The worst relationship I’ve had in my entire 30 years on this planet has been the one I have with food. It started young, as it does for many women who, like me, have had a body deemed unacceptably large since childhood. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t trying to lose weight. I read about the South Beach Diet between Harry Potter book releases and obsessed over “thinspo” tagged posts on LiveJournal. I’ve yo-yo dieted to the point of obsession, from cutting fats to cutting carbs to dark times when I simply cut out as much as possible, repeating to myself that it was better to be hungry than fat. I never felt better though, only more anxious, more miserable, and more hopeless.

If any other relationship made me feel so awful, I’d throw in the towel and walk away—but you can’t do that with food. The trouble with food is that we need it to live, to say nothing of the fact that it’s the cornerstone of almost every single social and cultural event. So instead, I just kind of gave up. I just ate as thoughtlessly as possible because that felt like the most painless way to get through the day.

Given that history, I swear I could hear a chorus of angels sing when I read “Smash the Wellness Industry” in the New York Times last June. The op-ed was all over my social media feeds, shared most fervently by fellow women. The piece, by novelist Jessica Knoll, got at something that’s been on the lips of the fat-positive community for years—that the wellness industry is just the diet industry, repackaged.

Knoll wrote, “At its core...wellness is about weight loss. It demonizes calorically dense and delicious foods, preserving a vicious fallacy: Thin is healthy and healthy is thin.”

Again, this is nothing new to fat folks. Believe me when I say we always knew terms like toxins and clean eating were about achieving a small body. Nonetheless, there was something about this piece that struck a specific chord with me and so many other women. I suppose it wasn’t just the wellness revelation that peaked my interest; it was also what Knoll said had helped her unlearn the mentality around food and body image that she’d been indoctrinated with, that we’ve all been indoctrinated with: intuitive eating. Registered dietitians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch released the seminal book Intuitive Eating on the topic back in 1995. I’d heard the term before, but didn’t realize that it was meant to help people mend their rocky relationships with food and eating, particularly the ones caused by a lifetime of dieting.

I was immediately intrigued by the notion that my body could feed itself without heavy-handed intervention, and within a few minutes of reading the article I’d made an appointment with a local intuitive eating counselor in Toronto. It turns out, though, that I’d just signed up for something much bigger than a diet tweak.

In our first session, as we sat in a cozy chairs while her dog napped in the corner, my nutritionist laid out the principles of intuitive eating. There are 10, but the quick version is this: Honor your feelings of hunger and satisfaction, let go of the idea that certain foods are “good” and others are “bad,” and reject the diet mentality. It isn’t, as it’s been characterized by some, a free-for-all or even a “hunger-fullness diet.” Rather, it’s a way to learn how to eat based on internal cues (your intuition) versus external rules (like no eating after 7 p.m., count calories every meal, whole foods only, low-carb, etc.). In other words, eating intuitively means taking into account hunger, fullness, and satisfaction, which means that no matter what you eat or why, you’ve done nothing “wrong” or “bad.”