Eat Freely With Intuitive Eating
Karine Gravel has been a contributor at Le Monastère des Augustines since 2016. She is a dietitian-nutritionist and holds a doctorate in nutrition. She is interested in eating behaviors and intuitive eating, an approach that is growing in popularity.
What is Intuitive Eating?
It is a compassionate approach that encourages listening to and respecting our needs and offers many benefits for both physical and psychological health.
The main goal of intuitive eating is to foster a healthy relationship with food, mind, and body. Rather than restricting or depriving oneself, intuitive eating involves recognizing the reasons that lead us to eat and to stop eating — without judgment.
It is a neutral approach that is not focused on weight, meaning our thoughts aren’t directed at the scale or measurements but on our relationship with food, which we want to soothe.
What Are Its Key Principles?
The dietitians who developed intuitive eating, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, propose ten principles for eating intuitively:
- Reject diet culture
- Acknowledge your hunger
- Make peace with food
- Challenge food rules
- Discover the satisfaction factor
- Honor your fullness
- Embrace your emotions with kindness
- Respect your body
- Move and feel the difference
- Take care of your health through pleasurable eating
How Is This Approach Different from Others?
Intuitive eating has been proposed as an alternative to weight-loss diets. It is a positive and flexible approach. A person who eats intuitively might ask themselves: Am I hungry? Will I be satisfied? Does it taste good?
The value assigned to food is global, meaning it includes not just nutritional aspects, but also psychological, cultural, and sensory ones. We don’t eat food solely for its nutrient content but also for the enjoyment it gives us.
In contrast, a restrictive approach focuses on controlling one’s diet, which too often leads to guilt when dietary rules are broken.
How to Integrate Intuitive Eating Into Daily Life?
For people who have followed weight-loss diets and/or who are preoccupied with weight and food, letting go of control to adopt intuitive eating can feel unsettling at first. However, intuitive eating is learned gradually, and because foods are no longer a source of guilt or deprivation, cycles of restriction and binge eating tend to fade.
A person who eats intuitively learns, among other things, to distinguish actual hunger from simply wanting to eat, to live through emotions without necessarily using food, and to respect their body. Respecting one’s body includes accepting one’s natural weight — that is, the weight that is fitting for one’s own health — because being at war with one’s body makes it difficult to be at peace with oneself and with food.
What Are the Possible Benefits of Intuitive Eating?
The effects of intuitive eating on physical and psychological health have been measured in nearly 200 studies.
Intuitive eating is linked with benefits such as:
- Greater appreciation and satisfaction with one’s body;
- Positive emotional functioning;
- Greater overall life satisfaction;
- Higher motivation for physical activity when the emphasis is on pleasure rather than guilt or appearance.
Some studies have also shown links between this approach and increased consumption of fruits and vegetables and more varied diets.
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Article updated on January 21, 2026.