You Were Born Knowing How to Eat: How to Rebuild Body Trust

Today, I want to address an important and yet not often discussed topic: how we were born knowing how to eat, but have learned to stop trusting ourselves while growing up. So, let’s dive into it!

I’d like to start with this statement: you didn’t lose the ability to eat intuitively like you did when you were a child - you simply learned to stop listening to your body. Spoiler alert: this means that you can learn to listen again!

Why your trust in your body was broken

There are many reasons why you might have learned to stop listening to your body: comments from your parents or friends on what you were eating, being made to finish your plate at dinner even though you weren’t hungry anymore, or being told that you had enough even though you were still hungry.

Those happen to many children - and we need to remember not to blame our parents in those cases if that was our experience, as they were doing their best and thought they were looking after us. They probably had the same experiences growing up too, and were simply doing what their own parents did.

It might also continue when teenagers: how many of us have been praised, by family or even our friends, for restricting what we ate and losing weight? As if eating as little as possible was something to be proud of, we stopped listening to our hunger cues to eat less and less.

Over time, all those voices coming from outside of you became louder than your own inside voice. And like so many of the women I work with, you might have started to believe some version of:

“I can’t trust my body.”

“If I don’t control myself, I’ll lose it and eat everything in sight.”

“My hunger is the enemy.”

So if you feel disconnected from your hunger... if eating feels confusing or chaotic... if you can’t tell the difference between being “hungry” and “emotional” - you’re not broken. You adapted. You protected yourself.

And now? You’re ready to come back home to your body.

Reconnecting with your body's signals

First of all, I want you to know that if you find it difficult to feel the difference between physical hunger and mental/emotional hunger, that does not mean that there is something wrong with you. More than likely, all the things that we’ve discussed previously have lead you to stop listening to your body cues.

If your plan says to eat a specific meal at a specific time because it’s better for your body, why would you wait to feel hungry to eat instead of following the plan? And if just like me and most of my clients you’ve done that for a few years, then it’s probably engrained in you that you need to eat at certain hours, instead of waiting to feel the hunger.

That’s something I’ve heard a lot during coaching sessions: I don’t even know when I’m full or not anymore. And of course, I get it. When you’ve spent years ignoring your body cues, suppressing that hunger because your plan told you that you had enough to eat, or found hacks to power through the hunger (downing water until your stomach feels full anyone?). Of course, your body signals are going to be quiet and hard to hear. But they’re not gone! They're simply buried deep under years of noise.

The best way to start getting those signals again is to start small and get curious, asking yourself questions throughout the day (especially at times when you’d usually have your meals):

• “What sensations are here right now?”

• “If I didn’t have food rules, what would I really want?”

• “Where do I feel hunger in my body?”

Sometimes physical hunger feels like an empty belly, or belly rumbles. Sometimes it’s a tension in your chest or a drop of energy. And sometimes it’s just this soft, persistent whisper that won’t go away: “I need something.”

And other times? You’ll feel mental hunger - some food that you won’t be able to get out of your mind even if your stomach feels “full.” That’s real hunger too, not “fake” hunger as I used to label it. Your brain remembers what being hungry is even when your belly is full. That's why I’d like to offer you a different perspective on this: instead of trying to suppress that mental hunger, try to listen to what it is telling you. Because mental hunger is not the enemy - it’s a signal.

Why trust can’t be forced

You 100% CAN rebuild trust in your body, but I want to make one thing very clear: you can’t do it by shaming your body and criticising yourself, or by pressuring yourself into listening harder.

For the trust to be rebuilt, you need safety. And that safety starts by regulating your nervous system.

That’s why when I coach my clients, we don’t jump straight into exercises that involve listening to their hunger or satiety, when their nervous system is in survival mode. Instead, we work with the body, gently, with tools like EFT tapping (Emotional Freedom Technique), breath work, and nervous system resets to help your body feel safe enough to start listening again.

Because if food feels like danger (that causes you stress, whether that's conscious or not), you’ll stay stuck in the loop. You’ll continue restricting (again, consciously or not), rebel by bingeing or over eating, feel shame and then repeat.

But when your body starts to feel safe again because food is just food again? Your hunger isn’t your enemy anymore and it becomes less scary - it’s not something you have to fight anymore or something you have to be ashamed of. Food becomes less charged with emotions. And trust (real, deep, embodied trust) in your body and in yourself starts to grow again.

You were never broken. Your body was never the problem. You just learned to survive in a world that taught you to disconnect completely from it.

Come back home to yourself

Your body has never stopped speaking to you. It’s just been waiting for you to listen.

This is the work we do inside Feed Your Freedom - we rebuild trust, from the nervous system up. If you’re ready to feel calm, grounded, and confident in your relationship with food, you’re not alone.

If you’re ready to take that first step, I’d love to invite you to book your complimentary consult today 💚