Intuitive Eating: Learning to Trust My Body Again

A gentle note before you begin. How we eat is a tender thing, and often a deeply wired one, so any method that asks you to change it deserves to be approached carefully.

If you have a history of disordered eating, please do not take this on by yourself. Someone qualified who knows you is the right person to walk it with you. And if you are reading this with another woman in mind, it may not be the post to send her.

If anything here starts to feel stressful, or simply not right for you, please trust that. Your own intuition is the whole subject of this piece, and it applies to the reading of it as much as to the eating. It may not be your time, and leaving this for another day costs you nothing at all.

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My own journey with intuitive eating

I want to share my personal journey with intuitive eating here, because it has been a big part of my life over the years.

Food became very overwhelming for me. I found it so hard to know what to eat. Everything I read told me one thing, eat this for that, and then the next thing I read told me the opposite. After a while none of it felt nourishing, it just felt uncomfortable.

What I loved about intuitive eating was that it brought me back to listening to my own body. The practice, for me, was learning to notice when I was actually hungry, and noticing which foods left me feeling good and which ones did not. That was the whole of it, and it was a lovely thing to come home to.

Was it easy? No. Not because the idea is complicated, but because of how much misinformation I had taken on, how much unlearning there was to do, and how much fear I was carrying about eating the wrong thing.

And it was never only intuition, either. I still read, I still talk things through with practitioners I trust, and I still learn from women who know more than I do. What changed is that I test all of it against my own body now, rather than handing my body over to whatever I read last.

Learning to hear that voice at all took me years, and how my intuition came back is its own story.

What intuitive eating actually is

Eating in a way that answers to your own body rather than to rules handed to you from outside.

People tend to shorten that to hunger and fullness, and it is a good deal more than that. The original framework runs to ten principles. They cover making peace with food, finding your meals properly satisfying, being gentle with yourself about how you eat, and what the dietitians who wrote it call gentle nutrition: choosing food that suits your body and your taste, without any of it having to be perfect.

So it is very much about what you eat, not only about when. No food is off limits, nothing needs earning, and there is no version of the day where you have been good or bad. You are simply a woman having her dinner.

My own feeling about it, after years of this and after sitting with a lot of women, is that no single way of eating is ever going to be right for everybody. Every body runs differently. Some of us handle certain foods easily and some of us do not, some of us have sensitivities, and what we need changes across a life anyway. That is not a fault in you and it is not a fault in the food, it is simply how bodies are.

Nobody knows yours the way you do. Given a little space and a little time to listen, what you work out for yourself tends to fit you better than anything handed to you ever could.

The idea is not mine. Intuitive eating is an established framework developed by two dietitians, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, in the 1990s, and there is a lovely body of work behind it if you ever want to read further. What I have to offer you is my own experience of trying to live it.

Why intuitive eating is so much harder than it sounds

Because most of us have spent decades quietly training the signal out.

If you have dieted, counted anything, eaten to a schedule that suited your work rather than your hunger, or reached for food to soften a feeling, then the thread between "I am hungry" and "I notice I am hungry" has worn thin. Mine had. That is what happens to a signal nobody has answered in twenty years. If food has been carrying feelings for you, my writing on the emotions we do not process sits gently alongside this one.

For the first long while I could not tell hunger from anxiety, boredom or thirst. I would eat because it was one o'clock. I could tell you the calorie count of almost anything and not whether I actually wanted a single bite of it.

Getting that back was slow, patient work, and it involved eating more than I was comfortable with for a stretch while my body worked out that food was reliably coming.

There is a word for the sense all of this rests on, and learning it helped me more than almost anything else. Interoception is your ability to feel what is going on inside your own body: hunger, fullness, thirst, needing the loo, your heart beating faster. It is a sense, in the way sight and hearing are senses, and like them it is sharper in some of us than in others.

That is worth knowing, because it means none of us start from the same place. Researchers looking at hunger, fullness and thirst found the differences between people ran through nearly every part of it: how strongly the signal arrives, which signals we notice first, and how much we believe them once they do. Some of us were born with a quieter signal. Some of us had it talked over as children. Some of us spent twenty years deliberately overriding it.

It also explained something that had puzzled me for years, which is that I am just as poor at noticing thirst as I am at noticing hunger. That is not two separate failings. It is one sense, doing the same quiet thing in both directions.

So if you are reading this and quietly deciding that you must be broken because you cannot feel what other women seem to feel, please do not. You have a sense that runs quieter than average, and a quiet sense can be brought back up, slowly, the way you would strengthen anything.

If you cannot feel hunger at all

This is the part I would least like you to skip.

Hunger is not a reliable signal for everybody, and for some of us it goes quiet altogether. Stress is one reason. There is research in midlife women linking higher morning cortisol with less intuitive eating, which matches what I see in the women around me: the more wound up she is, the less she feels like eating. Long stretches of undereating do it too, and so can illness and some medications.

If you are not feeling hunger, please do not take that as permission to skip meals. It is the opposite. Eat at regular times anyway, whether or not the signal has turned up, and give it a few weeks. For most of us it comes back once the body believes food is properly coming.

And if it does not come back, or you are losing weight without meaning to, please take that to your doctor rather than waiting it out.

None of this shuts you out of intuitive eating, and I would hate you to read it that way. It is a beautiful practice when your hunger is firing well. When it is not, you lean on the other half of it instead. Let the clock decide when you eat, and let yourself decide what.

Which foods appeal to you today. Which ones you are actually excited to sit down to. Which ones leave you feeling well a few hours later. That half of the practice works perfectly whether or not your hunger has turned up, and in my own experience it is often the half that coaxes the signal back.

What actually helped me eat intuitively

Eating regularly, at first

This sounds like the opposite of intuitive, and it is, deliberately. You cannot hear a hunger signal through the noise of being underfed. Regular meals for a season gave my body a reason to start trusting me again.

Sitting down, without a screen

This one is really about being present. If my phone is in my hand, or the laptop is open, or the television is going, I am not tasting anything. I reach the end of a meal with no memory of eating it and no idea whether I even enjoyed it.

That is why I noticed almost nothing about my food for years. Putting the screen down, even for ten minutes, changed more than I expected it to. It is hard to work out which foods suit you when you were not really there for any of them.

Eating what I actually want

For years I ate around the thing I wanted instead of eating the thing. If I wanted something warm, a salad was never going to settle it. If I wanted chocolate, a date and a handful of nuts was never going to settle it either. I would have the stand in, still want the chocolate, and then have the chocolate as well.

So now I ask myself what I actually want, and I have that. It sounds indulgent and it works out to be the opposite, because being satisfied is a great deal of what tells you to stop. A meal you did not really want leaves you wandering back to the kitchen afterwards, looking for something you cannot name.

Noticing how a meal left me feeling

Not whether I had been good or bad, but what my body actually did with it. That sat heavily. I felt lovely all afternoon. I was starving again by eleven. Those are things I can use. "That was bad of me" teaches me nothing and just makes me feel awful.

Learning which foods suit you is the slowest part of all of this, far slower than noticing hunger, and it is the part I still use most. It is also deeply personal. Two women can eat exactly the same lunch and feel completely differently by three o'clock.

And it is not only different from one woman to another. It changes inside the same woman. The same lunch can sit beautifully one week and sit like a stone the next, because you are not the same across the month. What suits you while you are bleeding is not always what suits you around ovulation. What worked for you last year may not be what you need this year.

None of that means you have got it wrong or gone backwards. It means you are a woman who keeps changing, and the noticing is simply how you stay current with her.

Giving it far longer than felt reasonable

It took me months rather than weeks, and I would rather say that plainly now than have you feel behind by week three. You are undoing years of not being listened to, and that takes as long as it takes.

Why your hunger changes through the month as a woman & how to trust it

This is the piece I wish someone had told me twenty years ago, and it is what finally made the whole practice make sense for my body.

Your appetite is not supposed to be the same while you are bleeding as it is around ovulation, or in the week before your next period arrives. If you count your days, that is roughly day four against day twenty four, and you do not need to count anything to feel it. Mine climbs noticeably in that last stretch, the week or so before I bleed. For years I read that as a lapse in discipline, and I would spend that week arguing with myself. It was never a lapse. It was my body asking for something, in a rhythm that comes back every single month.

Understanding that took the shame out of it, which is what let me keep going. A signal that changes is not a broken signal. It has a pattern, and a pattern is something you can get to know.

If you would like to see your own, tracking your cycle is how it becomes visible, and it takes about ten seconds a day.

And if what you are really after is what to put on your plate in each phase, that is its own question with a proper answer. I have written it out week by week in eating for your cycle.

Questions I get asked

How do I start intuitive eating?

Gently, and with one thing. For most women the kindest first step is eating regularly for a few weeks, so that there is a signal to hear in the first place. Listening harder does not help much when nothing is coming through. Everything else can wait until that part feels ordinary.

Is intuitive eating just eating whatever I want?

In a sense, and that is the part that frightens most of us. What I found was that once nothing was forbidden, the wanting evened out on its own. For me it was the forbidding that made a food feel urgent in the first place.

Will intuitive eating help my digestion?

I cannot promise you that, and I would not want to. Eating calmly and eating enough changed how I felt, but that is my own experience and not a promise about yours. And if your digestion has been difficult for a long time, or something has changed, please get it looked at properly. That one is a doctor's question, and a short appointment is worth it. If digestion is the part you are here for, digestion and emotions is where I would send you next.

What if I want more structure than this?

That is allowed. Wanting a little structure does not mean you have failed at any of this. Food combining is a gentler kind of structure that pays attention to how you put a plate together rather than to how much is on it. The five flavours of Chinese medicine is another, and it works by taste rather than by rules about what to keep apart.

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I wrote a book to walk you through this

Everything above is the short version of something I have spent years on, so I gathered it properly into a book called How to Intuitively Eat.

It is there if you would like something to sit beside you while you find your way back to your own body, rather than a post you read once and close. And if you would rather do this on your own, with what is written here, that is a perfectly good way to start too.

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