Intuitive eating is an evidence-based approach that helps people rebuild trust with their body's natural hunger, fullness, and satisfaction cues.

It involves 10 principles that guide individuals away from diet rules and toward a more peaceful, sustainable relationship with food:

Rather than following external eating rules, intuitive eating teaches how to honor internal signals and make food choices that feel good physically and mentally.

HAES is a weight-inclusive framework that promotes health and wellbeing without focusing on weight loss or achieving a specific body size.

It's based on 5 core principles:

• Weight Inclusivity: Accepts and respects the natural diversity of body shapes and sizes, rejecting the idea that specific weights or sizes are inherently healthy or unhealthy
• Health Enhancement: Focuses on improving overall well-being by promoting supportive health policies and encouraging health-enhancing practices across physical, mental, emotional, social and other domains of life
• Respectful Care: Aims to end weight bias, discrimination, and stigma by providing care that is compassionate and inclusive, considering how factors like socioeconomic status, race, and gender impact a person's health
• Eating for Well-being: Encourages flexible, intuitive eating based on hunger, satiety, nutritional needs, and pleasure, rather than externally regulated diets focused on weight control. 
• Life-Enhancing Movement: Supports physical activities that people of all sizes and abilities find enjoyable and can choose to engage in to the degree they desire.

Research shows that HAES approaches improve health markers and psychological wellbeing without the harmful effects of weight cycling and diet culture.

This approach is helpful for anyone:

• Feeling exhausted by dieting
• Struggling with food preoccupation
• Wanting a more peaceful relationship with eating and their body

It works well for people at any stage—whether just starting to question diet culture or already familiar with intuitive eating concepts.

Some individuals may benefit from additional support (like therapy for eating disorders or medical care for certain conditions) alongside nutrition counseling, and that's completely normal.

It's a common question, and it makes sense to wonder—diet culture has taught us to evaluate every eating approach by its effect on weight.

However, it would be unethical to promise what anyone's weight will do, as bodies are complex and individual. What we do know is that when freed from restriction and reconnected with internal cues, bodies tend to settle at their healthiest and happiest weight range.

This approach doesn't focus on weight outcomes because research shows that weight-focused interventions often backfire, and weight status do not reflect health, but weight cycling (which is common in weight loss treatment) being the top predictor to poor health outcome.

Intuitive eating is the goal of eating disorder treatment—to help individuals eat normally and trust their body again so that they can enjoy their life. However, it's not a standalone treatment for active eating disorders.

Recovery typically requires a team approach including:

• Medical monitoring
• Therapy
• Specialised nutrition support

This team first helps restore physical health and interrupt harmful behaviours. Once someone is medically stable, intuitive eating principles become an important part of relearning how to eat without rules or fear.

There's no standard timeline—it depends on each person's history with dieting, their relationship with food, and what they're working through.

Some people notice shifts in their thinking within weeks, while fully embodying intuitive eating often takes months to years.

This isn't a quick fix or another program to complete; it's a gradual unlearning of diet culture and rebuilding of body trust that unfolds at its own pace.