Intuitive eating encourages people to trust their bodies — not diet rules
As a teenager, Angie Caruso struggled with restrictive eating, avoiding what she considered “fear foods” and underfeeding her body’s needs. In high school and college, she met with doctors and nutritionists who helped her develop daily meal plans and strategies to gain weight.
In 2015, she connected with an online community of people recovering from eating disorders. She says their support “saved her life” and inspired her to launch her own Instagram and Substack, Healthful Radiance, where she shares nourishing recipes and intuitive eating practices, including honoring her cravings and cycle syncing (adjusting her diet to match hormonal cycles). More than 700,000 people follow the account she once created as an anonymous food diary.
“Now I get to decide what sounds good and when I want to eat — and if I don’t want to,” she says.
Intuitive eating — an approach that encourages people to listen to their body’s hunger and fullness cues to determine what, when, and how much to eat — is making a resurgence on social media and in wellness circles amid the growing anti-diet movement. Despite misconceptions that it means eating whatever you want, whenever you want, this approach can help people rebuild a healthier relationship with food.
“I rewired my brain and relearned how to listen to my body,” Caruso says. “Intuitive eating is important now more than ever.”
Eating in tune
People began pushing back on diet culture in the 1960s. A few decades later, in 1995, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch — co-founders of The Original Intuitive Eating Pros — published Intuitive Eating. The book helped popularize the concept of eating in tune with your body, and it has since become a widely recognized approach to nutrition.
“Intuitive eating is honoring our hunger, fullness, and satisfaction cues,” says Stephanie Fiorentino, a registered dietitian and owner of Food Wonderful, a Chicago nutrition practice.
The approach involves 10 core principles, including rejecting diet culture, exercising in order to move (instead of a focus on burning calories), and challenging thoughts of good vs. bad foods. At the heart of the approach is learning to trust your own body, especially if you’re recovering from an eating disorder.
“If we’ve had a long period of disruption in that relationship, it’s not fair to just ask that relationship to just turn back online,” Fiorentino says.
Jennifer Huelskamp, a certified nutrition specialist at Chicago Women’s Health Center and owner of JMH Nutrition, encourages people to pay attention to the foods they avoid (unless they’re avoiding them due to allergies).
Huelskamp and Fiorentino both work with a wide spectrum of clients, from those with disordered eating to neurodivergent individuals who may struggle with certain food textures or hunger drives. They begin each person’s care with a nutrition assessment to identify any health or medical risks.
“If you don’t eat certain foods, why is that? What happens when you do eat those foods?” Huelskamp says. If people gradually add those foods back into their diets, she encourages them to think about how the foods make them feel, emotionally and physically.
Sometimes the voices telling a person not to eat certain foods are coming not from the person or their physician but from social media. Millions of creators on Instagram and TikTok share daily videos of recipes, routines, supplements, diets, and health advice. Huelskamp encourages people to be skeptical of nutrition advice on social media and to discuss major dietary changes with a qualified nutrition professional. Popular “What I Eat in a Day” videos and “SkinnyTok” content can reinforce unrealistic and harmful body standards.
“These videos take away from the meaning of intuitive eating — asking our bodies what we need and how much food we need,” Caruso says.
Weight-loss medications like GLP-1s could also hinder the success of intuitive eating. The drugs slow digestion and increase fullness. And even though many people take them for medical reasons other than weight, they also have shifted the focus to weight loss for many.
About 1 in 8 U.S. adults currently take a GLP-1 medication, and nearly 1 in 5 say they have used one, according to a November 2025 KFF Health Tracking Poll.
“What I’m seeing, and what a lot of my colleagues are seeing, is that GLP-1s have really impacted — mostly for the worse — intuitive eating,” Fiorentino says.
Battling misconceptions
As an intuitive eater for more than 12 years, Maggie Garrity moved away from the shame-based approach to food that forms the basis of dieting approaches. The registered dietitian and co-founder of Intuitive Wellness Therapy Group in Chicago says the approach helps people move away from labeling themselves as good or bad based on their food choices.
In practice, Garrity says intuitive eating involves creating flexible meal plans that take into account cultural influences, taste preferences, and comfort cooking. It also encourages people to find joy in food while working toward balanced meals.
“Intuitive eating is a continual balancing act and can be really confusing. The journey does take years to really honor foods that are both healthy and delicious,” Garrity says. “It’s becoming in touch with what your body needs at that moment.”
Linda Van Horn, PhD, professor emeritus of preventive medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, says young women in particular can become preoccupied with body image. Taken to extremes, obsessive thoughts or behaviors around food can develop into major mental health issues, she says.
Mother-daughter relationships with food also influence how attitudes about food and body image pass from one generation to the next, she says.
“A lot of young women who suffer from this problem point to their mothers as having had similar problems and desperately approaching their daughters with ‘don’t eat too much’ and ‘don’t get too fat,’” Van Horn says.
One of the big challenges is letting go of the idea of losing weight while trying to eat intuitively, Van Horn says. That’s because intuitive eating focuses first on responding to hunger cues rather than restricting them. Over time, many people naturally begin making healthier food choices instead of cycling between restriction and overeating.
Restriction can make it harder to rebuild a healthy relationship with food. Moving out of the scarcity mindset — believing certain foods are only acceptable on holidays and special occasions — can help people develop a healthier eating outlook.
Caruso advocates for the approach in her 2021 book A Body to Love and through her Instagram video series, including “Healthful Hormones” and a healthy food prep series. She tries to create simple, approachable recipes, she says.
“I love to cook, but I also want to make sure I’m providing people with value through my videos,” Caruso says. “Once we start honoring our cravings, it’s such a gift.”
