Last updated on August 19th, 2025 at 03:27 pm
Gentle nutrition combines the process of giving yourself unconditional permission to eat with optimizing nutrient rich foods in your body. Gentle nutrition is the nutrition behaviors that focus on adding nutrient rich foods, not taking foods away.
The core of gentle nutrition is that:
- Nutrition matters: your body benefits from vitamins, minerals, and balanced energy. Choose nutrient rich foods in a way that feels supportive, not controlling.
- You make food choices based on how they make you feel physically and emotionally, not just what’s “healthiest” on paper.
- There are no “good” or “bad” food. All foods simply serve different purposes in different moments.
Gentle nutrition capitalizes on the fact that every food on the planet has a nutritional benefit to offer, and that this beneit can be maximized by choosing these foods in the proper time and place.
Lets ding into what gentle nutrition is and some tips for the best success on implementing gentle nutrition into your lifestyle.
What Is Gentle Nutrition
Gentle nutrition is the 10th stage of the intuitive eating process that focuses on balancing meals and incorporating nutrient dense foods all while allowing yourself unconditional permission to eat.
Gentle nutrition is about food liberation, not food restriction. It’s not about shrinking your body or becoming the smallest version of yourself. It uses food as a powerful tool to improve your mood, give you energy, improve digestion and gut health, and increase overall food and body wellbeing. Gentle nutrition always adds healthy nutrient dense foods to your plate rather than taking other types of foods away and leaving you thinking about food constantly or feeling deprived.
Gentle nutrition is a non-diet way of incorporating nutrient dense foods into your daily routine.
When you are practicing gentle nutrition you will notice you:
- Don’t label foods as good foods or bad foods
- Focuse on foods that make your body feel good
- Eat for types of hunger
- Have no off-limits foods
- Don’t obsess over portion sizes
- Don’t Not Calorie Count
- Are not focusing on weight loss
Practicing Gentle Nutrition
Get Enough Fuel, And Be Mindful When You Get Too Much
Your body naturally knows when it’s time to start and stop eating. You might just need to learn to listen to it a bit better. By the time you are experiencing extreme hunger, you’re body has already set the stage to help you eat as much as possible. This can cause you to overeat and feel miserable after a meal unintentionally. This happens because you often eat too quickly when you’re extremely full and your gut doesn’t have time to relay to your brain that you’er actually full.
Instead, try:
- Use an intuitive eating hunger scale to map out your hunger/fullness cues
- Acknowledge that hunger/fullness happen on a wide spectrum and try to navigate your different levels.
- Notice if you’ve gone past your fullness threshold and gently observe how it makes your body feel
- Don’t be afraid to waste food (and practice leaving food on the plate if needed)
- Practice letting your body sit at different levels of hunger fullness throughout the day to see which one feels best
Let Your Body Feedback Guide You
Intuitive eating first teaches you that you should be choosing all the foods you enjoy without conditions for both physical and emotional reasons. Where gentle nutrition comes into play is that it teaches you that sometimes the foods you eat arent ONLY about taste and pleasure. While taste and pleasure should always be available in the foods you choose, its also okay to choose the food because of the cues your body gives you after you eat the food.
This might include choosing oatmeal over brownies as a snack because you know you’re going to be playing baseball with your friends in an hour and choosing the oatmeal will sustain your energy longer.
You might notice if you don’t get enough fiber rich foods like grains and vegetables through the day then you have trouble going to the bathroom the next day. You also might choose not to have fried foods even though you like the taste of them because you notice you start to feel sluggish or have a stomach ache an hour after you eat them.
All of this is very valuable information that your body has to share with you and should go into the decisions you’re making about food.
Foods that make your body feel good can include:
- Whole grains
- Fruits
- Veggies
- Lean meats
- Beans
- Lentils
- Fatty fish
Try Eating New Foods
Truly disliking a food and choosing not to have it in intuitive eating is much different than simply not having tried certain foods in the past. You might dismiss a food a “dislike” when perhaps you just haven’t been exposed to that food in the right way.
Maybe mom and dad didn’t buy or prepre fruits or veggies or from-scratch meals when you were a child. This can really make these foods seem off putting as when you grow up because youve just never been around them before.
Also, your taste buds are changing constantly. So even if you didn’t like something as a kid give it another try. If you aren’t exposing yourself to new foods regularly, you can’t truly know if you would want to intuitively eat them. Just like a little kid, you sometimes need to train your taste buds to accept a new food you might later come to LOVE!
To truly intuitively eat in gentle nutrition remember:
- It can take as many as 15 tries to like a new food
- If you don’t like fresh fruit, try it in a smoothie
- Blend up foods you have a problem with texture with (for example onions or tomatoes) and see if you like the taste in a sauce
- If you don’t like a food prepared one way you might like it prepared another (for example you might not like raw broccoli but you might love it roasted)
- Exposing ourselves to new foods may require some food chaining where we combine a familiar food we like with a new one. Especially if you’re a very picky eater.
Check In With Your Emotions, And Tend To Them Gently
What language comes up in your head when you’re eating a food you were taught your whole life was unhealthy? Do you find yourself continuing to mentally restrict even though you are physically eating the food?
- Acknowledge negative thoughts and write them down
- Most thoughts from diet culture and food shamers don’t have language, put language to the thoughts
- Putting language to thoughts gives us the power to accept or dismiss them
As these emotions come up, try to simply acknowledge them and reflect on your past experiences that may have prompted the thought. Just because a thought exists doesn’t mean it’s a fact. And even if something from diet culture is a fact (for example, cookies have more calories than broccoli), it doesn’t make the decision to enjoy that food right or wrong.
Keep a Stocked Pantry/Fridge
It’s difficult to intuitively eat if you want something and you don’t have it in your house!
Is your house stocked with all the foods you enjoy?
- Keep a running grocery list
- Have the freezer and spices stocked
- Keep canned fruits/veggies, lentils, and meats
- Keep your favorite treats in the pantry and freezer
Keep A Schedule, But Don’t Get Rigid
Your body likes a bit of routine when it comes to when you eat. Your body is going to trust you more if you stick to relatively the same schedule for meals and snacks, and it knows when it should prepare for food. However, this shouldn’t be rigid!
In addition to this, your body enjoys getting roughly the same size of meal or snack from one day to the next. Your body doesn’t like to be in feast or famine mode. The more you are able to get in meals and snacks consistently, the better you’ll be able to practice gentle nutrition.
Here’s some tips to help your body trust you as you’re practicing gentle nutrition:
- Get in three meals and three snacks minimum. a day
- Start and stop eating at roughly the same time each day
- Don’t go more than about 4 hours between eating
If you’re “holding off until a certain time” it might be best to revisit steps 1-9 of intuitive eating.
Choose A Variety of Foods
It’s okay to try putting foods on the plate you might not be immediately motivated to go for. Things like fruits, veggies, and whole grains might not feel as enticing initially because you might have felt forced to choose these foods growing up or as part of wellness culture.
Spoiler alert, diet culture doesn’t own salads or other “healthy” food. Give it a try and if you’re not feeling it, go for something else!
Some ways to make nutritious foods easier include:
- Chopping up veggies so they’re as fast to grab as chips
- Making sure nutrient dense foods are in your fridge or pantry
- Buy veggies or fruit chopped so you don’t have to do it
- Put the fruits/veggies on the counter so they’re the first thing you’re thinking about
Sneak in the Veggies/Fruit
Benefits of Improving Nutrition In Intuitive Eating
Gentle nutrition is about eating in a way that supports your physical well-being while still your mental and emotional relationship with food. Adding gentle nutrition to intuitive eating can bring a lot of benefits—especially once you’ve already worked through the earlier steps like honoring hunger, making peace with food, and rejecting diet mentality.
Getting in a variety of foods can help us to:
- Have more energy
- Keeps metabolism up
- Helps with blood sugar management for those with diabetes
- Keep your heart healthy
- Get in adequate vitamins and minerals
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