When you’ve spent years dieting, you get really used to having a scoreboard.
Did the number on the scale go down? Did you stick to the plan? Did you hit your calorie goal? Did you make it through the week without eating the food you told yourself you weren’t supposed to have?
Diet culture gives us very tangible ways to decide whether we’re succeeding or failing. So when you step away from dieting and begin exploring intuitive eating, it can feel a little disorienting.
How do you know if this is actually working?
Katherine, a longtime Find Food Freedom® client who received both group and one-on-one support from our team, described experiencing that exact feeling. When she first found intuitive eating, she remembers being almost shocked by how much sense it made. After years of trying to monitor and suppress her hunger, the idea of learning to listen to her body felt refreshingly simple.
But understanding intuitive eating and actually unlearning decades of diet culture are two very different things.
Katherine joked that when she first started doing this work, she thought she was going to be the “best intuitive eater.” She expected to sign up for a few months of support, figure it all out, and graduate.
And honestly? That makes so much sense.
When you come from dieting, you’re used to programs with a beginning and an end. You’re used to pass or fail, on or off, before and after. It can take time to realize that healing your relationship with food doesn’t follow the same rules.
Progress with intuitive eating isn’t always easy to measure
Before beginning this work, Katherine described her relationship with food as unpleasant.
She felt caught in a binge-restrict cycle. Food had become one of her primary coping mechanisms, and she spent a significant amount of time thinking and worrying about what she ate. She had also been dieting and worrying about her weight since childhood.
Through her intuitive eating journey, Katherine reached a place where she could describe her relationship with food as pleasant.
That didn’t mean eating according to hunger and fullness cues perfectly every day. There were still times when she ate more than felt comfortable. Difficult thoughts about food and her body could still show up.
What changed was how much power those experiences had over her.
Food became less loaded. She could enjoy eating because food tastes good and brings pleasure. She took a cooking class simply because learning to make interesting, delicious meals sounded fun. She even signed up for a baking class, something she said she previously would have avoided because having a bunch of baked goods in her house would have felt scary.
These are the kinds of changes that can be easy to overlook because there isn’t necessarily a number attached to them.
Progress might look like keeping foods in your house that used to feel out of control. It might look like ordering what sounds satisfying without spending the entire meal mentally calculating what you ate. It might mean eating past fullness and recognizing that being overly full sometimes is part of being a human who eats.
Maybe you realize food doesn’t dominate every social event anymore. Maybe you notice that your body hasn’t crossed your mind for hours. Maybe food simply starts taking up less space in your brain.
None of those things fit neatly onto a scale, but they can completely change your life.
A bad body image day doesn’t need to become a new diet
One of the biggest shifts Katherine described had nothing to do with eliminating negative body image thoughts.
It was learning that she didn’t have to act on them.
Earlier in her journey, a bad body image day could feel like evidence that something needed to change immediately. She might sign up for Weight Watchers, join a gym, clean out the pantry, throw away food, or decide it was time to start over.
As she continued this work, she learned to notice those thoughts and give them time to pass.
Instead of treating body discomfort like an emergency, she could observe what was happening and get curious about it. Maybe she was exhausted. Maybe she was stressed. Maybe something else was making her feel particularly vulnerable in her body.
That pause matters.
Diet culture thrives on urgency. “Start today. Get back on track. Fix your body now.“
Those messages are everywhere, but feeling uncomfortable in your body doesn’t mean you have to immediately do something about it.
You can have a hard body image day without signing up for another diet. You can dislike how an outfit fits without deciding your body is the problem. You can have the thought I wish my body looked different without immediately turning that thought into a new set of food rules.
Being able to experience discomfort without automatically reacting to it can be a huge part of healing your relationship with your body.
Body neutrality can be a really big deal
When Katherine first filled out her paperwork with Find Food Freedom®, she described a “deep hatred” of her body. She wanted her body to be smaller and felt like her size affected everything from what she could wear to how attractive she believed other people found her.
Through her body image work, her relationship with her body shifted toward somewhere between neutral and pleasant.
I think that distinction is important.
Body image work does not require you to wake up every morning, look in the mirror, and think you are the hottest person to ever walk the earth.
Sometimes neutrality is the freaking win.
Your body can exist without becoming a project you have to work on all day. You can appreciate what your body allows you to experience without requiring yourself to love how every part of it looks. And you can have difficult body image moments without allowing them to consume all of your mental bandwidth.
When so much time and energy has been spent actively disliking your body, neutral can represent an enormous amount of freedom.
You can’t “fail” at intuitive eating
One message that stuck with Katherine from her work with the Find Food Freedom® team was simple: you can’t do intuitive eating wrong.
That can be a hard concept to absorb when dieting has trained you to look at everything through the lens of success or failure.
You ate past fullness. Did you mess up?
You emotionally ate. Are you doing intuitive eating wrong?
You had a thought about wanting to lose weight. Does that mean you’re back at square one?
No.
Intuitive eating is not another diet where hunger and fullness replace calories and macros as the new rules.
You will sometimes eat when you aren’t physically hungry. You will occasionally get overly hungry. You will eat beyond comfortable fullness. You might choose something because it tastes freaking delicious even when another option might feel different in your body.
The goal isn’t perfect eating.
This work is about building trust, flexibility, awareness, and a deeper understanding of what actually feels supportive to you.
Katherine described intuitive eating as a muscle she continued to build. Diet thoughts didn’t have to magically disappear forever for progress to happen. She became better able to recognize those thoughts, understand where they were coming from, and decide whether she actually wanted to respond to them.
That’s a much more realistic picture of what healing your relationship with food can look like.
What could you do with all that brain space?
Katherine also described spending years with what felt like constant background anxiety around food.
She could go out to dinner and technically enjoy herself, but part of her brain was still figuring out what she should order, whether she should get the dressing on the side, or what she needed to do afterward to compensate.
She was physically there, but food noise was taking up space that could have been spent being present.
As Katherine healed her relationship with food and her body, she noticed that she was able to be more present with friends, family, and the people she loved. She described diet culture as a “sneaky thief of joy” because she hadn’t realized just how much of her life had been filtered through thoughts about food and her body.
That is the kind of progress I wish we talked about more.
How much mental space are you getting back? How much less scary does food feel? Can a difficult body image thought exist without determining what you eat? Can you be more present at dinner, on vacation, at a birthday party, or sitting on the couch with someone you love?
Those changes matter.
Healing your relationship with food doesn’t mean reaching some magical place where diet culture can never get to you again. We live in a world that talks about food, bodies, weight, and weight loss constantly.
But those messages don’t have to run the show.
◑ ◉ ◐
Want support making peace with food and your body?
If food and body thoughts are taking up more mental space than you want them to, our Find Food Freedom® dietitians can support you with intuitive eating, body image, and nutrition from a weight-inclusive, non-diet perspective.
Check your insurance benefits to see how many virtual 1:1 nutrition counseling sessions may be covered with our team.
