There is a version of the intuitive eating conversation that gets shared in wellness spaces fairly often. Eat when you’re hungry. Stop when you’re full. Make peace with food. It sounds straightforward enough, and for people who are starting from a relatively uncomplicated relationship with eating, those ideas can be a relief from the overwhelming and often contradicting nature of many diet dialogues.
But for people navigating complex chronic illness, a history of restricted eating, neurodivergence, mast cell activation syndrome, or a body that has had to fight very hard to stay alive, the intuitive eating principles conversation needs to go a lot deeper. That is exactly what happened in this episode of the Coming Home to Ourselves with Denise Elysa podcast, when Denise sat down with Registered Dietitian Liz Powell, founder of Yaletown Nutrition.
You can watch the public version of this episode on YouTube now. The full unfiltered deep dive, recorded live inside the EmbodiedSoul community, is available inside the community app for members.
Why Intuitive Nutrition Is More Layered Than It First Appears
Liz Powell is an anti-diet, weight-inclusive Registered Dietitian with additional training in eating disorders, IBS, pediatrics, and body image, among other areas. She works with clients to reduce guilt and shame around eating, rebuild trust with their bodies, and find a way of nourishing themselves that is sustainable across the full arc of their lives.
Her framework is built around the ten principles of intuitive eating, a non-diet approach developed by dietitians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch in the mid-1990s. At its core, the framework is not a set of rules about what to eat. It is a path back to the intuitive eater each person was born to be, before diet culture, family messaging, medical systems, and lived experience began layering in the idea that the body cannot be trusted.
One of the biggest misconceptions Liz sees is that intuitive nutrition simply means “eat what you want, when you want.” That framing misses most of what makes the approach meaningful. What the principles actually offer is a way of dismantling the external rules and restrictions that have disconnected people from their own signals, and slowly rebuilding that capacity for internal attunement.
When the Nervous System and Food Become Entangled
Denise brought a lens to this conversation that Liz, by her own acknowledgment, had not considered in quite this way before. From a somatic perspective, shame around food and bodies does not only affect how someone feels about eating. It affects how they inhabit their body at all.
When shame becomes chronic, energy tends to move upward. People live increasingly in their heads. Interoception, the ability to sense the body from within, gets clouded. Neuroception, the nervous system’s ongoing assessment of safety, starts picking up threats in places that do not require threat responses, including food itself, clothing sizes, or a number on a scale.
This is where the somatics and nervous system conversation becomes directly relevant to intuitive eating principles. Trying to reconnect with hunger cues, fullness signals, and food preferences while the nervous system is reading eating as unsafe is an extremely difficult thing to do.
Liz noted something similar from the nutrition side: an undernourished brain is a more anxious brain. Hunger hormone dysregulation, vitamin deficiencies, and chronic calorie restriction all contribute to a nervous system that is running in a more activated state.
The Calorie Myth, Weight Science, and What the Research Actually Shows
A significant portion of this conversation was devoted to something Liz described as one of the most persistent and harmful myths in nutrition: that weight is primarily a matter of calories in versus calories out, and that all weight loss is inherently a health gain.
The reality, as Liz laid it out, is considerably more nuanced. An estimated 70% of body weight is influenced by genetics, with the rest shaped by a range of factors including hormones, medications, the gut microbiome, sleep quality, stress, access to movement and outdoor space, food environment, and more. Diet and exercise are factors, but they cannot override the others. And yet those other factors receive almost no attention in the public narrative around weight.
The calories in/calories out model also runs into the problem of metabolic adaptation. When calorie intake drops below what the body needs for a sustained period, the body responds by slowing its metabolic rate and increasing hunger signaling, because survival is its priority. Short-term weight loss studies may not follow participants long enough to capture what happens next, which is often weight regain, increased preoccupation with food, and a more difficult relationship with eating than existed before.
Liz was clear that she does not bring judgment to people who have engaged in restrictive eating, or who continue to do so. Diet culture is pervasive, the social rewards for thinness are significant, and people make the choices that make sense in their context. What she does challenge is the idea that restriction is a long-term pathway to health.
MCAS, the Mast Cell-Amygdala Loop, and Intuitive Food Safety
This section of the conversation drew from Denise’s own lived experience navigating mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS) at its most severe, including a period when she was on high therapeutic doses of multiple MCAS medications and still experiencing anaphylaxis. At that point, her safe food list had narrowed dramatically. She was able to eat almost nothing.
What she observed, and what she now supports others in exploring, is that the relationship between MCAS and eating is not only physiological. There is a bidirectional loop between the amygdala and mast cells: a trigger activates mast cells, which signals the amygdala, which can further drive mast cell degranulation. But the loop also runs the other way. Anxiety and fear around eating something can activate the amygdala first, which then triggers the mast cells, which produces a reaction that may or may not have had anything to do with the food itself.
Additionally, she explains, someone with mast cell activation syndrome might be able to eat a food safely one day, and react to it the next. There are various factors that contribute to this, one being the person’s overall histamine load and how well their body is processing it. If someone’s histamine bucket is low, then they have a higher tolerance or “more room” for foods or triggers that they might otherwise react to, whereas if someone’s histamine bucket is already at its peak, then there is no more room in their system to safely process more. To add another layer of complexity, leftovers tend to have a higher histamine level than freshly cooked food. Therefore, what was safe for dinner, may not still be safe a day or two later from the fridge.
This creates a genuine diagnostic challenge. When someone reacts to a food they were anxious about eating, there is often no clear way to know which direction the loop was running. Denise’s approach, developed over time and from within her own body, was to do somatic work before eating, arrive at mealtimes from a place of as much felt safety as possible, stay present with the body while eating rather than dissociating, and use her intuition to evaluate whether a food felt right on a given day.
This process has deeply supported her healing and has contributed to her being able to slowly and safely titrate off of her MCAS specific medications. She is clear about that being her experience, not medical advice, and about the crucial role medication played in her recovery. The full context of that journey, including what supported it somatically and energetically, is covered in more depth in the free MCAS and chronic symptoms somatic lesson available through the EmbodiedSoul platform. She also discusses it in more depth in her June 2026 podcast episode: S3E4 Summer Solstice 2026 Inner Seasons, Self Healing Journey, Choosing a Practitioner You Can Trust.
The Body Remembers What It Ate During Conflict
One of the threads Denise introduced that Liz found intriguing and new was the somatic dimension of food associations. The body does not only build associations with food through allergic response or digestive discomfort. It builds them through the full emotional and relational context in which food was consumed.
If someone experienced repeated conflict, fear, or emotional distress while eating a particular food, the body can begin to register that food as part of the threat landscape, not because of anything in the food itself, but because the nervous system learned to associate it with danger. Later, eating that food may produce a response that has very little to do with the present moment.
From a somatic perspective, this becomes an invitation rather than a wall. Symptoms around food can be understood as messengers, pointing toward something that may be ready to be looked at, processed, or completed. That layer of work is distinct from the dietitian’s scope, and Denise voiced that they can be used in conjunction with one another rather than as a replacement. The goal is not to bypass the medical and nutritional dimensions but to address them in parallel with the somatic and energetic ones.
What Mechanical Eating and Intuitive Eating Can Look Like Together
Denise was open about the fact that she does not practice intuitive eating in its pure form, for personal reasons that she discussed in the full recording. She combines it with mechanical eating, specifically because of how her own nervous system processes hunger cues. She can hyper-focus on something and miss hunger signals for many hours. Without structure, she would consistently under-eat.
Her approach involves building a few reliable anchors into each day, things that happen nearly automatically, including a protein shake in the morning before her appetite is available, and a ritual afternoon cacao drink that has become a pause point and a vehicle for additional protein. These automatic nourishment moments mean her body is receiving something even on days when her system would not otherwise prompt her to eat.
The intuitive layer sits on top of that. It is where she evaluates whether a food feels safe on a given day, adapts to her sensory needs, and checks in with her body during mealtimes rather than eating while distracted.
Liz reinforced that this combination approach is both legitimate and often necessary. Jumping directly into intuitive eating from a state of chronic undernourishment can feel chaotic rather than freeing, because the hunger and craving signals arriving are amplified by deprivation rather than being the gentle, reliable information they are designed to be. Establishing adequate and consistent nourishment first creates the physiological baseline that makes attunement possible.
The Scarcity Pattern and What Healing It Actually Looks Like
Denise also shared something from her own experience around moving into a shared household and the scarcity response that developed around food. Coming from years of living alone, where her specialty foods sat untouched in the cupboard for months because she had unconditional access to them, she found that when those same foods were sometimes eaten by others, a tension arose that surprised her.
It was not about the food. It was about the felt sense of whether there would be enough when she needed it. And because her way of eating is slow, with pauses, checking in, going back for small amounts later, she was also navigating a new dinner table culture that moved much faster.
What she named that took vulnerable conversation and time to communicate, as well as openness and adaptation from the people around her, was what it meant for access to nourishment to feel safe. Once those conversations happened, and the household adapted, something shifted. The scarcity feeling began to soften slowly over time because the underlying concern had been heard and met. That is what Liz described as moving toward trust: not a feeling someone can generate through willpower, but a capacity that develops when the conditions for safety are actually in place.
What This Conversation Points Toward
By design this episode does not offer a protocol. Both Denise and Liz are working from a position that there is no eating approach that works for everyone, and that the pursuit of the one right answer often causes more harm than the uncertainty it is trying to resolve.
What the conversation does offer is a way of holding food differently, with curiosity instead of fear, awareness of the nervous system’s role in digestion and hunger, and with recognition that healing a relationship with food is often inseparable from healing a relationship with safety in the body.
The public version of this episode is available to listen to now. The full unedited deep dive, which runs considerably longer and includes more depth and both Denise’s and Liz’s personal reflections, is available inside the EmbodiedSoul with Denise Elysa community for members.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What are the core intuitive eating principles, and how do they apply to chronic illness?
The ten principles of intuitive eating, developed by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, focus on rejecting diet culture, honoring hunger, making peace with food, and rebuilding trust with the body’s signals. For people living with complex chronic illness, applying these principles often requires additional support, including mechanical eating structures for those who do not reliably access hunger cues, and somatic or nervous system work to create the felt sense of safety that makes internal attunement possible.
Can intuitive nutrition work alongside conditions like MCAS or IBS?
It can, but often needs to be adapted. For conditions where the nervous system is deeply involved in symptom production, such as MCAS or IBS, eating from a place of anxiety or hypervigilance can amplify reactivity regardless of what is being eaten. Liz Powell discusses how gut-directed hypnotherapy has shown comparable results to elimination diets for some IBS patients, and Denise shares her own experience of using somatic practices around mealtimes to support a calmer nervous system response. A multidisciplinary approach, combining medical care, dietitian support, and nervous system-informed work, is generally more effective than any single intervention.
Is the calories in, calories out model accurate for weight management?
Research suggests it is a significant oversimplification. Genetics, hormones, the gut microbiome, sleep, stress, access to food and movement, and metabolic adaptation all influence body weight. The body also responds to sustained calorie restriction by lowering its metabolic rate and increasing hunger signaling, which makes long-term weight loss through restriction difficult to maintain. This is discussed in more depth in the Coming Home to Ourselves with Denise Elysa Podcast, S3E6 Intuitive Eating, Somatic Healing, and the Brain-Body Connection.
What is the connection between the brain-body connection and eating?
The brain-body connection influences everything from how hunger signals are generated and perceived, to how well the digestive system functions in different nervous system states. Eating while in a stress response impairs digestion; the vagus nerve requires a relative state of safety to support optimal gut function. For people with a history of disordered eating, trauma, or chronic illness, the brain-body connection around food may have learned to associate eating with threat, which can produce real physical symptoms regardless of what is being consumed.
How is somatic healing relevant to food relationships?
Somatic healing addresses how the body holds and responds to experience, including relational experience, fear, and survival responses that became organized around food or mealtimes. In this episode, Denise explains that the body can build associations between specific foods and emotional contexts, particularly conflict or fear, and may respond to those foods as though the original threat is present, even when it is not. Somatic work, addressed alongside nutritional and medical support, can offer a way to complete those incomplete experiences and gently widen the range of foods the body feels safe receiving.
Resources
Listen to This Episode The public version of S3E6 with Liz Powell is available now. Listen on the Coming Home to Ourselves podcast or watch on YouTube.
Full Deep Dive (EmbodiedSoul Members) The full unedited recording of this conversation is available inside the community. Access it here.
EmbodiedSoul with Denise Elysa Community The EmbodiedSoul with Denise Elysa Community is a desktop and mobile-friendly web app and community platform. Inside, members have instant access to over $1,000 worth of on-demand guided practices, workshops, ceremonies, meditations and more. Denise hosts approximately 2–3 live events per month for community members, including Live Guest Experts, Live Connection Calls, The Seasonal Pause: Equinox and Solstice Ceremonies, Live Energy Healing Sessions, Guided Practices and more. All events are free to members and pre-registration is required. Explore the EmbodiedSoul Community
Free Resource: Somatic Healing for Chronic Symptoms How to take what is learned about somatic inquiry, somatic healing, and somatic parts work and apply it in real time when experiencing symptoms that feel scary. This free lesson walks through the experience. Note: browse the app at mbodiedsoul.passion.io before creating a free account, as creating any account removes the ability to preview other available content. Access the free lesson
Work with Denise Denise offers a few different ways of working 1:1 depending on individual needs and commitment levels. Explore how to work with Denise
The Podcast A new episode of Coming Home to Ourselves with Denise Elysa releases the first Sunday of every month. Available on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music and Amazon Music. Listen now
