Intuitive Eating Counselling

Intuitive Eating focuses on helping you meet both your biological and psychological needs by becoming attuned to your body and relearning to trust its signals. This approach focuses on moving away from rules, beliefs and thoughts that create obstacles to body attunement and body trust.

Do you long to reclaim a peaceful and enjoyable relationship with food that is built on body-trust and respect?

It is possible to make peace with food.

Ten Principles of Intuitive Eating

  • Reject the Diet Mentality

    The research is clear — diets do NOT work. Instead of blaming yourself for “failing” another diet, release the pursuit of dieting.

  • Honour Your Hunger

    Not eating frequently enough or under-nourishing yourself makes you susceptible to losing control while eating.

  • Make Peace with Food

    Attempts to avoid certain foods creates feelings of deprivation which can lead to intense cravings and binge eating.

  • Challenge the Food Police

    Beliefs that you are “good” or “bad for eating a certain way, interfere with your ability to listen to your body.

  • Feel Your Fullness

    Learning to recognize your fullness cues allows you to make informed decisions about when your body has had enough to eat.

  • Discover the Satisfaction Factor

    Reclaiming pleasure and satisfaction in your eating experiences makes it possible to determine when you have had enough.

  • Cope with Emotions with Kindness

    Learning how to manage emotions effectively frees you from having to turn to food for comfort or regulation.

  • Respect Your Body

    All bodies deserve respect. Treating your body with respect, no matter what it looks like, is essential to continually meeting its needs.

  • Movement — Feel the Difference

    Shifting your focus to how exercise makes you feel is much more motivating than focusing on how it will change your body.

  • Gentle Nutrition

    Learning to make food choices that honour your health (and taste buds) and make you feel good, supports your ability to look after your body’s health.

Benefits of Intuitive Eating

Research has shown that intuitive eating is associated with many benefits including:

  • Increased body appreciation

  • Improved life satisfaction

  • Increased motivation for movement

  • Increased intake of nutritious food

  • Improvements in overall health, including decreased blood pressure and cholesterol

  • Decreased loss of control eating and binge eating

Are you an intuitive eater?

 Is Intuitive Eating Right For You?

  • Intuitive eating is an anti-diet approach. It is not possible to work on intuitive eating if you are still actively dieting. You cannot work on allowing your body’s signals to guide your choices if you are following externally based rues about what, when and how much to eat. This is is not to say that you can’t still feel pulled to restrict or diet, but you need to be willing to let go of dieting behaviours because they will actively get in the way of your ability to become an intuitive eater.

  • Actively pursuing weight loss will only get in your way if you are trying to work on intuitive eating. Intuitive eating can absolutely make space for processing your feelings about your body, and your wishes for your body to be different (if that is the case for you), but making choices based on a desire to lose weight is inconsistent with intuitive eating.

  • A foundational component of intuitive eating is learning to tune into, and be guided by, your body’s signals and the feedback it provides you. You need to be willing to work on reconnecting with your body and rebuilding body trust.

  • Intuitive eating is typically not an ideal approach for individuals struggling with an active eating disorder, especially during the early stages of treatment. That is not to say elements of intuitive eating cannot be incorporated into your treatment, or that you cannot graduate to working on intutive eating as you move through your recovery journey. This is especially possible when working with a clinician who is trained in both intuitive eating and eating disorders.

  • Intuitive eating is not a quick fix. Becoming an intuitive eater is a process and requires a commitment on your part to put in the work to transform your relationship with food. It often requires a lot of unlearning and re-learning.

  • Typically any unresolved trauma needs to be addressed before you begin working on intuitive eating. Trauma dysreguates the nervous system, which impairs your ability to tune into what is happening inside your body in a useful and regulated way, which impairs your ability to be guided by internal cues.