If you’ve ever felt like you “failed” intuitive eating, this one’s for you.

---

It’s easy to fall in love with the promise: what if the solution to decades of dieting, emotional eating, or weight cycling was as simple as listening to your hunger and honoring your fullness?

No points, no macros, no weigh-ins—just tuning in to your body and letting it guide you home.

And that’s not a bad starting place.

Intuitive eating introduced a new language for a lot of us. One that emphasized trust over control. Permission over punishment. It taught us to get quiet and curious, and to question a culture that constantly told us our desire to eat was a bad thing.

But here’s the hard truth: That just wasn't enough. There's friction that has to be accounted for upending your intuitive nature.

Here's what I think is happening.

---

Hunger Cues Can’t Compete With a Loud World

The core of intuitive eating is learning to listen to internal cues—things like hunger, fullness, satisfaction. That’s a powerful practice. But it only works if those cues are reliable.

And here’s the catch: modern food is engineered to hijack them.

Much of what we call “food” today isn’t designed to nourish you. It’s designed to be craved. It overrides fullness. It increases how much you eat without even noticing. People eating highly processed foods consume, on average, 500 more calories per day—even when they’re trying to stop when full.

So when intuitive eating says “just listen to your body,” we have to ask: what is your body being fed?

Is the food pre-masticated or designed to fall apart quickly in your mouth and body? If so, your intuition will be to overeat it.

---

You Can’t Heal in the Same Environment That Made You Sick

We often treat hunger like it’s a private experience. But hunger is incredibly social and visual and contextual.

You don’t exist in a vacuum. You exist in a culture that normalizes overeating, glorifies convenience, and delivers temptation with every scroll, ad, and grocery aisle.

Let’s say your kitchen counter has a basket of mini muffins. You may feel like you're choosing to eat one—or three—but your brain is reacting to a constant stream of external prompts. The muffins are making the first move, not you.

You’re not broken for eating them.
You’re responding to your environment.

In fact, research shows that obesity is socially contagious. You’re 57% more likely to become obese if your close friends are. That’s not about willpower—it’s about shared habits, settings, rhythms, expectations.

So when intuitive eating ignores your environment, it’s asking you to play a rigged game.

---

Real Peace Isn’t Found in a Package

Another intuitive eating principle says: make peace with food. Let go of guilt. Stop moralizing your choices.

Beautiful.

But here’s the trouble: if you try to make peace with manipulated food—the kind specifically designed to keep you eating—you’re not resolving anything. You’re being set up.

You don’t heal your relationship with Oreos by giving yourself permission to eat them. You heal your relationship with food by reconnecting to food that actually nourishes you. Food that partners with your body, not overrides it.

In my experience, that peace comes from knowing you can eat as much real food as you need, without shame and without restriction. That’s when your cues come back online. That’s when your body finally exhales.

---

Weight Loss Requires More Than Self-Compassion—It Requires Intention

If you’ve been relying on internal cues alone and feel stuck, I want to say this clearly: you didn’t fail intuitive eating. It just wasn’t built to solve the whole problem.

To create lasting weight loss without returning to diet culture, you need something more than hunger awareness. You need structure, systems, and environment design. You need to know how to build habits that support you, not just hope you’ll make a better choice next time.

This doesn’t mean restriction. It means intention.

The kind of intention that looks at your day and says:

• What kind of meals am I most likely to cook at 6pm when I’m tired?

• What foods help me feel full and steady for hours?

• What environment would make the healthy choice the easy one?

Intention is powerful because it isn’t about eating less. It’s about seeing more clearly.

---

So Where Does That Leave Us?

There’s so much to love about teaching you to stop fighting your body, and simply work with it.

But if what you want is to live at a healthy weight—and you haven’t been able to get there—you’re not crazy or failing. You’re just up against a system that requires a multi-pronged approach or what I call engineering your environment.

My own turning point came when I stopped trying to feel my way to change, and started building an actual system: one based on real food, modular cooking, home environment shifts, and joyful movement.

Because it’s not enough to trust your hunger.
You have to trust your life to support it.

And when that happens?
Your body can finally do what it was always meant to do–let you eat in peace.

---

💌 P.S. If this resonated with you, you’ll love the COOK! Course—our modular, real-food system that makes healthy eating natural, not effortful. You can check it out here.