Discover the 5 stages of becoming an intuitive eater: how you can transform diet rock-bottom to intuitive eating peace, freedom, and trust around all foods

Knowing where to start with intuitive eating, and how the journey will unfold can feel overwhelming. The 10 principles of intuitive eating self-care framework can be approached in any order, which is unique to each person and their background around food and body dieting beliefs and experiences. The 5 stages of becoming an intuitive eater identifies common themes that occur as you do the healing work, that become apparent as you unlearn diet culture and relearn how reconnect to your inner wisdom to become the expert of your own body. As with the 10 principles, you may find yourself going back and forth between the stages during your own unique process go healing, and there is no expectation for time line within each stage, or with the process of becoming an intuitive eater in completion. Typically however, the process an take anyway from 6 months to 3-5 years to fully embody, an is often proportionate to your past lived experiences and trauma in your past that may have impacted on your relationship with food and body. And it also worth remembering that with anything important in your life, we are life long learners of ourselves, and intuitive eating is a life long journey and remembrance of returning to our true authentic self, and that in itself is a beautiful journey.

Stage 1: Hitting diet bottom

This is where most people begin, you are painfully aware that every attempt to lose weight has ended in ‘failure’. You are tired of valuing each day based on whether the scale is up or down a pound or two (or if you overate the day before). You think and worry about food all the time. You talk the restrictive food talk. - ‘if only I didn’t have to watch my weight, I could eat that,’ or ‘I had two cookies - I was really bad today.’

At the present time, you’re very focused on your weight, as you’ve likely been losing and gaining weight as frequently and rapidly as you wash your clothes and they get dirty once again.

You have lost touch with biological hunger and satiety signals. You have forgotten want you really like to eat and instead eat what you think you ‘should’ eat. Your relationship with food has developed a negative tone, and you dread eating the foods you love, because you’re afraid it will be hard to stop. When you give in to the ‘temptation’ of forbidden foods, it’s not unusual to overeat them, because you feel guilty. Yet you sincerely vow you will never eat them again. 

It’s not unusual to find that you eat for comfort, distract, or even numb yourself from your feelings, as your primary coping mechanism. If that’s the case, you will sense that the quality of your life has been clouded by obsessional thinking about food and by disconnected eating. 

Your body image is negative - you don’t like the way you look and feel in your body, and self respect is lessened. You have learned from your own experience that dieting does not work - you have hit diet bottom and feel stuck, frustrated, and discouraged. 

This stage continues until you decide that you are unhappy eating and living this way - you are ready to do something about it. Your first thoughts may veer toward finding a new diet to solve your problems. But almost immediately, you realise that you just can’t do that one ever again. If this is where you find yourself, then you are ready for the process that will bring you back to eating intuitively.

Stage 2: Exploration - conscious learning and pursuit of pleasure

This is a stage go exploration and discovery. You will go through a phase of hyperconsciousness to of help reacquaint yourself with you intuitive signals: hunger, taste preferences, satisfaction, and satiety. 

This stage is a lot like learning how to drive a car. For the novice driver, just getting the car out of the driveway requires a lot of conscious thinking, complete with a mental checklist; put the key in the ignition, make sure the gear is in park or neutral, turn on the engine, check the rear view mirror, remove the hand break etc. This hyperconsciousness is necessary to  lock in all of the steps needed to get that car into the drive! In the same sense, you will be zooming in on details of eating that have evolved without your conscious thought (but this is necessary to reclaim the intuitive eater in you.)

It may seem awkward and uncomfortable, even obsessive. However, hyperconsciousness is different than obsessive thinking. Obsessive thinking is pervasive and is characterised by worry. It fills your mind during most of the day and keeps you from thinking of much else. Hyperconsciousness is more specific. It zooms in when you’re ready to eat but goes away when the eating experience is over. And just like the steps required to drive a car become autopilot for the experienced driver, intuitive eating will eventually be experienced without this initial awkwardness. 

You may feel that you are in a hyperconscious state much of the time during this stage. This may feel uncomfortable at first and perhaps even strange. Remember, much of your previous eating was either mostly disconnected or diet-directed. 

In this stage you will begin to make peace with food by giving yourself unconditional permission to eat. This part may feel scary, and you may choose to move slowly (within your comfort level). You will earn to get rid of guilt-induced eating and begin to discover the importance of the satisfaction factor of food. The more satisfied you are when eating, the less you think about food when you are not hungry - you will no longer be on the prowl. 

You will experiment with foods that you may not have eaten for a long time. This includes sorting out your true food likes and dislikes. You may even discover that you don’t like the taste of some of these foods you’ve been dreaming of! (Keep in mind that years of dieting, or eating what you ‘should’, only serve to disconnect you form your internal eating drive and true food preferences).

You will learn to honour your hunger and recognise your body signals that indicate the many degrees of hunger. You will learn to separate these biological/physical signals from the emotional signals that might also trigger eating.

In this stage, you may find that you are eating larger quantities of foods than your body needs. It will be difficult to respect your fullness at this stage, because you need time to experiment with the quantity it  takes to satisfy a deprived plate. It also takes time for you to develop trust with food again and know that it’s truly ok to eat. How can you honour fullness if you are not completely sure if it’s ok to eat the particular food, or if you fear it won’t be there tomorrow?

If you have been eating as your predominant was to comfort yourself, you may find that you will begin to feel your feelings and may experience discomfort, sadness, or even depression at times.

The bulk of your eating may be foods that have previously been forbidden, although you may have been eating large quantities of these foods secretly or with guilt. It is unlikely that the way you eat during this stage will be the pattern that you establish or want for a lifetime. You will notice that your nutritional balance is off-kilter, and you may not feel physically on top of things during this time. 

This is all normal and expected. Remember, you must let yourself go through this stage for as long as you need. You are making up for years of deprivation, negative self-talk, and guilt. You are building positive food experiences, like a strand of pearls. Each food experience, like each pearl, may seem insignificant, but collectively they make a difference.

Stage 3: Crystallisation

In this stage, you will experience the first awakenings of the intuitive eating style the has always been a part of you but was buried under the debris of dieting. When you enter this stage, much of the exploration work from the previous stage begins to crystallise and feels like solid behaviour change. Your thoughts about food are no longer obsessive. You hardly need to maintain the hyperconsciousness about eating that was originally needed. Consequently, you're eating decisions don’t require quite as much directed thought. Instead, you find that your food choices and responses to biological signals are mainly intuitive. 

You have a greater sense of trust - both in your right to choose what you really want to eat and in the discovery of that your biological signals are dependable. You are more comfortable with your food choices and will start to notice increased satisfaction at your meals. 

At this point, you honour your hunger most of the time, and it’s easier to discern what you feel like eating when you are hungry. You continue to make peace with food. 

What feels new in this stage is that it’s easier to take a time-out in the midst of your meal to consciously gauge how much your stomach is filling up. You will be able to take note of your fullness and respect the presence of that signal, although you may find that you often eat beyond the fullness mark. Just like when an archer takes aim at a new target, it often requires shooting many arrows before learning how to reach the bull’s-eye. You may still be choosing previously forbidden food most of the time, but you will find that you don’t need as much of them to satisfy you.

If you’ve been an emotionally cued eater, you’ll become quite adept at separating biological hunger signals from emotional hunger. Because of the clarity, more often than not, you will be experiencing your feelings and finding ways to comfort and distract yourself without the predominant use of food.

Remember to put weight loss on the back burner (which in and of itself is a practice resulting from the insidiousness of diet culture). What is most important at this stage is the sense of well-being and empowerment that begins to take place. You won’t feel helpless and hopeless anymore. You will begin to respect your body and understand that if you’ve been eating more than your body needs, it’s as a result of the dieting mentality, rather than lack of willpower. 

Stage 4: The intuitive eater awakens

By the time you reach this stage, all of the work you have bending culminates in a comfortable, free-flowing eating style. You consistently choose what you really want to eat when you are hungry. Because you know that you can have more food of your choosing, whenever you are hungry, it’s easier to stop eating when you feel comfortably full. 

You may begin to find that you choose more nutrient-dense foods, not because you think you should, but because you feel better physically when you eat this way. The urgent need to prove to yourself that you can have previously forbidden foods will have diminished. You truly know and trust that these foods will always be there, and if you really want to eat them, you can - so they lose their alluring quality. Chocolate starts to take on the same emotional connotation as a peach. You won’t need to test yourself anymore, and your deprivation backlash with food will be gone.

When you do choose the foods you used to restrict, you will get great pleasure and be more acutely in touch with satisfaction, without feeling guilt (when you feel guilty eating a food, it takes away the pleasure from eating).

If coping with your feelings had been difficult for you, you will be less afraid to experience them, and become more adept at sitting with them. Finding diverse alternatives to distract and comfort yourself when necessary will become natural for you.

Your food talk and self-talk will be positive and noncritical. Your peace pact with food is firmly established, and you will have released any conflict or leftover guilt about food choices that you have carried around. 

You have stopped making disrespectful comments about your body. You respect it and accept that there are many different sizes and shapes in the world and begin to appreciate that your inner qualities hold much more value than a number on the scale. 

Stage 5: The final stage - Treasure the pleasure!

At this point your intuitive eater has been reclaimed. You will trust your body’s intuitive abilities - it will be easy to honour your hunger and respect fullness. Finally, you will feel no guilt about your food choices or quantities. Because you feel good about your relationship to food and treasure the pleasure that eating now gives you, you will, for the most part, discard unsatisfying eating situations and unappealing foods. Bear in mind that being able to respect fullness and experience satisfaction with food can only come with knowing you have food security. 

You will want to experience eating in the most optimal of conditions and not taint it with emotional distress. You will feel an inner conviction to let go of using food to cope as your primary coping skill, if that has been your dominant habit. When emotions become too overwhelming, you will find that you would much rather deal with your feelings or distract yourself from them with something other than food. 

Because your eating style has become a source of pleasure rather than an affliction, you will experience nutrition and movement in a different way. The burden of exercise will be removed, and moving your body will begin to feel enticing to you. Exercise will no longer be used as a driving force to burn more calories: rather, you become committed to movement as a way to feel better, physically and mentally. Likewise, nutrition will no longer be another mechanism to make you feel bad about the way you eat; instead, it becomes a path to feeling good physically and all be part of your journey towards self-care.

When you reach the final stage, your concerns about weight will diminish as you appreciate the other qualities that make you the unique person that you are. You will feel free from the call of diet culture and the burden of dieting. And you will become an intuitive eater once again. While many of you will feel empowered and protected from outside forces telling you what and how much to eat, and how your body should look - it is important to acknowledge that this personal intuitive eating work does nothing to get rid of the root of oppressive forces, which occur at the systemic level (such as racism, anti-semitism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, poverty, classism, and weight stigma).

You can do it!

These stages and the changes that occur with your eating and thoughts may seem impossible. Or they might seem scary. For example, the thought of giving yourself unconditional permission to eat may seem terrifying - and you might fear that you will never stop eating.  As you go through the process of becoming an intuitive eater, using the 10 principles of intuitive eating, you will explore in great detail how to implement each principle, why it is needed, and the rationale behind it. You will also find how other chronic dieters became intuitive eaters and how it changed their lives in the book ‘Intuitive eating - a revolutionary anti-diet approach’ by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch (this blog post content has been adapted with permission from the book).