Dietitian Lucy Cary explains why intuitive eating isn’t something you teach your clients, but the natural end result of healing instead.

“Intuitive eating doesn’t work for me. If I listened to my body I’d be eating Tim Tams for every meal!”

If you work with clients who have been restricting, binge eating, or yoyo dieting, I know you’ve heard this before. They want a meal plan they can “stick to” (at least temporarily) because they feel like they lose all control if they try to eat intuitively.

In my early days of practicing dietetics, I used to give my client’s a handout of the 10 principles of intuitive eating. I would explain the principles, send them on their merry way and… never hear from them again. No doubt many of them tried to embrace it, but found themselves feeling lost, confused, and bingeing the moment they gave themselves “permission to eat”.

Here’s my mistake: intuitive eating isn’t something you teach. The principles aren’t like a set of rules that you can stick to like another diet and boom, you’ve made it. And it’s certainly not the starting point for healing when you’ve been restricting, or bingeing, or on and off diets for years. No, intuitive eating is actually the natural end result of healing your client’s relationship with food.

So when a client says intuitive eating “doesn’t work” for them, what they’re really telling you is that they’re still stuck in a mindset of control and restriction.

But how do you help them move forward? In my FREE Masterclass: The Roadmap from Disordered Eating to Intuitive Eating (and where weight loss fits in), I’ll be walking you through my unique framework to guide your clients through this transition.

But first, let’s unpack why the deeper healing needs to come first so that intuitive eating can naturally emerge.

Intuitive eating requires body trust – and your clients are experts at ignoring their bodies

Telling a client to “listen to their body” when they’ve probably spent years suppressing their hunger, or overriding their fullness, and being flat out afraid of eating certain foods is like asking someone to run before they can even crawl. Their hunger and fullness signals are usually totally unreliable because their body has adapted to years of ignoring their needs.

Before intuitive eating can happen, your client needs to rebuild body trust. Their body needs to feel safe so that true hunger and fullness cues can be re-established.

Want to learn how to help clients rebuild body trust so they can transition to intuitive eating? Sign up for my free Masterclass here!

Hunger and fullness are meaningless without permission to eat

Even if your client is able to recognize their hunger and fullness, that doesn’t mean they act on those signals, or indeed that they feel safe to act on those signals. If they still fear certain foods and they’re anxious about weight gain, they’re more than likely going to override their body’s cues by using external rules.

A true intuitive eater doesn’t just hear their hunger – they honour it without guilt. And that can only happen once they stop telling themselves that they are “good” or “bad” for what they eat.

My free Masterclass shows exactly where the shift from fear-based eating to full permission comes in your client’s journey. Enroll now!

In the early stages, structure is needed

Many clients misinterpret intuitive eating as “eat whatever you want, whenever you want”. But when they’ve been stuck in a cycle of dieting, bingeing, skipping meals, etc., their hunger and fullness hormones have become more and more unreliable.

That’s why, in the early stages, having some structure around meal times – whether the client feels hungry or not – helps to regulate appetite, get some energy back, stabilize mood, and lay the foundation for intuitive eating later on.

Intuitive eating isn’t a free-for-all. It’s what naturally happens after your client’s body and brain have learned to trust that food is consistently available.

In my free Masterclass, I’m taking you through the steps to transition clients from structured eating to true intuitive eating. Save your spot now!

If you’ve been struggling to help your clients truly understand and embrace intuitive eating, it’s not because intuitive eating doesn’t work for them. They just need to lay the foundations they need first.

When the focus is shifted to healing their relationship with food, intuitive eating is the natural outcome. And the beauty is that you don’t need to teach it as such. When you create the right conditions, it happens effortlessly.

Want to learn the steps I take to guide my clients from disordered eating to intuitive eating? And where weight loss fits in the picture? Join my free Masterclass!

Your clients don’t need another diet. They don’t need more rules. They need healing. And you can be the one to help them get there.

See you on the Masterclass!