Your Natural Way Of Eating
From the moment we start eating, we’re surrounded by opinions.
Eat this.
Don’t eat that.
That’s “good”. That’s “bad”.
This is “clean”. That’s “toxic”.
Carbs are evil this week. Fat will be the villain next week.
Add in well-meaning parents, teachers, influencers, doctors, friends and whoever’s doing a “challenge” at the gym and it’s not surprising that many people end up confused about something the body actually knows how to do.
Because underneath all the noise, you already have a natural way of eating.
You were born with an internal guidance system. Babies don’t count calories. They don’t “earn” their food. They don’t negotiate with hunger. They eat when they’re hungry and stop when they’ve had enough. Simple.
So what happens?
Over time, we learn to override our signals. We learn rules. We learn meanings. We learn to treat eating as something to manage rather than something to respond to.
A few things make this easier to do:
Highly engineered food can keep the mind interested long after the body has had enough.
Dieting and restriction teach you to mistrust yourself and to treat appetite like a problem.
Moralising food turns eating into a referendum on your worth — which creates guilt, pressure and ironically, more confusion.
Food was never meant to be that complicated.
The more rules you add, the louder “food noise” gets in your head. And the more you try to control it, the more it can start to feel as if food has control over you.
Reconnecting isn’t about learning new rules. It’s often about letting old ones fall away.
Not in a heroic, “I’m never dieting again!” declaration. More in a quiet way — noticing which ideas about food you’ve inherited and questioning whether they’re actually helping you.
Here are a few questions to sit with, gently. No right answers. No perfect answers. Just things to consider:
How would I eat if I hadn’t been told what I should eat?
How would I eat if I wasn’t constantly thinking about my weight?
How would I eat if food wasn’t “good” or “bad”?
How would I eat if I didn’t feel pressured to look a certain way?
Don’t rush to answer. Let the questions do what good questions do — open space.
The goal isn’t to eat perfectly. It’s to listen to your body and let it guide you once again.