How to Know If Intuitive Eating Is Right For You

So, you’re interested in Intuitive Eating. But, if you’re being honest, you’ve got lots of questions about how an Intuitive Eating approach to food and nutrition works. And, you’re wondering if it’s the right fit for you.

I totally get it. Intuitive Eating is very different from your standard diet culture approach to food and feeling good. To be honest, that’s precisely WHY it’s so incredibly effective in helping you stop dieting as you enhance your health and wellbeing and find a more peaceful, “forever” food solution!

As a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist, I’ve helped hundreds of women heal their relationships with food and body through Intuitive Eating and gentle, flexible nutrition. But, I know that some common questions and fears tend to come up again and again.

To help you understand more about Intuitive Eating, how it works, and whether or not it’s the gentle food solution you’ve been looking for, I’ve pulled together my answers to some of the most frequently asked questions. Let’s dive in!

6 of Your Most Common Intuitive Eating Questions Answered

Q: I haven’t had great success with other diets and popular nutrition programs. How can I trust that Intuitive Eating will work for me?

Intuitive Eating is different because it's not a diet. In fact, it's actively anti-diet. We're taking the intentional focus off of weight loss altogether. Instead, Intuitive Eating can help you heal from diet culture as you shift your focus to enhancing your physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing—what I like to think of as authentic health.

We’re throwing out the so-called “rules”about what to eat and teaching you to tune into your body, its cues, and its needs instead. You really can't fail with this approach because every meal is an opportunity to gather helpful feedback about your body and your eating behaviors. Then, I help you interpret the information you gather so you can land on a consistent approach to nutrition that works the best for you.

As with anything, of course, you'll get out of your Intuitive Eating journey what you're willing to put into it. But rest assured, I trust you. I trust your body. And I'm all in on helping you learn to do the same!

Q: I've heard you talk about giving yourself unconditional permission to eat and enjoy all foods. But anytime I eat the foods I know I shouldn't, I overeat them and end up feeling like crap. How will Intuitive Eating work for me?

Just about every single person I've ever worked with has felt this very same way before learning to eat intuitively. Nearly every single one.

And this fear makes total sense, especially if you're a dieter or careful, clean eater. Because the more we try to restrict certain foods, the more likely we are to obsess about, crave, and overeat those very same foods!

It's known as the restrict-binge cycle, and it's well-documented in research.

So, of course, when you fall off track with a diet or restrictive eating program—or give yourself permission to enjoy yourself on the weekends after eating so carefully all week—you're primed to go hard in the other direction. This leads to you devouring all the foods in ways that don't feel good at all.

It feels like evidence that you can't trust yourself around certain foods or without a set of "rules" to follow. But in reality, it's a natural human response to restriction and deprivation.

I'm not saying it will happen overnight or without effort. But with permission to eat all foods and the right tools and support in place, you can absolutely learn how to make peace with food. Using Intuitive Eating as a framework, I can show you how to trust yourself to keep any food you want in your house and still eat it in a way that feels good!

I love celebrating all of my clients' many wins, but I get especially excited when they tell me that they're not only keeping their former trigger foods in their kitchens ... but they sometimes even forget they're there!

This type of food peace and trust is possible for you too! 💚

Q: How can it possibly be healthy to give yourself unconditional permission to eat any food you want?

Great question! This is a concept that’s so often misunderstood with Intuitive Eating. Yes, we want you to give yourself full permission to eat any food you want without guilt or stress. Why? Because all foods really can fit in a healthful diet, and eating guilt, stress, and anxiety detract from your health in other ways.

But that DOESN’T mean we Intuitive Eating dietitians are advocating for you to eat anything and everything with no regard for anything else. We want to teach you how to eat anything you’d like with ATTUNEMENT to your body’s cues and your physical, mental, and emotional health and wellbeing.

Also, eating all foods without guilt INCLUDES nutrient dense foods too. Lots and lots of them, in fact!

Q: You say Intuitive Eating is not about weight loss. Can I still do Intuitive Eating if I need to lose weight for health reasons?

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but there's a mountain of very clear research that shows dieting (defined as any intentional attempt to reduce calories to produce weight loss) does not work for the vast majority of the people, the vast majority of the time, over the long-term.

Yes, some dieters may lose weight in the short term ... but the overwhelming majority of those people (somewhere between 85-95% depending on which set of data you follow) will regain the weight back.

Often, they'll regain even more weight than they lost.

To put that into perspective, that's kind of like taking a medication with an 85-95% failure rate! 😒

Beyond that, dieting and the scale tend to put people into an unhelpful, all-or-nothing thinking pattern. Maybe you can relate?

Intuitive Eating empowers you to put the focus on things you can control—health-promoting habits and helpful self-care.

And yes, we can absolutely include medical nutrition therapy with Intuitive Eating to treat specific health conditions or diseases. Research shows that Intuitive Eating can help improve lab markers such as blood pressure, blood glucose, cholesterol and others. It's also been shown to help people eat a wider variety of nutrient dense foods, exercise more consistently, reduce disordered eating, improve their body image, and enhance their psychological well being... along with SO many other healthful benefits!

Instead of tracking weight, these are some of the ways we measure success with Intuitive Eating!

Q: But what if I'm just not happy with my body or comfortable in my own skin without losing weight? Is Intuitive Eating still right for me?

I completely understand you may have a desire to lose weight. To be honest, who wouldn't given the weight-obsessed culture we all live in?

But here's another hard truth. If you're unhappy with your body, this is really a body image issue. And believe it or not, body image is so very much more about your thoughts and feelings about your body than it is your body itself.

I know this may be hard to grasp initially, so let me share an example. Most people can relate to the experience of looking back at photos of their younger selves when perhaps they were in a thinner or more toned body than they are today. Today, they may think, "I'd give anything to have that body back. Why was I so hard on myself then?"

Yet at the time, they didn't wake up every day loving their body. They still wanted to change it.

Likewise, perhaps you can think of a time when you woke up in the morning and felt ok about yourself or how you looked in your clothes. But later in the day you caught a glimpse of yourself and thought, "what the heck was I thinking? Look at how awful my stomach, or legs or [insert body part] look?"

Your body itself didn't change in those few hours. Something in your mindset changed.

It's difficult to imagine taking your eye off of weight loss. Believe me, I know. And while we absolutely create a safe, non-judgmental space for you to explore weight concerns and heal your body image in our Intuitive Eating work together, we're ultimately trying to help you untangle your confidence, value, and self-worth from the way your body looks.

I call it finding body peace ... and while this work isn't easy, it's so incredibly worth it, rewarding, life-, and wellbeing-enhancing.

Q: Will I or won't I lose weight with Intuitive Eating?

The honest answer is that some people lose weight, some people gain weight, and some people’s weight stays exactly the same when they learn to stop dieting and eat intuitively.

It very much depends on your individual genetics, current behaviors and environment, and personal starting point. I can't promise you weight loss (neither can any other diet program out there, by the way, although surely some will try!).

But what I can tell you definitively is this:

Intuitive Eating is about helping you enhance your physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing or what I like to call authentic health. It can help you stop fighting against your body, and learn to partner with it instead.

Ultimately, it’s your path to finding food and body peace.

Stop Dieting and Start Eating Intuitively

One of the top things I typically hear from my clients once they learn to stop dieting and eat intuitively is that they feel lighter and more liberated than they have in years (sometimes decades) as a result of our work together—regardless of what happens with the scale!

Why? Because Intuitive Eating enables you to reclaim your life—including your time, mental energy, and money—from dieting. It’s not only deliciously liberating, but empowering and health-promoting too!

If you’ve stuck with me reading until this point, I’m guessing that your current approach to food and self-care isn’t working for you as well as you’d like. Perhaps you’ve tried every diet or fad food solution out there … only to feel more lost and confused about how to eat than ever.

If so, you’re not alone. And Intuitive Eating is perfect for you! 

I would absolutely love to help you learn how to eat intuitively and enhance your health and wellbeing without dieting or stressing about the scale. Click here to set up a FREE Intro to Intuitive Eating call with me now and let’s chat about how we can work together towards a more peaceful approach to food, health, and healing.