The first principle of Intuitive Eating reviews some of the facts above about how dieting not only doesn’t work but in fact does much harm. Principle 1 also gives you the permission you might be waiting for to get really angry about being lied to: that you just didn’t have enough willpower, that with more effort you could have changed the shape and size of your body, that dieting is a form of “respecting” one’s self, that it’s not ok to have the body you were born with. Rejecting – and continuing to reject – the diet mentality is essential to developing a natural and intuitive relationship with food and your body.

A perfect starting point for sharpening your interoception is with recognizing the sensations associated with hunger. Feeding yourself regularly and adequately with energy from protein, carbohydrates, and fats according to your unique body’s needs will help you feel nourished, satiated, and able to dive deeper into this process. You’ll also start to recognize the relationship between not eating enough (through dieting and restriction) and the drive to overeat and binge.

Giving yourself unconditional permission to eat – what you want, when you want it, and in the amount that feels like “enough” – is key to having a peaceful relationship with food. This involves letting go of the idea of good and bad or healthy and unhealthy foods. When there is no such thing as a bad or unhealthy food, the question shifts from “how do I resist this food?” to “what do I really want to eat right now?”

The food police come in two varieties: inner (what we’ve internalized from the diet culture about sugar, keto, Ozempic, etc.) and outer (the people in our lives who are still stuck in the diet culture). The faulty logic of the food police is that you are good for eating good foods and bad for eating bad ones. Since you are already learning there are no good and bad foods, you are also learning that what you eat does not determine your worth.

Satisfaction lives at the center of all the other principles. This is because when you eat exactly what you want, in the amount that feels right to you, you feel content, tended to, and cared for. Pleasure is key! Prioritizing satisfaction invites you to finally figure out what tastes, textures, temperatures, and densities of foods you love.

Like hunger, fullness emerges as a set of sensations in the body. Learning your body’s signals – having prioritized satisfaction and pleasure – allows you to recognize what level of fullness feels like “enough” for you.

Food serves many roles in our lives. Sometimes it become the primary way we deal with intense, painful, and difficult emotions. This principle invites you to more deeply understand the relationship between your feelings and your eating and to develop a variety of other coping and soothing techniques that more precisely meet your true emotional needs.

Most of what determines the shape and size of your body is completely out of your control (ie, genetics, social determinants of health, past dieting history). Respecting your body means accepting the truth of body diversity and then giving yourself permission to feel comfort, not to be shamed (by yourself or others) for having your body, and to stop participating in harmful self-talk and conversations with others.

Your body was born knowing how it wanted to move. But the diet culture likely overshadowed your relationship with movement by making it about burning calories. This principle is about reclaiming a relationship with movement by prioritizing what feels good to you.

The last principle is about bringing nutrition into your eating gently, gradually, and in a way that complements your body’s innate wisdom. This principle teaches you how to add in nutritious options rather than cutting anything out. And it encourages you to recognize how foods feel in your body, both while you’re eating them and afterwards – a concept known as body-food congruence.