If Food Feels Complicated, This Is for You (An Intro to Intuitive Eating)
There’s a very specific kind of memory many of us hold.
You’re on the couch in the same rotation of comfy clothes you wore every weekend with a blanket that has seen better days, watching a movie where someone is absolutely crushing some delicious food. Fully in it, enjoying it, no hesitation, no care of how others may be perceiving their eating experience.
The Szalinski and Thompson kids discovering that giant cookie in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Curly Sue going all in on that cheese pizza in Curly Sue and that colorful, imaginary feast in Hook where food feels joyful and actually magical.
Something in you leans toward it. It’s hunger, it’s curiosity. It’s that feeling of, “that looks so good, I want that” and then, almost immediately, there’s a second thought, “yeah, but not for me.”
So you sit there with whatever feels more acceptable (probably a lean cuisine or some shit), thinking about oatmeal cream pies like they’re some kind of forbidden treasure. If this realization hits somewhere familiar (past or present), you’re not alone. Many folks have versions of these memories and experiences around food.
There’s also another narrative and understanding when you watch those scenes as an adult. Curly Sue, the Szalinski and Thompson kids, and the Lost Boys are all struggling with some form of food insecurity or unintentional restriction. When they finally have access to food that feels abundant and satisfying, they’re so relieved and excited, their bodies and minds are responding exactly how they’re designed to respond when something has been scarce. The same response happens to folks who grew up with intentional food restrictions (food rules, “clean eating,” or growing up in a house where certain foods were off-limits). The circumstances can look different on the outside, but the internal experience can feel surprisingly similar.
What Is Intuitive Eating?
At its core, intuitive eating is about rebuilding a relationship with food that is rooted in trust. It’s a framework developed by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch that invites you to reconnect with your body’s cues (hunger, fullness, satisfaction) and your emotional experience around food.
If your immediate reaction is, “Yeah, I don’t think I have cues anymore,” that makes a lot of sense. Many of us were taught, very early on, to override them. If you’ve spent years following plans, tracking, second-guessing, or trying to “be good,” the idea of listening inward can feel unfamiliar, maybe even a little disorienting. This doesn’t mean anything is missing. It usually means your attention has been trained toward external cues for a long time, which is exactly where principle #1 (rejecting the diet mentality) starts to come into focus.
The School of Unlearning
If you came of age in the 90s or early 2000s, food and bodies were constant conversation topics whether you opted in or not.
SnackWell’s and fat-free everything (remember Alli pills), the Special K era, points systems that encouraged us to keep little blue calculators in our pockets, tabloids picking apart people’s bodies at the grocery store checkout and shows like The Biggest Loser using bigger bodies for entertainment.
Food started to carry meaning beyond nourishment. It became tied to identity, discipline, and worth. Hunger became something to micromanage instead of something to respect and respond to. I remember being so excited when I turned 18 years old in 2006 and could finally purchase Stacker 2 diet pills. Yikes!
When intuitive eating enters the conversation, it can feel like someone just changed the rules of a game (an expensive, soul-sucking game) you’ve been playing for decades. It can feel exciting, scary, relieving, simple, and complicated all at the same time.
The 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating
1. Reject Diet Culture
This is the unlearning phase. It often starts with noticing how deeply those old rules still live in your head. The “I’ll start over Monday” thoughts, the limiting beliefs that carbs are bad, and eating after 7:00 pm is illegal. The way certain foods feel “wrong” before you even take a bite.
2. Honor Your Hunger
For a lot of people, this means relearning what hunger even feels like and responding to it before you’re running on fumes and suddenly everything feels urgent. Honoring hunger can look like eating at 11:30am because your body said so, not because the clock hit noon, or grabbing a snack before you get overly hungry and then feeling more steady the rest of the day.
3. Make Peace With Food
This looks like allowing all foods to exist in your world again. Some people notice a strong pull toward certain foods at first especially ones that used to feel off-limits. Over time, those foods tend to feel more neutral. As permission becomes more real, you might notice oreos and other treats sitting in the pantry for days because they’re no longer a now-or-never situation.
As Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch write in The Intuitive Eating Workbook,
“Making peace with food is a critical component of Intuitive Eating, which involves eating the food you desire with attunement to your hunger and fullness levels. It is the process of making your food choices emotionally equal, without placing shame or judgement on them, whether you are eating green jelly beans or a piece of broccoli. Your dignity remains intact, regardless of your food choices. You are not a good or bad person based on what you eat.’”(Tribole & Resch, 2025, p. 119).”
4. Discover the Satisfaction Factor
When food actually tastes good and hits the spot, the whole experience changes. You don’t feel like you’re chasing something all day. Satisfaction brings a sense of completion. You finish eating and realize, “oh, I can move on now.” Food isn’t lingering in the background of your day. Over time, you start to trust that eating can feel both enjoyable and settling.
5. Feel Your Fullness
This develops alongside hunger. It’s less about hitting a perfect stopping point and more about checking in with your body and noticing what feels comfortable. Also, now that you’ve made peace with food, it’ll feel easier to accept your fullness because you can have more tomorrow.
6. Challenge the Food Police
This is that running commentary in your mind that assigns moral value to what you eat. The voice that keeps score and somehow turns lunch into a personality trait. Commentary like, “I was so good today, I just had a salad” or feeling oddly proud of being hungry.
As Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch write in The Intuitive Eating Workbook,
“There are many ways that diet culture and weight stigma have harmed us by convincing us to focus on not being fat rather than on being nourished. Words or phrases describing foods like “fattening” or “will make us fat” are a prime example of anti-fat bias.” (Tribole & Resch, 2025, p. 213).”
7. Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness
Food has always been connected to comfort. This principle opens the door to building more ways to support yourself while still allowing food to be part of the picture. You’ve had a long day and want something comforting so you eat it and maybe also take a hot shower, snuggle your pet, or just sit for a minute.
8. Respect Your Body
This means choosing to no longer suffer unnecessarily, it begins with a place of care and livability. Accept your genetic blueprint.For some people, this may look like wearing clothes that fit, sitting comfortably (taking up the space you actually need), and speaking to yourself in a way that feels gentler and kinder.
9. Movement – Feel the Difference
This invites you to notice how movement feels in your body rather than treating it like something you have to do to earn or offset anything. This is a great opportunity to reconnect with movement and physical activity that you enjoyed from your childhood. I cannot do a cartwheel anymore but you better believe I can still do a mean split jump on the trampoline.
10. Honor Your Health – Gentle Nutrition
This tends to come in later, once things feel more stable. It’s where you can think about nourishment and how different foods support your energy and well-being without it turning into another rigid system. You notice certain foods help your energy, mood, digestion, or focus, and you start incorporating them more often in a flexible, low pressure way.
Letting Go of Control and Practicing Self-Compassion
A lot of people have a moment where they think, “If I loosen my grip here, things are going to spiral.” This is a fair concern and usually comes from experience.
When food has felt scarce, physically or mentally, it can take on a bigger presence. Certain foods can feel charged, almost like they’re calling your name from the pantry. In the early stages, food can feel more front and center. You might think about it more. You might want things you haven’t let yourself have in a long time. Self-compassion is so integral here because it’s easy to interpret this as “too much” or “out of control again,” when it’s actually a very human response to restriction. As access to food becomes more consistent, the intensity tends to soften. Food finds its place again, still meaningful, still enjoyable, but no longer taking center stage in every moment.
As Dana Sturtevant and Hilary Kinavey write in Reclaiming Body Trust, “Control is often a compelling path in our struggles with our bodies. Control can feel like the answer to the deep inner separation that comes from cycling through bouts with dieting and disordered eating again and again. Control seemingly offers clarity, a path forward, and a plan. And no matter how you slice it, control is an illusion. We are here for more than stories of what we controlled, restrained, pulled off, and performed” (Sturtevant & Kinavey, 2024, p. 53).
Reclaiming Your Relationship With Food
Food shows up in celebrations, traditions, late-night conversations, stressful afternoons, road trips, breakups, and random Tuesday evenings when your brain is tired and you want something comforting.
You might find yourself noticing, “I’m actually hungry right now”, and other times, “I’m overwhelmed and I want something soothing.” Being able to name those moments without turning them into character assassination changes the tone of the whole experience. You’re responding to your needs instead of policing them.
Let’s bring it back to the giant cookie, the pizza, and the imaginary feast. What stands out in those scenes is not only the food but also the experience of being fully present, enjoying it, and letting it be abundant and good. Intuitive eating is a way of coming back to that kind of experience in your real, everyday life.
It’s a place where food can be satisfying, comforting, something you share with people you care about, a way to honor your heritage, your culture, your way of being!
If you’re reading this and thinking, I want this kind of freedom, but I don’t know how to get there, you’re in very good company. This kind of shift usually happens through exploration in spaces where you can unpack and process your history with food and your body without feeling judged or rushed. You don’t have to have it all figured out to start. You just have to be willing to get a little curious about your own experience and see what unfolds from there.
Here’s to taking your power back, food freedom, and feeling more at home in your body.
BANGARANG!
Citations:
Tribole, E., & Resch, E. (2025). The Intuitive Eating Workbook (2nd ed.).
Sturtevant, D., & Kinavey, H. (2024). Reclaiming Body Trust: Break Free from a Culture of Body Perfection, Disordered Eating, & Other Traumas.
If you’re feeling stuck in cycles of food rules, guilt, or second-guessing your body, you don’t have to figure it out alone. Therapy can be a supportive space to explore your relationship with food, rebuild trust with your body, and move toward a more peaceful, sustainable way of eating. If you’re ready to start that process, reach out to learn more about working together at The Therapy Hub.