Raising Intuitive Eaters: What My Kids Teach Me About Food and Body Trust

I struggled with an eating disorder in my late teens through my early twenties. 

Long before this, I struggled with chronic dieting and didn’t trust myself with food as early as I can remember. Food always seemed to be chaotic and out of control. Sadly, I lost out on years of my life during this battle with an unhealthy relationship with food and my body.

If I wasn’t counting calories or restricting my food intake, I was binge eating and finding ways to rid my body of the food I’d eaten. My body was something to control and manipulate, and I constantly felt at war with myself. Weight was something I had to achieve, and at the peak of my eating disorder, there was never a number that felt satisfactory. 

No matter what it was, it could always be lower. As a result of a chaotic relationship with food and my body, I suffered physically, mentally, and emotionally. 

Social events and functions were torture.

I could hardly engage with the people in my life that mattered most because I was so consumed with thoughts about food and my body. I felt ashamed in my own body and wanted to shrink into the smallest spaces possible. Needless to say, it was a scary place to exist for quite some time, and I honestly couldn’t conceive that it was something I would ever move beyond. 

To me, existing in an unhealthy relationship with food and my body became my new normal, and sadly, it was something I began to accept as part of my existence. 

Thankfully, I did break free from that tortuous place and found the help and freedom I needed to recover from my eating disorder. You can read a little bit more about my journey here: “Eating Disorder Recovery: My Story and Hope for Moms Struggling.”

Healing my relationship with food and my body took time, effort, and a commitment to the journey, and it was something that unfolded for me before my husband and I began to grow our family. 

Learning to Become an Intuitive Eater

One important aspect of my healing journey in making peace with food and my body was learning how to become an intuitive eater. 

Intuitive eating is a practice that helps you learn how to become the best expert of your own body and reconnect with your innate programming to help you guide your relationship with food. 

It puts you back into the driver’s seat of your body AND life and helps you learn how to reconnect with your body’s internal regulators that help you get what your body needs. Intuitive eating helped me learn how to trust my own body again and rediscover normalcy with eating after years of disordered eating and manipulating my body. 

(For more information about Intuitive Eating, be sure to check out this post here: “Intuitive Eating 101: What is Intuitive Eating and How to Get Started”)

Learning to become an intuitive eater helped me heal my relationship with food and recover from the many physical and mental side effects I had suffered as a result of my eating disorder. I’m grateful to have found healing and recovery before my husband and I started growing our family.

Getting pregnant alone was a miracle in itself, as I was told by many doctors and health professionals that it would be impossible for me to have children due to the damage caused from my eating disorder. Together, we had 5 beautiful children, all who have been an instrumental part of my continued healing. 

I was scared about how my eating disorder past and dysfunctional relationship with food and my body would affect and impact my children. 

Would they pick up on my past beliefs about food or distrust their own bodies as I did? Would they fear eating certain foods or fall into dieting traps at a young age like I did?

But instead, my children have proven to me that a chaotic relationship with food and distrust of our bodies is not something built into our DNA. 

Watching my children eat, learning how to feed them and trusting them with food has taught me so much about the beginnings of our relationship with food and reminded me of the innate programming we’re all born with to trust our bodies. 

My children have taught me so much more about food, eating and trusting our bodies than anything or anyone else. They’ve taught me what it looks like and means to be an intuitive eater, and truly they have been my greatest teachers when it comes to learning to eat and trusting my body. 

While I had come so far in healing my relationship with food and my body before my children were born, I felt like I was relearning to eat and trust my body alongside them. 

From the moment they were born and learned to feed, I marveled at their ability to self-regulate their intake. When they started eating solids, I marveled at their curiosity with food and the way they learned how to eat new foods. 

As they got older, I was amazed at their inclination to eat and desire a variety of foods and naturally be able to regulate what they eat, including sweets and dessert (which were previously such a sore spot for me). 

What My Kids Have Taught Me About Food and Body Trust

Seeing my kids eat in action has been an affirmation of everything I’ve worked to relearn about food and trusting my body. 

After being so far removed from what a positive relationship with food actually looks like because of my eating disorder and history of chronic dieting, seeing my children eat in accordance with what their bodies need has been so healing to me on multiple levels. 

Here are some specific lessons I’ve learned from my children about food, eating and trusting my body: 

We can trust our bodies as the best guides of what we need:

As adults, we’re prone to the traps of diet culture.

We constantly look for external rules to guide our food decisions and choices rather than listen to the internal wisdom our bodies already have to help us guide what we need.

It’s amazing to me how closely connected children are to their bodies and typically rely ONLY on their bodies as the best source of information to guide their food decisions.

As a mother, I’ve always provided my children with regular meals and snacks that include a variety of food, and my children decide what they want to eat and HOW MUCH to eat from the food I’ve provided. From the world’s standards, it doesn’t always seem “right”.

Sometimes my kids would only eat the carb or fruit portion of their meal or take a couple bites before declaring they were done or eating everything and more off their plates.

Ultimately, there is no “right vs. wrong” way for our kids to eat because they’re eating according to what their own individual bodies need.

Even the way my kids eat is drastically different from one child to the next.

But they’re all healthy and growing into the bodies they’re meant to have because they’re trusting their bodies to guide their food choices and regulate their appetites. We are the best experts of what we need. Not what anyone tells us or outside “rules” about eating. 

Eating and food should be comforting & pleasurable - not rigid:

Diet culture has promoted this idea of food being used to manipulate our bodies.

When food is used in this way, it’s a terrible way to eat and quite frankly, abusive way to treat our bodies.

So often, we force ourselves to eat in a way that is undesirable because we think that’s what’s “best”, but really, we’re just making food a tortuous experience when we eat for external reasons versus in alignment with what our body really wants and needs.

As I’ve seen in my own children, they don’t make food decisions based on what they think is the “healthiest” and most “nutritious”.

They don’t even understand what those words mean or how to qualify food in that way. Instead, they eat according to what tastes good to them in those moments, what feels good to them, and what brings pleasure to their bodies.

Honestly, this was such an eye-opening experience for me as a mother who recovered from an eating disorder. I always seemed to imagine that my kids would always go crazy over desserts and gorge themselves on “junk” food if given the opportunity.

But I now understand this narrow lens of understanding was based on my own experiences with food as a child.

Because what I’ve observed instead is that when all foods are legalized and a normal approach to food is taken in the home, children will naturally gravitate toward eating a variety of foods based on whatever their bodies need in the moment.

I’ve seen my children get excited about eating roasted broccoli, chocolate cake, pesto chicken, berries, candy and everything in between.

They have an emotionally equal approach to all foods and because of this, they’re able to make decisions based on what is pleasurable, comforting and satisfying. Food is also meant to be comforting, as I’ve seen with them.

We vilify “comfort food” and make it out to be a bad thing. When in reality, a child’s earliest experience around feeding - when done right - is deeply comforting and connecting, attaching pleasure and attunement with primary caregivers.

When we focus on prioritizing eating foods we enjoy and make eating a pleasurable experience, we naturally eat in a way that is more healthful for our minds and bodies.

Children intuitively eat what tastes good and what they’re hungry for.

Their eating decisions are not clouded by judgement or feelings of guilt, but rather, an innate curiosity to learn and desire to want to eat and enjoy eating.

We have an innate ability to self-regulate our intake:

From the time my kids were babies, they’ve always had an uncanny ability to regulate their intake to get exactly what they need to sustain their individual growth and development.

As their mother, I simply needed to trust them to eat what they needed, no matter how differently it may have looked from what I thought they needed.

Because at the end of the day, the only person living in my children’s bodies are my children, not me. They don’t base what they need to eat on what is served to them or on their plate.

The basis of what they need to eat comes from the signals their bodies are telling them and may look different from day to day, even from meal to meal.

They don’t force themselves to eat a certain quantity of food and fully trust their bodies as the best source of wisdom to guide them through food choices and the amount of food to eat to feel content and satisfied.

Their appetites may vary from one day to the next (even from one meal to the next), and they're able to eat in according to what they need. One of the best examples I can think of this was a time I made brownies with my kids, and we ate them together as a snack.

My son, who was about 3 years old at the time, was making his way through his brownie and a glass of milk.

To my surprise, he left the smallest bite of brownie on his plate before declaring that he was done, that his tummy had eaten enough brownie. It was seriously the tiniest bite of a brownie left behind - certainly not anything I would’ve ever done.

I remember constantly cleaning my plate, and when it came time to eat sweets, I practically inhaled everything I could set my hands on.

Watching my son eat in this manner was a pure demonstration of how closely my kids listen to their bodies as the guides of how much they need to eat.

My son didn’t eat his whole brownie, simply because it was in front of him. He left a single bite behind because it was more than his body needed at that moment. 

We’re programmed with this ability to eat in accordance with what our bodies need, not what’s measured out on a plate or socially “appropriate”.

Our bodies know how to troubleshoot:

When I struggled with an eating disorder, I was constantly compensating for how and what I ate. If I overate or binged on certain foods, I would intentionally find ways to try to “correct” it, and this kept me in a vicious circle of destructive behaviors.

I could never trust my body to help me troubleshoot those inevitable times of overeating or undereating until I worked on healing my relationship with food and my body.

Having children and seeing them have the ability to do this naturally was a stark reminder of our bodies’ natural abilities to regulate what we need but also troubleshoot when we may not get it right.

There’s been times when my kids have eaten too much candy or popcorn and were able to not only learn from that experience but trust their bodies to help them through it without resorting to destructive behaviors.

I remember one time in particular where I made cupcakes with my kids and we had some as a snack afterward.

My son went to town on the frosting and seemed to really be enjoying it. But shortly after, he was groaning and telling me that his tummy didn’t like eating too much frosting - all on his own, without me intervening whatsoever. I asked him what he thought his tummy needed to feel better, and I remember he asked for water and then went to play outside.

He learned from the experience, was able to listen to his body, and move on. He’s never repeated that same experience with cupcake frosting again. 

There’s also been plenty of experiences where my kids were sick and ate very little during that time. However, as soon as their appetites came back and they were feeling better, there were able to naturally get in what they needed or may have missed over the course of time while they were sick.

The point is that we can trust our bodies to help us troubleshoot in the instances where we eat too much of something or maybe don’t eat enough at other times.

Our bodies can help us get to a baseline that feels best without us having to resort to maladaptive behaviors. Eating doesn’t have to be prescriptive or look a certain way.

There’s no such thing as perfect eating, but rather, just eating in alignment with what our bodies may need. And if we somehow miss the mark (because hey, we are human after all), our bodies have the resources needed to help us troubleshoot.

Good nutrition is a byproduct of having a positive relationship with food:

So often, we prioritize nutrition over having a good relationship with food, but in many ways, this is like putting the cart before the horse.

It usually doesn’t work very well.

I know this to be true from my chronic days of dieting, where I put so much emphasis on the WHAT I was eating, that I totally lost sight of the HOW.

When food was just about nutrition, all the joy went out of eating completely.

What I’ve learned from my own recovery journey and for watching my kids eat is that good health and nutrition is a byproduct of having a positive relationship with food.

I’ve seen how my own children are growing and thriving, not because they’re forced to eat vegetables or don’t ever eat sugar, but because they trust their bodies and eat for pleasure, comfort and enjoyment.

Because food feels safe and eating is connected with positive experiences, they’re better able to eat in accordance with what their bodies need and feel comfortable learning how to eat and explore a variety of foods.

Even one of my daughters, who has sensory sensitivities and is more selective with food, has naturally been able to get the nutrients she needs to support her growth and development without me forcing her to eat anything in particular.

I’m so grateful that my children are thriving and well.

It’s not something that was forced by overemphasizing nutrition but something that has naturally evolved as they’ve grown into a positive relationship with food and learned to trust their bodies. 

Raising Intuitive Eaters: Feed Your Kids With Trust

We’re not given a manual on how to feed our kids once they’re born.

We only have our past experiences to go off of, and many of us recycle behaviors and patterns that we learned from our parents and caregivers as children. This can be complicated when our past experiences were defined by an unhealthy relationship with food and our bodies, or if food is chaotic and we feel unable to trust our own bodies. 

(You can read more about this here: “How to Raise an Intuitive Eater When You’re Learning to Become One.”)

We’re also inundated with rigid rules around eating, which is constantly promoted by diet culture. The idea of raising healthy children has been completely hijacked by diet culture, in that we’ve lost sight of the most essential things that are necessary for preserving our children’s innate intuitive eating abilities and natural eating instincts. 

As Ellyn Satter says in her book, Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family: “The goal of raising a healthy eater is to help your child grow up with positive eating attitudes and behaviors; it is not to get him to eat his peas for tonight’s supper.”

In other words, how our children feel and engage with food are more important than what they actually will eat on any given day. If their attitudes and behaviors around food and their bodies are positive, they will eat well and get the nutrition they need.

So how can we help facilitate this as caregivers, especially when our own experiences around food have been distorted or tainted by a chaotic relationship and understanding of food and our bodies?

Learning how to trust my children to eat was one important part of the equation as a mother who has recovered from an eating disorder.

Another crucial aspect was learning how to feed my children. It’s easy to feed our children through the lens of how we learned to eat, and this can get tricky if our eating perspective is based on rigid rules or distrust of our own bodies. 

Raising intuitive eaters has far less to do with anything we could potentially teach our children and has everything to do with TRUST. 

While we’re not given a manual to guide us with feeding our children, we have to remember that our kids are born with the programming they need to help them navigate eating, and it’s our job to preserve these abilities. 

This starts with redefining what it means to raise a healthy child, because again, it’s not about trying to measure up to society’s arbitrary standards. 

Our children do need us to take leadership with feeding, and we do have the responsibility as caregivers to fulfill our jobs with feeding our children so they can learn that food is reliable and safe. 

When we can focus on doing our parts with feeding and trusting our children to do their parts with eating, this can help build the foundation for a positive relationship with food.

A trusting feeding relationship is fundamental to raising intuitive eaters who have positive associations with food and who are able to confidently trust their bodies to help them navigate any eating situation. 

For more help with this, be sure to check out this post here: “The Feeding Relationship: How to Build Trust With Your Child Around Food” as well as this blog here: “Feeding Kids: How Trust Can Help Your Child Feel Confident With Food”

Remember, trusting our children is so fundamental to preserving their natural intuitive eating abilities they were already born with.

Being Aware of Eating Behaviors That May Be Triggering 

Healing my relationship with food and learning to become an intuitive eater meant undoing the many rigid food rules through which I operated and allowed myself to eat. There were INFINITE rules for every situation, and this was a big reason why my relationship with food was so chaotic and complicated. 

One thing I realized in becoming a parent is how easy it can be to project our own fears and uncertainties toward our children. I’ve also learned how past insecurities and pain can manifest in the most unexpected ways. 

We can only take our children as far as we’ve come ourselves.

If it’s difficult to trust your children to eat or to feed them outside of the rigid food rules you’ve learned and adapted.

For example, if you’re actively struggling with an eating disorder or have been a chronic dieter, you may not naturally keep foods in your home that you feel insecure about eating or have eating experiences with your children that you feel uncomfortable with (like eating out or baking cookies, etc).

You might feel triggered when your child has certain eating experiences, like encounters with sugar and fast food, or dealing with picky eating. You may even find that your child’s body size brings up discomfort in your own body or perhaps, triggers unresolved pain you’ve experienced in your own body. 

If you’re a parent currently going through this, I want you to know you’re not alone. As a parent who’s been there myself, I understand how this feels, and I also believe there’s so much hope, for you and your families. 

Children are like a mirror that reflect the parts of our lives that we still need healing.

If any situations around feeding your children have been triggering or uncomfortable, can I encourage you to lean into that discomfort from a place of curiosity?

These situations can be clues about the areas around food or body image that may need more attention and tender love. Be compassionate with yourself through this process and know that simply having awareness of these situations is instrumental in creating change and breaking generational cycles of food guilt and body shame. 

Healing your relationship with food is essential for supporting your children in building positive associations with food and their bodies and to be able to feed them from a place of trust

For more on this, check out this post here: “Why Healing Your Relationship With Food is the Best Gift For Your Family”

Raise Intuitive Eaters and Enjoy Freedom WIth Food as a Family

Seeing my children eat and their natural inclination to trust their bodies as the best guides of what they need has been so healing for me on many levels. Perhaps you are learning the same from your own children. 

You too, like your children, were born with eating capabilities that can guide you toward a positive relationship with food and your body.

The good news is that those eating instincts are still there. They’re likely just buried beneath an overwhelming load of rules and regulations that have made it difficult for you to listen to them and TRUST. You may have had experiences that have taught you your body couldn’t be trusted or that you needed to exercise rigid control over yourself in order to create a desired outcome. 

Your children may be a reflection of where you’d like your own eating to return to: to a place of trust, security, comfort, and in a place that aligns with your intuitive eating instincts. This is absolutely possible, no matter what your past experiences have been around food or your body or what your current relationship with food may look like. 

If you need more help in this area, please feel free to connect with me today. I’d love to hear your story and learn more about how I can help you.

I’d also love to invite you to join our free virtual support group, Lift the Shame, for mothers and moms-to-be in eating disorder recovery. 

Now I’d love to hear from you! What have your children taught you about food and body image? Share your thoughts in the comments below!