The Origin of Intuitive Eating
Diet fads change as quickly as the weather. From Weight Watchers to Whole 30 to Keto, to cleanses... it's hard to keep up. Whether you've heard of Intuitive Eating or not, you might be wondering, "Is this just another fad?" Let me reassure you—it’s not.
In their book Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach*, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch introduced the 10 principles of Intuitive Eating, providing evidence-based insights into how it helps heal the harms caused by dieting. But here’s the thing: Intuitive Eating isn't something new they created. It's something you've already experienced.
Rediscovering Your Natural Wisdom
Believe it or not, you were an intuitive eater once—whether you realize it or not! One of the reasons I’m so passionate about Intuitive Eating is that our greatest teachers are... BABIES! Yes, babies are natural intuitive eaters.
As infants, we are born with an innate ability to recognize hunger and fullness. Babies cry when they’re hungry, stop eating when they’re full, and have preferences for flavors. They don’t think about calories or nutritional labels—they trust their bodies to tell them what they need.
Losing Touch with Our Bodies
However, as we grow up, we're often trained out of this natural ability.
We’re taught to:
Follow external cues (nutrition labels, calorie counts)
Abide by food rules (e.g., "don’t eat before bed" or "only eat at meal times")
Rely on societal guidelines rather than listening to our bodies
All of this extra information can quickly clutter our minds and cloud our connection to our body's signals.
We’ve become a society that bases what, when, and how much to eat on logic alone. Don’t get me wrong, the brain is incredibly powerful and necessary. But so is your connection to your body, your wants, and your needs.
Intuitive Eating invites us to integrate both—facts and feelings—so we can restore our connection to our true needs.
Evelyn Tribole & Elyse Resch: Pioneers in Intuitive Eating
Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch have been at the forefront of this movement. They didn’t just write the book—they've dedicated their careers to researching and refining the practice of Intuitive Eating, establishing it as an evidence-based approach to health.
You may have heard that Intuitive Eating is simply "eating when you're hungry and stopping when you're full." Or maybe you've heard that Intuitive Eating is all about "eating whatever you want, whenever you want." Both of these may be components of your Intuitive Eating journey, but Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch have outlined 10 principles of Intuitive Eating that encompass much more than those two statements!
You might have heard that Intuitive Eating is simply about "eating when you're hungry and stopping when you're full," or "eating whatever you want, whenever you want." While those might be aspects of Intuitive Eating, there's so much more to it.
You might have heard that Intuitive Eating is simply:
Eating when you're hungry
Stopping when you're full
Eating whatever you want, whenever you want
While those might be aspects of Intuitive Eating, there's so much more to it. Tribole and Resch outlined 10 core principles that form the foundation of Intuitive Eating. These principles help guide us back to the innate wisdom we were born with and offer a roadmap to healing our relationship with food and our bodies.
The 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating.
Principle 1 - Reject the diet mentality.
Rejecting the diet mentality is the first and perhaps most critical step on your Intuitive Eating journey. It’s about letting go of the idea that diets and weight loss are the solution to health, happiness, or worthiness.
This means:
Recognizing the lies diet culture has sold you: Diet culture thrives on the belief that thin = good and fat = bad. It convinces you that you can only achieve happiness and health by controlling your body and weight. Rejecting the diet mentality means challenging these toxic narratives.
Stop chasing the weight-loss fantasy: Another aspect of rejecting the diet mentality is coming to terms with the fact that weight loss is not the path toward health. Most diets are designed to fail long-term and they don't address the root causes of our relationship with food or our bodies.
The Consequences of Diet Mentality
Diet culture isn’t just frustrating—it’s harmful. Diets set us up for failure because they’re not designed to be sustainable. They often lead to bingeing, yo-yo dieting, and feeling out of control with food. And the guilt? Ugh. That comes when the diet inevitably fails because it was never meant to work long-term in the first place.
Diet culture distracts you from tuning into your body and trusting its signals. When you’re constantly thinking about whether you’re following the plan or whether your food choices will lead to weight gain, you lose touch with your body's messages. Rejecting the diet mentality is a crucial step toward relearning how to listen to your body—not the rules.
Rejecting the diet mentality lays the foundation for the rest of your Intuitive Eating journey by removing the noise that has shaped your eating habits and taking weight loss off the table as a goal.
Principle 2 - Honor your hunger.
This principle says: Eat when you're hungry. No matter the time of day. Even if you just ate an hour ago. Even if you haven't moved your body today. If your body is sending hunger signals, it is an act of care and respect to meet your biological needs.
Years of dieting, meal plans, and food rules have taught us to ignore or mistrust our hunger. We've been told to push through it, suppress it, or ignore it. But hunger isn't something to be feared or ignored.
By listening to and responding to your hunger cues, you avoid reaching that overly hungry point where it feels like you're ready to eat everything in sight. When we get to that place of extreme hunger, using our brains (decision-making) and tuning into our bodies (asking ourselves what sounds good) becomes inaccessible.
It's nearly impossible to make decisions based on anything other than desperation, which can lead to eating beyond fullness or feeling out of control with food.
When we honor hunger as soon as it shows up, we stay connected to our body and its needs.
Principle 3 - Make peace with food.
Making peace with food means letting go of the guilt, the shame, and the constant mental tug-of-war over what you should eat.
We’ve been conditioned to view food as the enemy. As something to be controlled, avoided, or a demonstration of willpower. But this principle is about bringing neutrality into your relationship with food. This means all foods hold equal emotional weight and you can eat any type of food without guilt or judgment.
The “Forbidden Food” Cycle
When you tell yourself certain foods are off-limits, it only increases their power over you. We crave what we restrict, and when we finally allow ourselves to have the “forbidden” food, we often eat more than we want to—not because we lack self-control, but because our bodies think we need to stock up for the next famine. It’s a vicious cycle.
Think of it like a long-distance relationship. Distance makes the heart grow fonder right? When you know you can only see that person once a month, you think about them all the time when you're apart. And then once you're back together, you spend every second together to make it count.
Whereas, if you had access to your partner every day, you would find a much more balanced way of interacting. You'd take time apart and appreciate them when you're together but without any of the dramatic swinging from one end of the spectrum to another.
Making peace with food means giving yourself unconditional permission to eat all foods. Yes, even (especially) the foods you’ve been avoiding or restricting. When you stop treating them like they’re forbidden or special, they start to lose their charge. You’ll find that you’re less likely to binge or eat beyond fullness because the food is no longer a 'special treat' or rare occurence. It’s just food.
Principle 4 - Challenge the food police.
We all have voices in our heads and different parts of ourselves that show up and run the show. Some voices/parts you may be familiar with are: "Inner critic," "Inner child," "Higher self," "Intuition," etc.
The Food Police are the voices that dictate strict rules about what you should and shouldn’t eat, how much is “acceptable,” and what kind of food makes you “good” or “bad.”
The Food Police can feel like a constant companion, but you don’t have to live by their rules anymore.
Challenging the food police encourages you to develop a new voice in your mind—a voice that talks back against the "diet voice" that has ruled your food choices for so long. By questioning their authority, you can begin to create a relationship with food on YOUR terms.
Principle 5 - Discover the satisfaction factor.
You are allowed to enjoy food!!! Even encouraged!!
The satisfaction factor is all about reconnecting with the pleasure of eating. When you allow yourself to eat what you truly want and savor it, you’re much more likely to feel satisfied, both physically and emotionally.
Why Satisfaction Matters
If you’re eating a salad because you think it’s “healthy,” but what you really want is pizza, you may find yourself feeling unsatisfied after the meal, even if you’re physically full.
That lack of satisfaction can lead to eating again later when you aren't hungry or constantly thinking about food because your needs weren’t truly met.
When you deny yourself the foods you enjoy, it can create a cycle of craving, restriction, and then overindulging. On the other hand, when you allow yourself to eat what brings you pleasure and satisfaction, your body feels nourished and content.
Principle 6 - Feel your fullness.
Learning to feel your fullness means tuning into your body’s natural cues that it’s had enough, without judgment or guilt.
When you’ve been caught in the cycle of dieting or restricting, you might be used to eating according to external rules (like portion sizes or calories) rather than paying attention to your body’s signals. The goal of this principle is to help you trust your body to tell you when it’s had enough food.
This can be a hard principle to lean into for a few reasons:
1) Fullness is a subtle sensation and without practice, it can be hard to detect. So you may be feeling it and just not noticing it yet.
2) Years of dieting have convinced you that feeling "slightly empty" is the new full and so when people feel actually full, they are uncomfortable with that sensation and mislabel it as having eaten too much.
3) Sometimes, if you let yourself eat until fullness, you will eat beyond what diet-culture has deemed the "appropriate" amount. So it's not that you can't feel fullness, it's that you don't want to eat as much food as is necessary to feel full.
When you honor your fullness, it helps build trust in your body’s natural regulation system, which is something that diets tend to disrupt. Over time you’ll find that trusting your fullness helps you feel more in tune with your body’s needs.
Principle 7 - Cope with your emotions with kindness.
Eating for comfort or to soothe emotions isn't bad or wrong. Part of your healing journey with food involves releasing any guilt or shame around emotional eating.
That said, emotional eating becomes tricky when it’s your go-to for every emotion. Sometimes eating in response to emotions can feel genuinely soothing and nurturing (yay), but sometimes food is used to numb, avoid or escape your emotions (not ideal).
This principle is all about expanding your toolbox of emotional coping skills so that food isn't your only or default coping skill.
Instead of turning to food automatically, this principle encourages you to pause and ask yourself, What do I really need right now? Food can be one tool in there, but you need to have others as well.
Different emotions require different responses and it can take time and attention to learn the nuances of what feels most supportive to you.
Principle 8 - Respect your body.
Instead of focusing on love or approval, this principle is about recognizing that your body deserves care, kindness, and respect—right now, exactly as it is.
Respecting your body means treating it with care and compassion even if you don't love what you see in the mirror. It’s about accepting the body you have today, even if it doesn’t look or feel the way you think it “should.”
Respecting your body is about making choices that support your well-being and showing up for your body even on days when you’re not feeling your best.
This could look like:
Wearing clothes that fit and are comfortable
Maintaining basic hygiene
Being mindful of your self-talk and self-criticism
Resting when your body is tired
Eating when your body is hungry
Moving when your body wants to move
❤️ Your body is worthy of care, compassion, and dignity, no matter what it looks like.
Principle 9 - Movement - Feel the difference
When you hear the word exercise, what comes to mind? For many, it’s DREAD.
Or, it's associated with weight loss, burning calories, or “earning” food.
But the idea behind this principle is to completely reframe how we think about movement. Instead of focusing on how exercise can change your body, this is about reconnecting with how movement makes you feel.
I've never been one to enjoy “typical” forms of exercise like working out at a gym or going for runs. They most certainly feel like 'shoulds' rather than something I want to do.
Dancing, on the other hand, doesn't even register as exercise. I honestly don't even dance for physical health reasons. I dance because it makes my heart happy, makes me a nicer person to be around, and refuels my spirit. The fact that it's exercise is just a bonus.
I know that not everyone has a passion that also happens to be a form of movement, but there are a lot of creative and unique ways to move your body that don't fit the traditional mold and might resonate with you.
If you haven't explored different types of movement recently, let this be a gentle nudge. No pressure to even get out there and do it; the nudge it to simply brainstorm some forms of movement that sound fun to you. Rock climbing? Swimming? Jump rope? Pole dancing?
Listening to your body’s wants and needs for movement is just as important as listening to your hunger and fullness cues. And just like with food, your relationship to movement and exercise will flourish when you release the rules and "shoulds" and get in touch with what feels good and makes you happy.
Principle 10 - Honor your health with gentle nutrition.
Intuitive Eating does not leave everything to the body’s desires alone; it still incorporates nutritional guidelines but with a much lighter grasp.
Gentle nutrition is a compassionate and flexible approach to eating that prioritizes both nourishment and enjoyment by making food choices that support your health without stressing over every bite. And it's a reminder that your health is determined by more than a single meal—it’s about the overall patterns in your eating over time.
This principle invites you to think of nutrition not as a rigid set of rules to follow, but as a guide to help you care for your body. It’s about striking a balance between eating what you enjoy and what nourishes you. Yes, your body needs nutrients like vitamins, fiber, and protein—but it also needs satisfaction and pleasure.
Intuitive Eating is not a fad. It’s a return to trusting yourself and your body, recognizing that you are more than a set of rules or a number on a scale. It’s about finding joy, satisfaction, and balance in your relationship with food and your body.
If you’re ready to embark on this journey and need support, I’m here to help. Check out my 1:1 coaching for personalized guidance tailored to your unique needs and experiences.
* If you purchase books through my Bookshop store, an independent bookstore and I will both get a cut of your purchase!