating and exercise)
Intuitive Eating and Eating Disorders: When Intuitive Eating Might Be Difficult
When years and/or decades are spent believing and adhering to food rules, you may not know how to operate and live outside of them - you might be disconnected from your own body, but that is okay. There is absolutely hope for healing and reconnecting with yourself.
There are some specific instances where it may be difficult to begin eating intuitively. For example, if you’ve had a history of an eating disorder or are actively struggling with an eating disorder, you may need professional support and assistance to help you learn how to eat intuitively once more.
For example, for intuitive eating anorexia recovery, there are many initial stages of refeeding and nourishment that need to happen in order to help your body’s systems come “online” again, so to say. Because eating disorders disrupt your ability to eat intuitively and to respond to our innate hunger and fullness cues, there is physical and mental healing that needs to be done first.
The good news is that your cues are still there, you just need to do the work to heal your body and mind to learn how to respond to them again. It’s like driving a car where all your gauges are broken. When you fix your gauges, you can trust driving your vehicle again.
As you progress in eating disorder recovery, there is hope for regaining your innate hunger and fullness cues and learning how to trust your body again once more.
This article is a summary of intuitive eating. For a more in depth look, I highly recommend the following to support your ongoing intuitive eating journey:
RUN, don’t walk to get a copy of the original intuitive eating book by Elyse Resch and Evelyn Tribole: “Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works”
Consider using the intuitive eating workbook to help give you practical application through the guiding principles
Work with a certified intuitive eating counselor to help support you through your journey! (As an intuitive eating registered dietitian with a specialty in maternal/child health, I would love to help you! Set up a free call with me today - I’d love to hear your story).
Audit your social media feed: consider unfollowing accounts that promote dieting and follow more accounts that promote a healthy relationship with food and your body!
This journey may feel overwhelming, but step by step, you can regain your life with food freedom and build a healthy relationship with food that helps you THRIVE!