Well, hello, Katy here, and welcome back to a VERY special series on the Rebuilding Trust With Your Body podcast. This is episode 2 of a 3-part series, so if you haven’t listened to part 1 yet, I encourage you to back and start there and then come back to this episode, because they build upon each other. I have dropped all 3 episodes at once, so you can listen to them back-to-back and get yourself some serious momentum in breaking free from diet culture and making peace with food. 

In the first episode we talked about the grip that diet culture has on us, and how it feeds off our fear, our insecurities and our unexamined beliefs that we often carry around unconsciously that are actually holding us back from having the health and comfort with our bodies that we so deeply desire. 

In this episode we are going to talk about strengthening your intuition and focusing on HOW to rebuild TRUST with your body, step by step. 

So as you are stepping away from diet culture, we don’t just want to then wing it with food. Simply not being on a diet isn’t a great strategy for honoring your health or giving your body what it needs.

What I recommend to my clients instead is the approach called “intuitive eating.” 

When we say “intuitive eating,” what does that actually mean? 

Often times, when people first hear the term “intuitive eating” they think that it either means just eating whatever you want, whenever you want (which isn’t intuitive eating, it’s impulsive eating). OR sometimes people hear it and think it means you should simply eat when you are hungry and stop when you are full.

Now, honoring your hunger and fullness are absolutely important parts of IE, but they’re only about 20% of it. 

When we look at the entire IE framework (which is a research-backed framework developed by 2 dietitians, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch), it contains 10 principles. (Hunger/fullness are 2 of them). 

The rest of those 10 principles include things like: making peace with food, letting go of food rules, choosing satisfying food, eating for health, being kind to your body, accepting your body’s natural weight, finding ways to move your body and exercise that work for you, and gentle nutrition. 

Where I don’t want you to get stuck is in “no man’s land” in between dieting and IE, where you’re not really dieting, but you’re not really doing IE either. 

So in this episode we are going to work on the “intuitive” part of IE, and what it takes to connect with and learn to trust your body in order to honor that intuition with food.

Sometimes in the early stages of this process, people don’t know when they’re actually hungry (vs wanting to eat for emotional reasons or out of habit), and they don’t know what they’re truly hungry for because they’ve been dieting and disconnected from their bodies for so long. 

This is part of what drives that fear of being out of control with food – because you don’t trust that your body and your intuition are going to accurately guide you towards what you need.

I’m here to tell you this: They will. Your body and your intuition are trustworthy. We just need to get you reconnected and rebuild that innate connection and trust that you were born with.

Understanding Intuition 

• Babies and toddlers don’t have food rules and judgments. 
• You were born with the natural ability to tune into hunger, fullness, movement, and emotions.
• Address why we lose touch with intuition: years of dieting, societal messaging, and external rules override our internal cues.
• One of the first things that I teach inside NDA is how to intentionally reconnect with your body by proactively providing yourself with reliable and predictable opportunities to eat, so that your body knows and trusts that it will have the fuel and nourishment it needs.
  • With dieting your body is living in fear that there isn’t enough  – jacks with your metabolism, increases TCT
  • By eating on a consistent schedule, you will help train your digestive system, your appetite hormones and your digestive enzymes to know when to expect food

How to Rebuild Body Trust Through Intuition

• Step 1: Listen Without Judgment
  • Practice noticing body cues (hunger, cravings, fatigue) without labeling them as good or bad – cultivate curiosity 
  • Example: “Your craving for chocolate at 3 PM isn’t ‘bad.’ It’s information.” – be curious about what it’s telling you
  • One of my previous NDA clients used to want multiple snacks every evening before bed. She’d start off with one snack, and it would lead to another and another. She’d then go to bed feeling guilty, and she’d wake up the next morning feeling the need to compensate by having a smaller breakfast, and she’d vow to be “good” with food the rest of the day, and it was this viscous cycle.
    • When she first came to me, her biggest concern was how to stop snacking at night. She thought maybe she just needed to tell herself that she couldn’t have any food after dinner, or after 8pm.
    • Instead we flipped the script and got curious about what the food behavior was telling us…(was she hungry? Yes, initially. Eating enough earlier in the day? No. Then she’d have the “what the heck” response…which fueled the overeating and the restrictive eating the next day)
    • The solution? It wasn’t to avoid the night snack. It was first of all to intentionally eat more during the day. So that was part of the structure we set up at the beginning of our work in NDA by having her do intentional meals and snacks, and to fully honor her hunger instead of only eating enough to take the edge off her hunger throughout the earlier part of the day.
    • So as she ate more during the day, then she found that she was still hungry for an evening snack, but it didn’t have to be a huge one. She could have a snack and feel satisfied. (You can see how instead of creating more restriction and deprivation, we leaned into fueling more, which naturally decreased her compulsion towards the food, without her having to have rules for when she had to stop eating, or telling herself she couldn’t have certain snack foods in the house – this would have just made things worse, and that’s what she was doing and it was backfiring before we started working together and approached it this different way)
    • So for you, I want you to be curious about your body cues, and your eating patterns that are worrisome to you. Instead of judging it, or being afraid of letting yourself eat, I want you to be curious about what the body cues or eating patterns are actually telling you. Curiosity is going to be your best friend throughout this process. Curiosity is going to be more helpful than shame and judgment every time. 
• Step 2: Start Small and Experiment
  • Encourage trying out small intuitive practices
    • Eating when slightly hungry
    • Pausing mid-meal to check fullness
    • Pausing before you eat to ask yourself if you’re physically hungry vs emotionally hungry, and what you’re hoping the food will do for you
    • Slow down to consider what types of food your body wants AND needs, and what will make you feel good
  • View it all as data, and the more of it you gather, and the more experience you gain, the more intuitive it becomes over time – but it will be very intentional at first, because there is so much un-learning of the diet culture messaging that we have to do, and learning of this new non-diet way of thinking
• Step 3: Develop a Feedback Loop
  • Reflect after choices: “How did that food/movement make me feel physically and emotionally?” >> They key is to not judge yourself, but to view it all as data, with curiosity and neutrality
  • Highlight that intuition gets stronger with practice, like a muscle.
  • This process of building trust with your body happens over time, with repetition, and the GREAT news here is that you get multiple chances per day to practice it. 

Barriers and How to Overcome Them

• Common barriers:
  • Fear of “getting it wrong” (it’s a learning process, not perfection).
  • Struggling to quiet diet culture noise (tips for tuning it out):
    • Take a break from social media, curate your feed
    • Stop clicking on the articles and ads
    • Set boundaries in conversations
    • Protect your peace, create your force field
    • Find community – FB group (that’s why I include group coaching and a private FB group as part of NDA in particular – healing happens in connection, and supporting others strengthens your own process)
• Encouragement: Reconnecting with intuition takes time, patience, persistence and self-compassion.
  • It’s not quick, and that’s ok. There’s so much wisdom that you’ll learn along the way. 
  • The more you resist that grip of diet culture, and strengthen your intuition and your trust with your body – the more confident you’ll feel in your ability to eat intuitively without having a set of rules to follow. And there’s something that is so empowering about that. You’ll get to where you can hear other people talking about their diet, and at first it might feel kind of triggering for you, but over time you’ll just feel sort of sad for them that they’re stuck in the grips of diet culture, and you know that it’s not all sunshine and rainbows to try and do those dieting behaviors that are so unsustainable. But when you’re confident in what you’re doing, you won’t feel sucked in or like you need to join them in their diet. You’ll feel clear and empowered to keep doing what you’re doing, because it’s working for you and your quality of life is so much better when you’re no longer consumed by diet culture and the obsessive thoughts about food and your body. 

Recap and Wrapping Up: 

• Intuition is innate but we get disconnected from it by deit culture. It can be strengthened through listening, experimenting, and reflecting.
• CTA: Try one intuitive practice today (e.g., asking your body what it needs, checking in with your hunger before you eat, or journaling after a meal to reflect on the experience).
• And when you’re ready, I’ll see you in the 3rd and final episode of this series, which is a juicy one – it’s all about claiming your power, living your life fully, and letting go of food guilt and rules, and what to do about your fear of weight gain or your desire to lose weight

Closing words of encouragement: “Your body is on your side—you can trust it again, one small step at a time.”