How Intuitive Eating Works - by restoring a normal appetite (and undoing the damage of dieting)
- alison489
- 6 days ago
- 2 min read
If you've ever been on a diet—especially more than once—you've probably noticed something strange happens over time: your hunger grows, your cravings intensify, and it feels harder and harder to “stay on track.” You're not imagining it. Dieting doesn’t just fail to work long-term for most people—it actually increases appetite and makes food harder to manage.
The good news? Intuitive eating can reverse that damage, but how does intuitive eating actually work?
Let’s look at how.
How Dieting Increases Appetite
Every time you restrict food—whether by counting calories, cutting carbs, skipping meals, or eating less than your body needs—your brain and body respond as if you're in danger.
To protect you, your body turns up the volume on hunger:
Hunger hormones like ghrelin increase
Fullness signals become weaker
Cravings for high-energy foods intensify
Eating becomes more impulsive and harder to control
This is a biological survival response, not a personal failure. Your body is designed to keep you alive—not to make you smaller for society’s approval.
Over time, repeated dieting trains your body to feel hungrier and more desperate around food, even when you're trying to be “healthy.”
How Intuitive Eating Works - by calming the appetite system
Intuitive eating is a completely different approach. Instead of trying to control food through rules and restrictions, it helps you rebuild trust in your body and respond to your natural hunger and fullness signals.
When you consistently feed your body enough food—without guilt or delay—something remarkable happens:
Your hunger signals stabilise
Intense cravings calm down
The urge to binge or overeat fades
Food starts to feel neutral instead of charged with emotion or urgency
In short: your appetite begins to normalise.
This happens because your body no longer thinks it needs to fight for food or brace for the next famine. The survival response turns off, and your biological system starts doing its job again—regulating your appetite smoothly and automatically.
From Chaos to Calm: What Normal Appetite Feels Like
A normal appetite isn’t about always eating the “right” amount. It’s about having a quiet relationship with food. You feel hungry when you need fuel, you eat foods that satisfy you, and you naturally stop when you’ve had enough—without having to think about it all the time.
There’s no moral judgment. No guilt. No rebound eating. Just the quiet rhythm of nourishment, comfort, and energy—like breathing.
Final Thoughts
If dieting has left you feeling broken, hungry, and out of control around food, intuitive eating offers a way back to balance.
It doesn’t happen overnight—but with consistency, permission, and patience, your body will remember how to eat normally. The increased appetite, cravings, and mental noise caused by dieting aren’t permanent. They’re the result of survival systems doing their job. And intuitive eating is how we signal that it’s finally safe to rest.
