Mindful & Intuitive Eating for Gut Health & Autoimmunity
When you’re dealing with ongoing gut issues, autoimmune symptoms, or chronic inflammation, food can start to feel really complicated.
There might be certain things you can’t eat anymore, or maybe eating itself has become a source of anxiety, frustration, or confusion.
If you’ve found yourself stuck between needing structure for your health and wanting freedom around food—it’s not just you.
This is where mindful and intuitive eating can be incredibly supportive. Not as another rigid plan or list of “good vs bad” foods, but as a way to reconnect with your body, reduce food stress, and better understand what helps you feel well.
These practices encourage curiosity over judgment—helping us understand not just what we’re eating, but why. They can be especially helpful when we’re trying to figure out how our body responds to certain foods, how daily habits impact how we feel, and how emotional or situational triggers can shape our choices.
For those navigating gut issues, autoimmune conditions, or other chronic symptoms, this awareness becomes even more powerful. Mindful and intuitive eating help us notice subtle shifts in how we feel after meals—bloating, fatigue, joint pain, brain fog, or skin changes—that we might otherwise dismiss or overlook. When we slow down and tune in, we begin to see patterns between what we eat, how we eat, and how our body responds.
So, what is mindful eating?
Mindful eating is about bringing your full attention to your food and the eating experience. It’s about slowing down, engaging your senses, and tuning in—not just to what you’re eating, but how you’re feeling while you eat and afterward.
It’s not a diet. There’s no meal plan or perfect way to “do it.”
But it can help you notice important patterns like:
Which foods leave you feeling energised, calm, or satisfied
What meals lead to bloating, brain fog, or flares
How stress, distraction, rushing eating or multitasking impacts your digestion
Whether you’re actually hungry or just feeling anxious, bored or triggered
Even simple practices—like taking a few deep breaths before a meal or pausing halfway through to check in with how you’re feeling—can make a noticeable difference. You give your digestion a chance to kick in, you stop eating on autopilot, and you start recognising what your body is really asking for.
What if I can’t eat everything? Using intuitive eating when navigating food sensitivities and symptom triggers
Intuitive eating is often misunderstood. It’s not just about eating what you crave or avoiding structure. It’s about relearning how to trust your body’s signals—your hunger, your fullness, your energy, your symptoms—and choosing food in a way that feels good both physically and mentally.
Yes, it gets trickier when you’re managing food sensitivities or autoimmune symptoms. You might not have total freedom with food right now—and that’s okay. But intuitive eating principles can still be used as a framework for healing and self-awareness, even during periods of necessary restriction (like the autoimmune protocol, low FODMAP, or other temporary elimination diet).
It’s about asking:
What helps my body feel safe and supported?
What foods do I actually enjoy and tolerate right now?
How can I meet my needs with kindness, not fear or perfectionism?
The key is curiosity over judgment. Food rules based in shame don’t help anyone heal. But learning to listen, experiment gently, and respond to what your body is telling you—that’s where the magic is.
Intuitive eating is a mind-body health approach and weight neutral model designed by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch in 1995.
The 10 principles of intuitive eating
Reject the diet culture - this seems a bit contradictory when we talk about adjusting the diet to learn what’s contributing to chronic symptoms, whether gut health issues and IBS, or various autoimmune diseases, and how to improve our wellbeing. But this principle is also about learning to trust your body and what it needs rather than prescribing to a long term “fad diet” because of societal rules and expectations.
Honour your hunger
Make peace with food
Discover the satisfaction factor
Feel your fullness
Challenge the food police
Cope with emotions with kindness
Respect your body
Movement – feel the difference
Honour your health – Gentle nutrition
For a full description of these principles, you can download my free Mindful eating, Intuitive eating, Gut health and Autoimmunity guide here
Balancing healing protocols with flexibility & self-compassion
If you’re in a season of needing to be more mindful of what you eat to manage symptoms or support healing, that doesn’t mean intuitive or mindful eating is off-limits.
In fact, these approaches can help prevent the cycle of stress, restriction, guilt, and burnout that so many people fall into when trying to follow a healing or temporary elimination diet.
Mindful eating supports your digestion, lowers stress (which is huge for autoimmunity and gut health), and helps you notice the more subtle shifts that can otherwise get missed—like whether a certain meal leaves you bloated two hours later or whether you’re actually just tired, not hungry.
Intuitive eating reminds you that your worth isn’t tied to how perfectly you eat, and that your body is still wise, even when it’s struggling. It invites you to honour your health gently, with flexibility, and from a place of support—not control.
It’s easy to feel like intuitive eating is just about “eating everything”—and when you're managing gut issues or autoimmune conditions, that can feel completely out of reach. The truth is, sometimes there is restriction. You might have coeliac disease, where gluten is permanently off the table to protect your long-term health. But that doesn’t mean food can’t still be enjoyable, satisfying, and deeply nourishing—within the boundaries of what helps your body feel its best.
There might be foods you’re avoiding while you work on reducing autoimmune symptoms, improving gut health and figuring out your triggers, and that’s a valid part of the process. But mindful and intuitive eating can still play a really important role here.
These approaches aren’t about being able to eat everything—they’re about learning what supports you. They help you tune into what feels good in your body, notice the patterns behind your food choices, and gently reflect on why you might reach for certain foods (especially when you’re stressed, tired, or overwhelmed). They also help you let go of that pressure to be perfect—which is so important when symptoms fluctuate and healing isn’t always linear.
If you're following a temporary elimination diet or trialing a more structured approach to manage symptoms, it’s completely normal to feel a bit restricted or deprived. That’s human. But when we layer in mindfulness and self-awareness, we can re-frame that experience. Instead of focusing on what you “can’t” have, it becomes about eating differently for a time to support your body, to better understand what it needs, and to feel well long term.
In an ideal world, your way of eating (as well as your daily habits) becomes something you choose—because it supports your energy, digestion, mood, and symptoms. It’s not about having a perfect, unrestricted diet, but about finding a rhythm that works for you. That might look different from someone else’s, and that’s okay.
Mindful and intuitive eating give you tools to tune in with compassion—not control. And often, over time, you naturally start choosing more of what makes you feel good and less of what doesn’t—without needing rigid rules to tell you what to do.
The Bottom Line:
You can care about your health and have a good relationship with food.
You can follow a healing protocol and listen to your body with compassion.
You can be mindful, intuitive, and symptom-aware—all at the same time.
Healing doesn’t happen through food alone. It comes from slowing down, tuning in, reducing stress, incorporating other daily habits to support well being, and meeting yourself with patience and respect.
If you’re navigating gut or autoimmune issues and feel unsure how to eat without feeling restricted, anxious, or overwhelmed, including this approach is for you. And you don’t have to do it alone.
If this resonates, let’s chat. It is possible to rebuild a more peaceful, confident, and supportive relationship with food alongside learning what adjustments need to be made to your diet and daily habits for symptom management and more joy in your life.
Ready to take your health seriously and stop guessing your way through it?
If you’re truly ready to feel better—and want personalised, evidence-based support—book a free 15-minute Wellness Investigation. We’ll chat about what’s going on and whether working together is the right next step for you.
