You sit down for a meal, not with any stress, guilt, or fear but with ease, excitement, and the ability to enjoy all the wonderful flavors. This does not have to be a fantasy; this could be you. No matter what gender, age, race, or social class you are, unhealthy eating habits have been implicitly taught to you your entire life. Whether in pursuit of unattainable perfect looks or using food as a reward for a hard day's work, everyone has unique harmful eating habits. This can change with Intuitive Eating Therapy. Intuitive eating is making a conscious choice about foods that meet your needs by identifying cues within your body that let you know when you are hungry or full. With a more compassionate, curious approach to eating, you will learn how to find a trusting and loving relationship with food again.
What is Intuitive Eating?
Intuitive eating is not a restrictive diet but an intentional approach to understanding your body better, increasing healthy eating patterns rooted in compassion, and deconstructing society's messages and expectations of your body. Intuitive eating therapy has principles like:
- Saying Goodbye to dieting: It's time to accept that dieting is not sustainable and does not work for you. It's okay; you are not alone, you are in the majority. While it's normal to feel anger, this does not have to be directed at yourself but at the unrealistic and toxic standards, corporations want us to internalize.
- Honor the moments that you're hungry: Eat when you feel hungry. When you recognize and tend to your bodily urges as they come up, they keep you energized and satiated. When you try to deny this hunger, you may often find yourself run down, feeling shameful, or eating past your limits later.
- Make a truce with food: Stop depriving yourself of food you love. This will only contribute to more shame-filled binges. With intuitive eating, you can fall back in love with your favorite foods with self-compassion.
- Recognize when you're full: Feel the feelings of knowing when you're full before, during, and after a meal. Then, recognize those feelings as a sign to stop.
Common Challenges with Food and Eating Habits
Everyone has their own food-related challenges. While some can be unique experiences, there are many that are common.
- Emotional eating and food guilt: Emotional eating occurs when you let your emotions, like stress, numbness, boredom, anger, or happiness, guide your eating habits. When you do this, you may engage more frequently in unhealthy restricting or eating as a way to cope with your emotional experience. This may often lead you to feel guilty about these behaviors later, even if, at the moment, they helped you get through whatever you were experiencing.
- Struggles with dieting and body image: With so many harmful diets and body image standards all over Instagram, TikTok, movies, and TV shows, many individuals have negative internalized messages on eating habits and bodies. Diets seem futile when they restrict so much without offering a sustainable substitute. It’s easy to get off course and feel like you're missing your goal.
- Overeating or restrictive eating cycles: it's easy to get stuck in loops of overeating or restrictive eating, significantly if you grew up with these patterns all your life. Perhaps in your life, you had a parent or close friend who modeled these eating habits to you. Because you have been engaging in these eating habits your entire life, beginning a new eating practice may feel entirely out of your depth.
- Societal pressures and misconceptions about nutrition: With so many misconceptions about food, like being healthy means looking skinny, it often feels like a failure if you do not fit that description. This belief isn’t just enforced by your mind but also can be enforced by a trip to a clothing store that doesn’t carry your size.
How Intuitive Eating Therapy Can Help
Intuitive eating is all about rebuilding a collaborative and loving relationship with your body through building trust in your body's natural hunger, addressing emotional triggers, and regulating when shame and anxiety kick in during meals. Losing weight is not a part of intuitive eating’s core principles. Your goals will shift less from how your body looks to how your body feels. With this mindset you can develop a healthier and more realistic sense of body image and self-esteem, assisting in overcoming eating disorders and body dysmorphia. Gone are the days when a snack in the middle of the day turns into a rainstorm of negative names in your head. After practicing intuitive eating, you can tell that guilt to step aside and refocus on gently checking in with your body.
What to Expect in Intuitive Eating Therapy
When you meet with a licensed intuitive eating therapist, you will do the necessary work to explore and rebuild healthy eating patterns. This includes building skills and also processing these messages.
- Unpacking the past: you and your therapist will go through your history of eating and understanding how your experience and eating patterns are linked. You may find that they are connected with trauma, negative emotions, or behaviors that were reinforced or shamed by a loved one. You will identify triggers, behaviors, and ways to regulate while using new eating patterns rooted in your needs.
- Unlearning and finding food freedom: A therapist will help you identify the negative messages you have internalized from our society and say goodbye to them! Together, you will develop new, more realistic messages. Size is expansive, and embracing and loving your body is complex and not linear. It's okay to love food.
- Learning Mindfulness and developing personalized strategies: Therapists may use experiential exercises with their clients, like guided doing a guided eating meditation to get more attuned to their body's physical sensations of hunger, eating, and being full. They may also work collaboratively with the client to develop personalized strategies like creating mealtime routines.
Why Choose Professional Support for Intuitive Eating?
Beginning intuitive eating can feel overwhelming, especially when years of diet culture have conditioned you to ignore your body's natural cues. This is where a professional can add more support than a book, the internet, or friends. A licensed intuitive eating therapist provides:
- Expert guidance tailored to your needs – No two people have the same relationship with food, and a therapist can help you explore your unique patterns, challenges, and goals.
- A nonjudgmental, compassionate approach—Intuitive eating therapy isn't about telling you what to eat or making you feel guilty. It's about helping you develop a more trusting, balanced relationship with food at your own pace.
- Long-term emotional and psychological benefits—By addressing eating habits and the emotions and beliefs that drive them, intuitive eating therapy fosters profound, lasting change.
- Support for underlying mental health concerns – Many struggles with food are connected to anxiety, depression, trauma, or self-esteem issues. A therapist can help you work through these deeper layers, ensuring your healing goes beyond what's on your plate.
Experience Personalized Support with Humantold
At Humantold, we understand that food is about so much more than nutrients. Food is about our connection with our self and others. That's why our approach to intuitive eating therapy is about more than just eating differently; it's about helping you rewrite your story about food and your body.
- Specialized therapists – Our licensed clinicians have experience and specialized training in helping clients unlearn diet culture, heal from disordered eating patterns, and develop self-compassionate, sustainable habits.
- Flexible in-person and virtual sessions – You might want to take a self-care walk to our office, or you might want to get cozy in bed with tea for a therapy session. Regardless, we will meet you where it feels best.
- A judgment-free, affirming space – Talking about our complex feelings about eating is not easy. You are brave taking this step to make a change. Our therapists are here to help you with curiosity and compassion.
- Easy, accessible care – To get started, visit our website or call our number. With three easy clicks or dials, you can easily schedule a consultation where we will match you with a therapist.
Conclusion
Intuitive Eating Therapy is a great tool that teaches us how our body is our friend and we can collaborate with it by being in touch with its needs. If you feel tired and stuck in cycles of dieting, self-doubt, and food anxiety, you are not alone and there is a way to disrupt that pattern. With intuitive eating therapy, you'll have the support of an experienced therapist to unpack those deeply ingrained beliefs, build trust with yourself, and create strategies that meet your needs to assist you in nourishing your body. This is not another fad diet you will be over in a month, this is a new way of living. Ready to change your life? Visit Humantold to learn more and book an appointment today.