Relearning Trust: How Our Beliefs Shape Our Body’s Eating Cues
Many people drift away from intuitive eating long before they realize it’s happening. Not because they failed at listening to their bodies—but because the beliefs they picked up over the years quietly changed the way their bodies responded.
Messages like “I should ignore hunger,” “fullness is bad,” “I need to control every bite,” or “my body can’t be trusted” can settle in and shape how your nervous system reacts around food. Over time, the body adjusts to those beliefs, even if they aren’t helpful anymore.
Somatic therapy offers a way to gently untangle those old messages so you can reconnect with what your body actually knows.
How Beliefs Show Up in the Body
Beliefs aren’t just mental—they live in the body, too.
They can show up as:
Tightness around the stomach when hunger appears
Numbness or flatness when tuned into fullness
Eating quickly because your body feels pressure or urgency
Feeling guilty or tense before or after meals
A sense of disconnect, like your cues are fuzzy or unreliable
These reactions often make perfect sense when you consider the beliefs that shaped them. The body isn’t malfunctioning—it’s adapting to the rules it learned.
Why Cues Get Quiet
When beliefs tell your body that hunger or fullness isn’t safe, reliable, or acceptable, your nervous system starts to downplay those sensations.
This can look like:
Missing early hunger because you learned to push through
Feeling overly full because you’re out of practice noticing subtle cues
A constant “on edge” feeling around food
Relying on external rules instead of internal guidance
This isn’t a personal flaw. It’s a learned pattern—one that can be unlearned.
Somatic Therapy: Listening Beneath the Old Rules
Somatic therapy doesn’t try to overpower old beliefs. It helps create the conditions where new experiences are possible.
Through gentle body awareness, you begin to notice:
What hunger feels like without judgment
What satisfaction feels like when you slow down
What happens in your body when an old rule pops up
How your breath and muscles respond to the idea of trusting yourself
These observations help soften the grip of old beliefs, not by arguing with them, but by giving your body new information.
The Body Can Relearn What It Once Knew
Even if those old beliefs feel strong, your body hasn’t forgotten how to guide you. It may take time, safety, and patience, but the innate wisdom is still there.
As the nervous system feels more supported and less controlled, hunger and fullness cues begin to return. Eating becomes less about managing and more about listening.
This isn’t about doing it perfectly. It’s about coming back to yourself in small, steady ways.
