Nutrition advice can feel super overwhelming, especially in the digital age. As an intuitive eating counselor, I hear my clients constantly feel pressured to engage in social comparison, diet talk, and wellness trends (that aren’t really focused on supporting your health at all, but rather the financial gains of the diet industry). We are surrounded by diet culture, which creates a lot of noise about what food to eat and what to avoid, drawing harsh lines around what is considered “healthy” or “unhealthy”, “good” or “bad”, “right” or “wrong”, all around your very personal and daily relationship with food.
Before reading this blog, ask yourself:
- Do I know anyone who cycles through diets? What did I notice about this person?
- If this person was me, how have diets interfered with my life?
- How do I react or respond when there is a lot of diet talk (ex. Hearing someone say “I shouldn’t eat that” or “I wonder how many calories are in this”)
- If I’ve ever engaged in diet talk myself, how has it made me feel? Fearful? Powerful? Estranged?
- What are my ideas about what qualifies as a “good” food choice or a “bad” food choice?
Rethinking Nutrition – From Diet Rules to Intuitive Eating
National Nutrition Month 2025 is a time to become curious about whether your relationship with food is sustainable and self-compassionate. How would it feel to engage in balanced eating, reconnecting with your hunger cues, and honoring your body’s needs to foster a healthy relationship with food? Intuitive eating offers a new pathway for how to build a healthy relationship with food. This blog will give you a small taste on what intuitive eating is all about.
Why Traditional Diets Fail
Diet culture is a billion dollar industry and unfortunately profits off of people’s personal insecurities about how they look. It is because of diet culture that many people intertwine nutrition with restriction. This pattern generally creates a cycle of what we call yo-yo dieting, where your weight fluctuates during the back and forth of restriction (during diet periods) and weight gain (during non-dieting periods).
Diet culture is dangerous because it interrupts our body’s very natural process of attuning to hunger and fullness cues. Intuitive eating is based on research that rigid dieting actually increases the risk of binge eating and even experiences of emotional distress. So what’s the alternative to non-dieting?
What is Intuitive Eating?
Intuitive eating is a health-at-every-size (HAES) aligned and non-diet approach to fostering a healthy mind-body-spirit connection with food. Intuitive eating principles are centered on uncovering your intuition around food – your very unique and natural eating habits based on internal signals, rather than external cues.
Intuitive eating was developed by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. IE consists of 10 principles focused on rebuilding trust with food. As an intuitive eating counselor, I received education and supervision from Evelyn, who is incredibly passionate about her work in helping people reconnect their natural intuition around their body’s needs. There is also a mountain of research backing intuitive eating approaches with some potential benefits of engaging in intuitive eating practices:
- Reduced disordered eating behaviors
- Improved mental health and self-esteem
- Greater appreciation for one’s body
- Healthier metabolic markers
- Improved blood sugar and cholesterol levels
- Engaging in exercise for joy, rather than for weight loss
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