That’s in stark opposition to another school of food thought that’s gained popularity on Instagram: clean eating. If you’re going to eat clean, you need to pay careful attention to any food’s place on a continuum of purity, and eat only the things that meet the strictest standards of unprocessed freshness. “Eating today has become this idea that the food on your fork can either kill you or cure you,” Tribole says. “It’s gotten to a point of almost religious fervor.”

By comparison, intuitive eating sounds like permission to sit on your couch and eat pizza until you pass out. But Tribole and Bahr don’t deny that different foods have different nutritional benefits, or aim to tear down public-health initiatives that tell kids to eat vegetables. Instead, they say they want to help people who have struggled with eating understand how food makes their body feel when the act is untangled from stress or shame. Both Tribole and Bahr find that in the first week or two, new adherents of intuitive eating do sometimes binge on the things they had always tried to skip. But the two researchers say the vast majority of their clients quickly habituate to burgers or donuts and then crave the variety and nutrition represented by the “healthy” foods they once used as punishment.

The theory is that if you can have pizza whenever you want, it feels less essential to eat it until you’re uncomfortable when the opportunity presents itself, or to seek out the opportunity at all. Telling yourself you can’t have something, meanwhile, gives it undue power and allure. “I didn’t understand that the binges were created from the restriction,” Bahr says. “I thought I was an animal.” In the past, research has indicated that American women internalize the importance of restricting food intake as young as age 5, making it almost impossible to test how people would act toward food if they weren’t shackled by a culture of dieting. Tribole calls the unnatural urge to eat a particular food that arises because of anticipated restriction the “last-supper effect.” “It’s the permission paradox,” she says. “When you have permission to eat, the food still tastes good, but you remove the urgency.”

That feeling of urgency is probably familiar to most people, even if they always thought of the need to adhere to some kind of food rules as totally normal and healthy. Although the number of people who might seek out the services of a dietitian is relatively small, the audience who could benefit from new ways of looking at food is much larger. According to a 2008 survey by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 75 percent of American women participate in some kind of disordered-eating behavior, even if their problems aren’t severe enough to constitute a clinical diagnosis of an eating disorder.

Suggesting that a healthy relationship with food is possible without any rules or restrictions sounds risky to many people, especially when it’s misconstrued as a call to indulge destructive impulses rather than to understand and quiet them. Intuitive eating has a seductive sound of ease and change that is used to market many types of diets. That has likely helped it catch fire on social media, where similar messages of positivity and future happiness are used to hawk all kinds of restrictive-eating practices and appetite suppressants. Unlike how wellness trends usually play out on Instagram, though, the concept’s developers aren’t behind its public push, and they don’t have much to sell you. “I started Instagram like three months ago,” Tribole says. “I had no idea that my people are there. I thought it was a Kardashian thing, so I was really reluctant to even get on.”