How I Learned Intuitive Eating (And You Can Too!)

My mother taught me how to eat.

Although she had no formal nutrition education, she was a teacher and, in my opinion, a self-taught nutrition expert. From a young age, she taught me to cherish my body. She taught me that eating nutritious food was a way to care for my body, and if I cared for it I could grow tall, be healthy and live to my full potential.

Intuitive eating is a philosophy that rejects the idea of traditional dieting and instead encourages people to listen to their own body cues to decide when to eat, what to eat and how much to eat.

In contrast to diet culture, which teaches us to ignore hunger and delay or skip meals, intuitive eating teaches us to honour our hunger and enjoy our food, which is exactly what my mother taught me.

She taught me how to recognise hunger and to eat when I was hungry and stop when I felt full. She also taught me to eat regularly throughout the day. My mother prepared breakfast for me before school, I enjoyed lunch with my friends, I had a snack after school, and then always had a family meal at dinnertime.

Regular eating is one of the key principles that I teach my patients in clinic. It is essential to keep your body fuelled throughout the day so that it functions optimally. It also stops you from becoming overly hungry during the day, which could cause you to lose control with food.

My mother also taught me the different food groups, what the function of each food group was, and then applied this knowledge by preparing balanced meals for the family. Eating balanced meals is another guiding principle I teach my patients, because each food group has a unique function in the body. If you include all food groups in the correct proportions, you are more likely to achieve optimal health and feel that you are in control of your eating.

My mother gave me the gift of enjoying my food. No foods were off limits and she never labelled foods as 'good' or 'bad'. This is another principle of intuitive eating: permission to listen to one's body to decide what to eat and to enjoy it without feeling guilty. However, she also taught me to prioritise nutritious foods. She encouraged fruits and vegetables at meals and as snacks (long before the 5-a-day campaign ever began), because she taught me that they were packed with germ-fighting vitamins that would help prevent me getting sick. We regularly ate wholegrain carbohydrates like brown rice, wholegrain bread, oats, barley, millet and buckwheat, which formed the basis of our main meals, because she said the fibre helped my tummy work and kept my heart healthy.

Our family followed a predominantly plant-based diet, long before the current popularity of veganism. We ate a lot of beans, lentils, tofu and houmous (she made her own as grocery shops didn't stock it then!), but we also ate fish, eggs and chicken too. She always tried to cook with healthy fats whenever possible, like olive oil, tahini and avocado, and she even made her own vegan mayonnaise with olive oil and almonds.

We also ate less healthy fats too, like butter, ice cream and her delicious baked cheesecake, a favourite of mine! We also enjoyed big meals without any guilt or encouragement to restrict before and after. We always had a three-course meal with my extended family on Friday nights, and often had a takeaway (I loved pizza) or ate out with friends and family at weekends.

In essence, my mother brought me up as an intuitive eater: to see all foods as equal, to enjoy all types of foods without any mention of guilt or weight, but also how to keep the balance. Everything I then learned at university in my Bachelor's, Honours and Master's degrees in nutrition just validated everything I had grown up practising.

I've never dieted in my life. I have never counted calories or weighed any food (except when I bake!) or obsessed about portions, and I have never obsessively exercised. I did ballet from a young age until teacher training because I loved it, not because I felt compelled to do it or to give myself permission to enjoy food.

I still practise all the principles of intuitive eating that my mother taught me. I eat regularly throughout the day and make sure my meals are balanced with all the food groups in the right proportions. I eat all foods (except blue cheese, because I hate the smell!) but I prioritise the nutritious ones, such as wholegrain carbohydrates, fruits and vegetables, plant-based proteins and healthy fats. And of course, to keep things balanced, I also eat less nutritious foods too, including my nightly treat of chocolate with my husband at the end of the day. I eat when I am hungry and stop when I feel full. I still enjoy a three-course family meal on Friday nights and love eating out with family and friends most weekends. I'm a real foodie and love trying different restaurants, browsing food markets and going for afternoon tea.

I feel very privileged to have been taught the principles of intuitive eating as a child, and I am passing that knowledge on to my young daughter by teaching her the same principles, which is why food in our home is never labelled 'good' or 'bad'. We regularly make pizza together, because no food should ever be off limits.

However, even if you weren't raised to eat intuitively, it is possible to learn to eat intuitively at any age. This may sound like an impossible dream for some people, particularly if they have a history of dieting, because diets dictate what and when to eat, making people lose touch with their own hunger and satiety cues and food preferences.

But it is possible to get back in touch with your body signals and learn how to eat intuitively, which will ultimately help you to develop a healthy relationship with food. I have worked with thousands of patients who have ditched diet culture and learnt to become intuitive eaters. This in turn has eliminated their fear of food, given them permission to eat what they want and allowed them to find true food freedom.

You can too!