Intuitive Eating. This book by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, two certified registered eating disorder dietitians, was first published in 1995. And right from the beginning, the two authors were very explicit about what they mean by the term “intuitive eating”. In spite of this, these two words are being thrown around a lot these days, and unfortunately, people ascribe all kinds of meaning to them.
Given that there‘s a lot of money to be made with false promises of weight loss, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. It is very unfortunate, however, as intuitive eating can truly heal a person’s turmoil with food.
Since 1995, the book has been updated a number of times, and the fourth and most recent edition came out in 2020. Over all these years since its initial publication, more than 125 studies have been done on intuitive eating, clearly demonstrating all of its benefits.
But despite how useful true intuitive eating can be, it is often gravely misinterpreted, misunderstood, and misrepresented.
It’s super disheartening to go on YouTube and to see the long list of videos talking about why the whole concept of intuitive eating doesn’t work or why it’s even dangerous. Or hearing trainers like Gillian Michaels (from The Biggest Loser), going on rants about the problems with intuitive eating.
When I watch these videos it is clear that these people have not read the book and are clueless about what the ten principles (the tenets) of intuitive eating are actually about. They quite obviously haven’t looked at the literature that supports why it is so helpful. They simply heard the term, and — depending on their own baggage and presumptions — reflexively had a negative response to what they understood intuitive eating to be.
And while I can see through all this, most people who are watching those videos cannot. The comment sections are filled with people expressing gratitude for the video, as it has “saved” them from falling into the “trap” of intuitive eating.
So for a large chunk of people, videos and comments like this can become a major roadblock: When there are so many voices warning them about the “dangers” of intuitive eating, they never really look into, let alone get started with it, for fear of ending up in even bigger trouble.
And then there are those people who do have a go at intuitive eating. Those are often the clients that I end up working with.
They did read the book. They did familiarise themselves with the principles of intuitive eating, and they think that they’re following them. So, naturally, they end up being frustrated and convinced that intuitive eating isn’t working. At least not for them.
However, soon after we start working together, we discover that the issue isn’t the principles of intuitive eating, but the way these principles are being applied by the client.
Because the reality is that intuitive eating isn’t just for some people, it’s for all people. And if you can truly follow the principles that are outlined in the book Intuitive Eating, it can and will work for you, too.
In order for you to avoid ending up feeling defeated and discouraged, let’s look at the five most common stumbling blocks and the reasons why you may think that intuitive eating isn’t working for you.
[Note: I’m not going to go through each of the ten principles listed in Intuitive Eating as part of this article, but will be touching on some of them. If you’d like to hear about the ten principles and the nuances of what these principles mean, then I highly suggest checking out this interview that I did with Elyse Resch, one of the authors of Intuitive Eating.]
If you’re interested in the concept of intuitive eating, you likely have a messy or troubled relationship with food. That is because people for whom food is a non-stressful part of life are the least likely to be on the lookout for a book on a certain way of eating, like Intuitive Eating for example.
So it’s a fair assumption that, before finding out about intuitive eating, you’ve already accumulated your fair share of diet experience: you tried different protocols, followed various rules, done cleanses, and followed specific exercise regimens. Maybe you’ve had or still have an eating disorder.
All of these prior experiences of experimenting with food inevitably mean that you’ve come to internalise various (and often arbitrary) food rules. Rules about what foods are “healthy” and what foods are “unhealthy”. Rules about specific times or time windows for when eating is or isn’t allowed. Rules about what foods “lead to weight gain” and what foods or food combinations will “make you lose weight”.
Now, the principles of intuitive eating are fundamentally about teaching you how to be back in connection with your own body. So if you try to tackle intuitive eating with all your rules still active in your mind, you will simply turn the whole endeavour into yet another diet. In this case, it’s no surprise that intuitive eating isn’t working, because it’s exactly those rules that prevent you from listening to your body.
When I initially start working with clients who say that intuitive eating isn’t working for them, I ask them what “doing intuitive eating correctly” would look like and often hear the following statements:
It quickly becomes clear that these clients have a particular way of eating in mind that they want to follow, and if — by chance — their body is giving them signals that match these expectations, then they think that they’re “doing intuitive eating correctly”. Since this rarely happens, they feel disappointed and discouraged. They feel like intuitive eating isn’t working.
Because what they’re experiencing way more frequently are exactly the things they were likely trying to avoid. You might recognise some of the complaints I hear:
Understandably, these experiences can lead you to believe that intuitive eating isn’t working and that you’re incapable of doing intuitive eating “correctly.” To you, the fact that these things keep happening just proves that you are a “boredom eater”, “emotional eater“, or that you possibly suffer from binge eating disorder.
But here‘s the truth: If you are following the cues of your body, you are doing intuitive eating. You‘re not doing anything wrong. In reality, this is what the journey of intuitive eating often looks like in the beginning stages — and for good reason.
One of the central tenets of intuitive eating is about learning interoceptive awareness. Interoception is the sense of the internal state of the body. It includes things like being able to notice the rate of your heartbeat, the depth or shallowness of your breathing, noticing that you’re tired, or registering that your body is sending you hunger signals.
Dieting, of course, teaches you the exact opposite of interoception. It teaches you to ignore the sensations that your body is giving you. Instead, it hands you particular rules to follow: Eat only these foods, eat them in a predetermined quantity, and make sure to only eat them at these specific times of the day. Oh, and while you‘re at it, also do these specific types and amounts of exercise.
When you keep this up long enough (including changing from one diet to the next), it teaches you to mistrust your own body, and because you think “my body is out to get me,” you reflexively try to ignore any feedback it might still be giving you.
Now, disconnection from the body is connected to anxiety, depression, panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and all types of eating disorders. Therefore, relearning the skill of interoceptive awareness of the body is a very important skill on the way back from these various states of dis-ease.
And having rules about what is and isn’t intuitive eating — which is akin to a diet — is one of the main reasons a person ends up thinking that intuitive eating isn’t working.
As human beings, we have a natural desire to fit in and to belong. And since a heartbreaking number of people have been bullied for their bodies at various stages of their life, they have set their minds firmly on what they believe will resolve this traumatic experience: weight loss.
Additionally, most people have been surrounded by dieting friends and relatives for most of their life and have been exposed to constant talk about weight loss in the media. No wonder so many people have come to think that “trying to lose weight” is just what you do if you want “to be healthy”.
In recent years, the idea of weight loss has started to receive some level of pushback, and the concept of “dieting” has lost some of its lustre. But instead of giving up on this pursuit altogether, society has now largely embraced the idea of “wellness”. Which — especially in conjunction with nutritional advice — typically is nothing but a deceitful misnomer.
What on the surface sounds so reasonable and worth pursuing, is in most cases still the pursuit of weight loss, only now packaged in a more marketable fashion. Instead of being called a “diet”, the programs, protocols, supplements and rules are now masquerading as being about “health”, “ethics“ or “longevity.” Especially when some of the most influential people on social media and podcasts are loudly promoting these ideas, they can start to seem like a moral imperative (something I cover more in this article).
Intuitive eating, on the other hand, stands in exact opposition to intentional weight loss, and for good reason: you can’t learn to reconnect to your own body’s wisdom by overruling its signals, which is what you will have you do.
In other words, you can’t approach intuitive eating with the intent to lose weight. This focus would directly interfere with the learning process of reconnecting with your body. This fact is made clear in the very first principle of the book Intuitive Eating, which states “Reject the diet mentality.”
This principle explains how all the various attempts to intentionally lose weight don’t work in the long run (except for the tiniest fraction of people, arguably those with restrictive eating disorders and severely disordered eating/exercise habits). Additionally — and this is the great irony — for most people, dieting eventually leads to a higher weight than if they’d never dieted in the first place.
Also, what nearly all people fail to consider at the outset of chasing the dream of weight loss is what this pursuit will end up costing them: The reality is that, to lose weight and then maintain this weight loss, your “lifestyle change” will have to be kept up indefinitely. What this results in is a life rigidly focused on (and restricted by) your food and exercise rules, fearful of “falling off the wagon”, distrustful of yourself, and in utter disconnection from your own and your body’s actual needs.
My clients often come to see that what they or the people around them tried rationalising by calling it “discipline” was really just miserable suffering.
It doesn’t even matter if you’re “successful” at losing weight, this is the reality of what a dieter‘s life looks like. Imagine the impact of constantly having to override your body signals, constantly feeling afraid of the “wrong” food, constantly having rules to follow, having to avoid “risky” situations (invitations, holidays, parties) for fear of “losing control”, and, as a consequence, seeing your body as the enemy!
Inevitably, as your life gets more and more restricted and rigid, and you become increasingly distrustful of yourself and your body, this “new lifestyle” starts having a progressively negative impact on your psychological health, your physical well-being, and therefore the overall quality of your life.
Commonly, I hear from people that intuitive eating isn’t working for them “because I’ve gained weight”.
But pursuing intuitive eating with the intention of weight loss can’t work. If whatever food or exercise choice you make is driven by a wish to lose weight or to avoid weight gain, your ability to tune into your body‘s signals will predictably be diminished. As a consequence, you won’t be able to improve any interoceptive awareness of your body, which is exactly what you would need in order to eat intuitively.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I’ll say it again: if the ruling question for you is “how do I eat to manage my weight?”, you‘ve turned intuitive eating into yet another diet, which will only perpetuate your current suffering.
Chances are that you’ve carried certain weight loss fantasies with you for such a long time, that they’ve come to feel like the truth to you:
“I’ll be so much happier at a lower weight”
“Life will be great if I lose that weight”
“Weight loss will make me feel confident in my body”
“I’ll do xyz as soon as I get that weight off”
“I’ll find love when I’m skinnier”
“People will respect me more when I am thinner”
“I’ll finally be myself when I lose weight”
These are strong convictions, and yet, after more than a decade of doing this work with clients, I can reassure you that these thoughts and beliefs can and will be refuted as the process unfolds.
Now, if you’re thinking “Well, I can’t just erase the wish to lose weight or somehow suddenly get rid of my deep fear of weight gain!”, I hear you. Of course, you can’t, nobody can just flip a switch on such deeply ingrained patterns. Especially not someone who has come to associate weight loss with the experience of “escaping emotional trauma”, “being a success”, “getting respect”, or “achieving desirability”.
Whatever your deep desire for weight loss might be connected to, the good thing is, you don’t have to be able to “reject the diet mentality” from the get-go. It is an ongoing process of unlearning and relearning for everyone who starts to do intuitive eating.
Many people who start the journey of intuitive eating still have a more or less explicit desire for weight loss. And that is completely ok. If the bar was set to “you can’t start intuitive eating until you’ve fully let go of any desire to lose weight,” then nobody would ever get started.
By now, you are probably asking yourself how this whole process could play out for you in real life. Given that in my work of helping people make peace with food and their body I’ve seen the same thing happen consistently, I am willing to make a prognosis: As you start working through and exploring all the principles of intuitive eating, it is highly likely that the importance of your wish to lose weight will slowly start to fade. All of your (by now habitual) thoughts concerning weight loss will start to lose their grip. You might still secretly be hoping for it to spontaneously happen, but you will be far from declaring it your main goal.
In other words, you will reach a place where you are no longer determining the success of your intuitive eating based on whether or not you lost weight.
Why? Because you’ll be able to live more in alignment with your true values, you will be able to be more spontaneous, you’ll (maybe for the first time) experience real peace with food and movement, and your sense of embodiment will have greatly improved.
All of these factors naturally lead to an enhanced sense of well-being and contentment. Which, ironically, most people think weight loss will bring.
As much as the concept of intuitive eating stands in opposition to intentional weight loss, it is of course not against weight loss per se. The goal of the process is to create a peaceful and intuitive way with food and movement, and — consequently — a higher quality of life. If, by eating intuitively, someone ends up losing weight, that is just as ok as if someone gains weight or stays the same. Your body will simply find whatever equilibrium that is beneficial for you overall. This decision is out of your hands.
I’ve already stressed the importance of interoception when it comes to intuitive eating, and how being able to tune in to your body’s signals is foundational for this entire process. It immediately becomes clear why when we start examining the following two principles of intuitive eating: “Honour your hunger” and “Feel your fullness”.
The second principle of intuitive eating is all about hunger and how we can learn to be in attunement with it. It focuses on how hunger is a natural biological cue that is critical for our survival, and that you are by no means “weak” or have a “lack of willpower” if you get hungry. We were all born intuitive eaters, way before most of us got influenced and sidetracked by diet culture. Put simply: By eating enough and often enough, we are supporting our body to do all of the functions that it needs to do.
As you might know from personal experience, when you stop honouring your hunger, you end up experiencing a way more “primal hunger”, which manifests as an almost overwhelming desire to eat. (Which might just be one of the reasons why you think that intuitive eating isn’t working.)
Given you set out to control your food in order to lose weight, this sudden and urgent appetite understandably feels quite scary, as you’re now experiencing a complete lack of control.
Sadly, this quite often sets off a vicious cycle: Instead of identifying the previous restriction as the cause, you typically blame yourself for “losing control”, and immediately start planning future caloric restriction or other ways of compensating for what you think was “too much food”. (In fact, many weight-loss proponents, unfortunately, suggest just that.)
To avoid such an outcome, the overall goal of this second principle of intuitive eating is all about attunement, which means learning to hear all the different signs and symptoms by which the body can tell you that you’re hungry. This includes way more signals than merely “a growling stomach,” something I go through in detail in this article.
This principle also looks at all the activities and life stressors that can interfere with your ability to detect signs of hunger. Cases where, despite your body needing food, the signal gets drowned out by the noise.
Just like hunger, the term “fullness” can elicit difficult emotions in people who have a history of dieting. I think it’s no coincidence that the principle called “Feel your fullness“ only comes in as the fifth. The reason is that the focus on fullness could easily sidetrack a person if other important insights and learnings leading up to this were lacking. Imagine how easy a person with a still active diet mind could fall into the trap of trying not to “get too full”, only to find themselves experiencing overwhelming hunger as an inevitable consequence later.
When the time is right, however, fullness is well worth examining. This principle focuses on the different characteristics and sensations of fullness. It looks at the many habits and distractions that can get in the way of us noticing if and how full we are: this could manifest as us finishing a meal overly full, or — equally, and often in response to this — a person finishing a meal before feeling full.
This could happen because they were too distracted to notice, or (as is the case for most dieters) because they were intentionally trying to stop before they had enough.
Apart from the fullness itself, this principle also looks at the concept of “staying power”, meaning eating meals that not only fill you up but keep you going for a long time. Because while two different meals can lead to the same feeling of fullness, one of them will leave you hungry again in an hour, while the other keeps you going for three hours. Most dieters are trying to subsist on meals as light and low in calories as possible, and are devastated when their body naturally starts reacting with an uncontrollable urge to eat.
Put together, both of these two chapters are about helping you to make eating choices that honour the feedback your body is giving you.
Interestingly, the majority of people who have read the book Intuitive Eating seem to remember those two principles most clearly. In fact, it often feels like these are the only two chapters that they remember.
You can probably see where this can (and often does) go awry: rather than honouring what these principles are genuinely about, people are turning them into what is referred to as the “Hunger and Fullness Diet“ instead. Cue rules.
As part of this “Hunger and Fullness Diet”, you are allowed to eat only when you are hungry. Now, you’d better be absolutely sure you are hungry, because if you’re not, it’s probably just boredom or emotions, or maybe you need more water. If you are absolutely sure you are hungry, then you can eat, but you must not eat past the point of fullness. Of course, it’s perfectly ok if you stop before that, but even one bite more than you need is a travesty.
As is true for all diets, the goal of the “Hunger and Fullness Diet” is to control your eating in order to control your weight. The erroneous belief being that if you eat with a hyper-focus on hunger and fullness, you’ll eventually stop craving all this “unhealthy” food and will just naturally start to eat the “right” amount of food at the “right” times.
Now, despite the above clearly not being what intuitive eating is really about, this is very commonly how it is being applied. And, rather unsurprisingly, people who tried this come away feeling like intuitive eating isn’t working. The thing is, of course: what they were trying to control in the first place ended up controlling them.
Hunger and fullness are clearly part of intuitive eating, but they are just two of the ten principles. And the book says nothing about them being the only two things to rely on when making decisions about food.
As I talk about in this conversation with Elyse Resch, there are times when you may not feel hungry but your body requires fuel regardless.
Here’s a common example: A person who is under acute stress at work might not detect any sensations of hunger, because stress hormones tend to blunt these signals. However, this doesn‘t negate the biological truth that the body needs energy. In fact, it typically needs more than usual, as it’s not only dealing with regular life but the added stress as well. Needless to say, the same thing often happens to people when they are engaging in physical activity.
Now, of course, there could also be a much deeper resistance to truly listening to your hunger. A common reason I hear from clients is this: “I’m afraid because as soon as I start paying attention to my hunger, I immediately start feeling hungry and find myself thinking about food constantly! And whenever I start eating, it feels like my hunger only grows and I often still feel hungry after finishing a meal.”
What in Intuitive Eating is referred to as “primal hunger” (commonly referred to as “extreme hunger” in eating disorder recovery circles) is not a mistake but a clear sign of how much energy debt the body is really in. Now, maybe your conditioning has led you to assume that this could only be possible if a body is emaciated, but it’s exactly this prevalent and detrimental misperception that’s holding a lot of people back from recovering from their struggles with food.
Based on research data, hours of professional exchange with colleagues working in this field, plus my own experience with clients, I can assure you that this more intense desire to eat will persist for any body type until that specific energy debt is “paid back”, and then it naturally balances out and adjusts to regular levels. (I cover this and many other aspects of hunger in this article).
So whether the issue is “not hearing hunger” or “having trouble accepting how big your hunger really is”, the fact remains that if you try turning intuitive eating into the “Hunger and Fullness Diet”, you’ll forever stay stuck thinking that intuitive eating isn’t working. Because it simply can’t.
Are you afraid to allow yourself to fully enjoy different foods? If you have a history of yo-yo dieting or an eating disorder, it is understandable that you probably are. Many of my clients are afraid to truly enjoy certain foods.
This fear does make sense. Given the fact that most of these clients have had many occasions where their appetite felt “out of control” and they experienced what they call “bingeing”, they have now become fearful of foods they consider highly enjoyable. They are afraid that eating those foods will merely open the floodgates. So, naturally, they avoid the foods they really crave, neglecting the aspect of true satisfaction in their food choices.
What certainly compounds these fears is being surrounded and influenced by ubiquitous talk about “hyper-palatable” food, “ultra-processed” food, and “food addiction.” Most of us have been exposed to all of those salacious headlines, and many have heard the fear-mongering stories about how “Big Food” is creating irresistible flavour/texture combinations in labs that are solely “designed to override our evolutionary ability to handle these foods”.
Rather logically, many people conclude that if they want to have control with food, true satisfaction could be dangerous and therefore needs to be minimised.
Another thing that happens rather often is clients declaring that their reason for restricting most of these more palatable foods is because they don’t even like them. They state that they’re a “healthy eater who really enjoys whole foods” and that this is “just their preference”.
However, throughout our work together, we come to discover that this isn’t true; in reality, these foods just felt safer, and it was merely this perceived safety that made their “healthy choices” appear more enjoyable.
Now, the issue with eschewing satisfaction is that it’s not optional if your goal is to have a healthy relationship with food. While food is obviously about providing energy for the body, this isn’t its only purpose. If enjoyment and pleasure weren’t an integral aspect of the eating experience, most species would be at risk of extinction: when hunger signals get chemically stunted in moments of acute stress and eating is perceived as a nuisance, any creature could unintentionally starve to death.
As one of the ten principles of the original book Intuitive Eating, satisfaction comes in at number six and is called “Discover the satisfaction factor”. Interestingly, when Elyse Resch wrote the “Intuitive Eating Workbook for Teens”, she promoted satisfaction to principle two, right after “Reject the diet mentality”.
And the reason that she did this was that they found that true satisfaction with food is the foundation on which intuitive eating needs to be built. It’s why I did a whole podcast on the topic, which you can listen to here.
As I’ve seen in my own work with clients, satisfaction is indeed crucial to unlocking a more peaceful relationship with food.
This might feel counterintuitive to you because whenever you have tried eating a food you truly consider satisfying, you experienced a loss of control with eating. Naturally, you’ve come to conclude that you need to avoid this food. However, by becoming an intuitive eater, you’ll find out that it’s not the food you ate that caused “a binge”, it’s the food you didn’t allow yourself to eat that caused it.
Let’s get deeper into what I mean by this.
The overall reason for loss of control over eating is all of the different variations of restriction (something I cover in this episode).
There is of course actual physical restriction, where you are avoiding particular foods.
Secondly, there’s impending physical restriction, where you are planning to avoid particular foods.
And thirdly, there’s mental restriction, where while physically eating a particular food, you’re telling yourself “I shouldn’t be eating this”, “this is the last time”, or “I’ll make sure to make up for this transgression later”.
The truth is this: Full permission to eat is crucial to a healthy relationship with food. If you are eating something while internally telling yourself off, this mental punishment is interfering with your ability to truly experience satisfaction. It causes you to feel anxiety, shame, regret and/or panic — emotions that are certainly not conducive to satisfaction.
Now, it makes sense why these feelings are occurring. You, like many other people, have been primed to have this emotional reaction for most of your life. Naturally, they will linger as you start the journey of intuitive eating, and it will take some time for them to dissipate. Nonetheless, it’s important to understand that true satisfaction will elude anyone in the presence of a loud symphony of negative thoughts and feelings about food.
Another important reason that eating more satisfying food ends up backfiring is “event restriction”, which is when a person habitually restricts their food intake prior to an event where food is involved.
Here’s a common example that most dieters or people with eating disorders can relate to: You have plans to go to a restaurant for dinner and you’re anticipating that you’ll be consuming more calorie-dense foods than usual. This causes you to worry, as you don’t have as much control as you would like. You are not in charge of how the food is being prepared, you don’t know if there are any of your “safer” options and how much you’ll be able to micromanage your order. So you feel like you’ll be exposed to a more “risky” situation, and maybe you regularly experience anxiety about eating in public.
Given this, you decide to reduce your caloric intake during the day in anticipation of this event: you have a smaller lunch, skip your snack or make time for a workout before dinner.
While all of this might make sense from the narrow perspective of trying to “watch your calories”, it invariably sets you up for failure from a biological perspective: as you’re likely to be overwhelmingly hungry come dinner time, which is exactly what puts you at risk of experiencing a “loss of control” around food.
To make things worse, if this uncontrollable urge to eat collides with what you consider “forbidden” food, you’ll be convinced it was the food itself that caused it, and that you’ll need to avoid it for “lack of willpower”.
The final common reason for experiencing a loss of control around food is your history of restriction. When you start to consider just how long you have been denying yourself certain foods, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they now feel all that more enticing-yet-dangerous to you. You’ll notice that the sheer idea of these foods comes with an unintentional side order of judgment and emotions.
As counterintuitive as it may seem, by actually eating them regularly and getting habituated to them, you will physically experience that you are not “addicted to” or “unable to control yourself” around certain foods. You’ll find they are not as exciting and irresistible anymore, and you start seeing them for what they really are: just food.
What ultimately ensues is the powerful insight that you can, after all, trust yourself. This is a moment of significant impact for a person, as it sets off something like a “empowering domino effect”: one by one, those long-standing negative associations and beliefs about themselves and their interaction with food start to fall. Thus begins the healing.
In other words: by giving up control and safety, you’ll regain actual control and safety.
By now, you’re probably asking yourself “So how long will this take? How long will I keep overeating?” I hear those questions all the time, and I understand that most people would love to get a simple, definite answer like “two months”.
However, you should be suspicious of anyone giving you an exact timetable, as the duration of this process effectively depends on a variety of things. Important factors include the amount of time you have been restricting, the extent of energy debt that has accumulated in that time, your genetics, your level of willingness to start regularly incorporating previously “forbidden” foods, the extent of mental restriction that is still present, etc.
And while nobody worth their salt can give you an exact time frame for you to find an intuitive and peaceful relationship with food, I can assure you of this: When the body is given access to all foods and you give yourself full permission to eat in a way that is satisfying, your body and brain will learn that the “potential threat of famine” (which is what a diet is perceived as) is truly gone and that no countermeasures are necessary anymore. That’s the place where peace grows.
When you go on a diet, you are effectively relinquishing trust in yourself and handing it over to a diet. You start following a specific set of rules, which typically consist of a list of “bad” foods, specific windows of time when eating is or isn’t allowed, as well as exercise regimens to follow. While doing this, you are holding on to the hope that if you diligently obey all those rules, everything will turn out the way the diet has promised it will.
Because you are human, there will be times when you “violate the rule book”. These transgressions set off a nasty shame-spiral which, in turn, provokes a wave of anger and distrust in yourself and your body: “Why is my body constantly against me!”
You start seeing your body as an opponent that needs to be rigidly controlled and outsmarted. Believing this, you soldier on doing what you think is best: restrictive countermeasures for “damage control”. What diet culture fails to mention is that “damage control” will trigger the same cycle all over again. (This is what leads most people to go back to diets as “repeat customers” as they get trapped in this cycle, which is what makes this sinister industry so profitable.)
Intuitive eating is different. Where diets are based on the belief that bodies can’t be trusted and need to be outmanoeuvred and pummeled into submission, intuitive eating shows you the opposite. Your body absolutely can and should be trusted.
It makes clear that the only reason why you’ve come to hold such deep distrust in it is that you dieted in the first place.
At its core, intuitive eating is about guiding you back to a place of trust in yourself and your own body. Yes, there are principles and recommendations, but they don’t ask you to hand over your trust to them. They’re simply there to guide you as you leave dieting behind and embark on this path to trust yourself again.
It’s understandable to me that so many people are reflexively resistant to the idea of body trust. Because unfortunately, it’s not just the various diets and “lifestyles” that cause people to relinquish trust in their bodies. We also live in a society that is saturated with fear-mongering messages about bodies and weight, as well as an ongoing moral panic over the “obesity epidemic.” Which explains why millions of people hold a deeply internalised belief that their body is not to be trusted.
It is also easy to see why eating disorders are so hard to recover from. Most of these messages are effectively supporting and enabling what the internal voice of an eating disorder dictates: control your body, control your weight.
But despite all of these negative influences, body trust is actually what makes intuitive eating work.
Now, this is a big idea to take on if you have been believing the opposite for years or decades. So like I mentioned in regards to the desire for weight loss, you don’t have to completely agree with the concept of body trust before you can begin making steps.
If you can, however, connect to the part in you that’s open to the possibility that a body can be trusted, you can start incorporating changes that, over time, will make you see that this is true.
From working with clients, I know that there’s no such thing as a “surefire way” to make someone trust their body. Every client has a unique life story and circumstances, so I use a variety of tools and ideas to help them to start shifting their perspectives and beliefs. Let’s look at a few examples of different situational strategies.
When I’m working with a client who has small kids, it often helps them when we explore how their children interact with food. Seeing that they sometimes eat more, sometimes less, sometimes just a single food, and sometimes a bit of everything. So while their preferences and day to day eating varies, it all balances out. Through their kids, they see that a body can be trusted and relied upon.
In cases where there are no kids, but a partner or a friend that they regularly eat with, it helps if my clients start seeing that there are people in their life that aren’t relying on diets and restriction to regulate their intake.
When working with people who can remember a time of peace with food, I’ll ask them to reflect on those times. As their issues began in their teenage years or early twenties, they often have active memories of a time when their food was not either withheld or restricted by parents and they were free to eat food without rules or guilt.
It can be a tremendous relief for them to understand that they don’t have to learn something from scratch here and that they were, in fact, once intuitive eaters before the weight loss attempts began.
Sadly, there are also cases where a client has no memory of ever having been an intuitive eater. Those are people who were put on diets very early on. Ever since they were a small child they were guilt-tripped for eating, shamed for their bodies, and had restrictions placed on their food intake.
So, naturally, their relationship with food was never peaceful, and many of them have come to see themselves as “food addicts” that need to be controlled and restricted. They never knew anything else, so therefore, they are unintentionally compelled to recreate their food trauma by continuing to diet, which only ever leads to a reinforcement of their narrative of “food addiction”.
For clients like this, my recommendation is to listen to the stories of others who have been in this place and made it out the other side. Isabel Foxen Duke, for instance. She was put on her first diet at age five. She had no memories of a peaceful relationship with food because it got disrupted so early on. All her life, she was stuck in a vicious binge/restrict cycle, believing she was a “food addict”.
But despite being stuck in this exhausting cycle for over two decades, and relying on more or less overtly restrictive “treatment” options (like Overeaters Anonymous, for example), she eventually made it out the other side by learning how to trust her body and how to intuitively eat. You can listen to Isabel’s story in this podcast interview here.
Given that everyone has a body, and therefore is in some sort of relationship with it, there’s a powerful perspective shift exercise that works well for clients regardless of the situation they’re currently in. I ask them to imagine their body as a separate person and then to put themselves into the position of the body.
How would their body describe the relationship at hand? Respectful? Fair? Loving? Or rather abusive and belittling? Controlling and distrustful?
How would their body feel about the verbal messages it’s been receiving for so long?
How would it feel about the fact that it’s regularly been denied pleasure and rest when it asked for it?
How would it feel about the fact that it’s been blamed for being so hungry after all these periods of mental and physical deprivation?
Some clients even visualise their body as a baby, essentially a creature that is fully dependent on them taking care of it.
Needless to say, this is a powerful mental exercise. If it triggers a reaction of guilt, it’s important to remember that it’s by no means meant to shift the blame on you instead of the body — if anything, it can help to see that it’s neither you nor your body that has “failed the diets”, but that the diets have failed you, and you couldn’t know what you didn’t know.
So, this visualisation is simply meant to make people see that their body has been suffering too, and consequently to consider accountability without guilt.
More to the point, this perspective shift helps you to foster a certain empathy and compassion for your body, as it flips the body trust question on its head and shines a light on your own trustworthiness from the perspective of your body: Can it trust you?
If this was a relationship in need of repair, how could you prove to your body that you are becoming a safe person to trust?
How could you show it that you now understand why it reacted the way it did?
Which actions would you need to take regularly for your body to heal from the trauma of years of dieting, and for it to be able to relax around you?
How could you start showing it respect and gratitude for always showing up for you?
As it becomes clear that neither you nor your body is to blame here, the ongoing project of restoring mutual trust begins.
It can’t be said enough: Body trust is at the heart of intuitive eating and it’s the way to make it work. Trust is generally built over a long time, and if your body hasn’t been able to trust you for years or decades, this process requires persistence and patience in your consistent practice of applying the principles of intuitive eating. You’ll see that body trust will slowly but surely develop.
Especially in the beginning stages, there can be times when things get rough. The “safe prison” of rules is gone, trust in yourself and your body are still lacking, so doubts creep in, and it may seem tempting to just jump back into another diet. That’s understandable.
Those are the moments when most of my clients find it helpful to have a greater understanding of physiology itself to provide them with an intellectual base level of trust in their body and to kickstart the recovery process. That is because the data shows that bodies are brilliant in the way they’re continually working towards achieving homeostasis; a state of equilibrium that is optimal for health.
One of the best pieces of information for this is the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, which I have done a detailed podcast on here. This was a highly detailed study designed to establish scientifically valid data regarding the effects of prolonged lack of sufficient food on the human body and to establish strategies for rehabilitation.
In this experiment, 36 men were “starved” for 26 weeks by having their food intake reduced to about 1560 calories a day (which is still above what many modern-day diets are prescribing). Following this “starvation” period, the caloric restrictions were lifted, and the subsequent process of recovery was tracked.
The scientists conducting this study closely monitored and kept records of all the physical, mental and emotional symptoms that occurred throughout this experiment.
For reasons of it being considered unethical and inhuman, a study like this is unlikely to get repeated, but it provides fantastic insights into how the body reacts in response to the threat of famine — in other words, to a person eating less than the body’s requirements.
The reason that this can be helpful is that many people have come to believe that their body is “broken”. But what they learn through understanding this experiment is that their body is, in fact, following a fairly predictable path.
The symptoms that start occurring when a person goes on a diet and starts restricting are mirroring what these men experienced. The reverse is also true: Bodies react the same when the diet (restriction) comes to an end and the recovery process begins.
So it’s not that you can’t trust your body. Your body is doing exactly what it should be doing and despite how you may have been seeing it, this is actually your body acting in your best interest. It is not “out to get you”, it is saving you.
As I said, there are numerous ways to help someone to keep going when they’re feeling stuck or struggle to trust their body. Here are a few ideas:
You might find it helpful to start paying attention to your symptoms and notice how they are slowly improving as you advance on this path. For example, if you start continuously allowing yourself to eat more food and allowing a higher level of fullness, you’ll notice that — despite feeling psychologically scary and uncomfortable — this actually ameliorates many symptoms: your ability to concentrate is rising, you feel more alive and energised, and you don’t get irritated as easily as before.
Another example could be that you start eating foods you previously denied yourself and that are more satisfying to you. Doing so can be scary, as the fact that they were “forbidden” might make them appear almost “magical” and “dangerous”, and you probably have a fearful assumption that “this will only end up in a binge”, as this aligns with what you experienced in times when you were trying to control your food.
As you proceed through and examine this unconditional permission to enjoy satisfying food, however, you’ll be able to observe something that you potentially never experienced before. As your body starts trusting you to not deprive it of food and pleasure again, the uncontrollable urges to eat will occur less and less frequently, as the body isn’t forced to react to the threat of famine any longer.
Being able to see for themselves that things get more peaceful and calm is a profound new insight for many and often leads to a sudden increase of trust in their body. Reflecting on your journey as you go through it helps you see that the more satisfaction you allow, the less deprived you feel and the less you keep thinking about food.
I’ll mention one last example that might be helpful as well: maybe you have noticed that you’re regularly getting hungry again in the evening after dinner. While it might be challenging for you to give yourself permission to eat more food then, actually doing so will allow you to sleep a little deeper and have fewer wake-ups in the night.
All of these instances will help you to see that your new choices are directly translating into an improvement of your symptoms. This proves to you that your body does know what it’s doing and that it can be trusted.
As is often the case with various healing and recovery processes the beginning stages are the most difficult ones to ride out and get through. Please don’t get discouraged if you suddenly find you‘re feeling exhausted, hungrier than before, and if your digestion feels slow and heavy. Think of the experiment I mentioned above, and know that all of this is completely normal and will improve. Unfortunately, recovery (from anything) has never been smooth sailing, especially in the early stages.
Learning anything new is difficult. It’s hard to feel like a beginner and as adults, we naturally experience this feeling way less often than we did when we were children.
Now, as if learning something new from scratch wasn’t hard enough already, imagine what you’re doing here: you’re learning something that is in direct opposition to what you were exposed to for most of your life. All you knew was diets, control, rules, protocols and scales.
And now this. Intuitive eating. Even after reading all the research on the unsustainability of diets and long term weight loss, even after having done a deep-dive into your own story and understanding the evolution of your struggles with food and body, you might still reflexively want to jump back to restriction and dieting. Your brain has been exposed and habituated to this type of thinking for so long that it’s hard to do something different.
Needless to say, the authors of Intuitive Eating took all of this into account, as ambivalence is such a common facet of this work. Ever since they published the Intuitive Eating Workbook in 2017, I’ve been incorporating it into my work with clients quite frequently. It includes exercises that help clients explore their experiences and reflect on them.
The reason I’m bringing it up at this stage, however, is because the very first exercise brilliantly demonstrates our resistance to changing deeply ingrained habits and beliefs: it simply asks you to write with your other hand, the one you don’t usually write with. Go ahead and try it right now if you want. The experience feels super awkward and unnatural. Your writing is barely legible. And while you’re scribbling away, every fibre in your being is telling (or screaming at) you to “put the pen back in the other hand already!”
This is what intuitive eating is like, to start out with. At the beginning, it often feels strange, uncomfortable and more difficult than expected. It’s picking up the pen with the opposite hand every time, and learning to write with it.
This is why it’s incredibly difficult to start the intuitive eating process on your own. You just don’t feel like you can trust yourself yet. You’re second-guessing everything. You feel like you’re “just overeating” or “emotional eating” or “just eating junk food now.”
Your mind is telling you daily that you’re giving up and that you’ll lose everything you’ve worked so hard for. That you’re just letting yourself go. These are common thoughts for most of my clients as they start out with intuitive eating.
Yes, there are some people who push through on their own; they read the book, follow the principles and eventually become intuitive eaters. It may not be all smooth sailing, but they manage the hurdles on their own. But these people are in the minority and what is true for most people is that it’s much easier to make this process work with some additional support and guidance.
Needless to say, this support is especially important if you have an eating disorder. Trying to find your way out of the maze of your eating disorder without getting sidetracked by ingrained thoughts and habits by simply reading the book (and working through the workbook) on your own is incredibly difficult. On top of that, chances are that you’ve ignored your body’s feedback for so long that it’s become inaccurate by now and you’re not even getting clear hunger signals throughout the day anymore, for example.
Above are five of the most common stumbling blocks for those trying to implement intuitive eating. But obviously, these are not the only issues that can arise. For you, there may be other roadblocks that are preventing you from truly embracing intuitive eating.
If this is an area you’d like support with, I’d love to help. I am passionate about helping people find true peace with food and their body. And you don’t have to just take my word for it, you can hear what some of my past clients have said by going here.
I’m a leading expert and advocate for full recovery. I’ve been working with clients for over 15 years and understand what needs to happen to recover.
I truly believe that you can reach a place where the eating disorder is a thing of the past and I want to help you get there. If you want to fully recover and drastically increase the quality of your life, I’d love to help.
Want to get a FREE online course created specifically for those wanting full recovery? Discover the first 5 steps to take in your eating disorder recovery. This course shows you how to take action and the exact step-by-step process. To get instant access, click the button below.
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