Once a woman gets that positive pregnancy test, she’s almost immediately inundated with information, including the shoulds and shouldn'ts of everything she consumes. It can feel incredibly overwhelming during a time that’s already full of intense emotion. For people with a history of an eating disorder, this can be even more pronounced. That’s why, when I became pregnant, I was relieved to know that I could lean on my intuitive eating practice and keep trusting my body, even during those special nine months.

The thing is, though eating intuitively when you’re pregnant can look and feel different than eating intuitively when you’re not pregnant, you can still apply all its principles—they just need to be adjusted to help you healthfully grow a human. Read on to learn everything you need to know about intuitive eating in pregnancy, including all its benefits, challenges, and strategies to help you confidently adapt to a new season.

Benefits of intuitive eating in pregnancy

Honestly, I would’ve been lost in my pregnancy without my intuitive eating practice. It benefited me in more ways than I can properly capture in this article, but I’ll highlight some of its most significant benefits:

• It fosters body trust. I can’t think of a more important time to trust and honor your body’s communication—the essence of intuitive eating—than when you’re pregnant. Instead of constantly looking outside of yourself for the rules and lists of what to eat or not eat, eating intuitively encourages you to rely on interoception, or your body’s internal cues. It helps you to feel empowered instead of helpless during a pivotal time in your life. According to Equip lead dietitian Dani Castellano, RD, CEDS, it also gives you “self-permission to honor your cravings without judgment.”
• It helps you maintain recovery. If you’re like me and developed an intuitive eating practice in recovery, you know it takes conscious effort to protect yourself from harmful food and weight messaging in the media, which is unfortunately loud in the prenatal world. Pregnancy also brings some food and drink limitations (more on that later), which can feel triggering for those in recovery. Staying rooted in your intuitive eating practice is one of your best tools to avoid any slippery slopes brought on by diet culture and help keep your recovery going strong. Castellano also points out that intuitive eating in pregnancy helps lessen the pressure of doing things perfectly, another recovery-supporting benefit.
• It may help with adequate weight gain, and your outlook on it. Part of intuitive eating is about releasing the desire to control your body and instead letting your body do its thing—which can come in particularly handy when your body is rapidly and drastically changing. In fact, research from 2019 shows an association between intuitive eating in pregnancy and healthy weight gain, while other research from 2020 shows a link between intuitive eating in pregnancy and a more positive attitude about gestational weight gain.
• It could help manage gestational diabetes. While gestational diabetes is largely unpreventable, a 2019 study of women with the condition found that intuitive eating could help them manage their blood sugars successfully throughout their pregnancies. The same study also showed that intuitive eating could help prevent the same group from developing postpartum diabetes. And it makes sense, because applying intuitive eating concepts—like eating and drinking regularly, striking a relative balance with all food groups, moving your body joyfully, managing stress and difficult emotions healthfully, and eating to honor your health—all support stable blood sugar levels.
• It may help your mental health. Many aspects of pregnancy can make you more vulnerable to anxiety or depression: drastically shifting hormones, preparing for a new baby, managing various physiological symptoms (like insomnia), and dealing with pregnancy after loss, to name a few. According to Melissa Bloom, MS, RD, LD, CEDS-C, lowered anxiety is one benefit of intuitive eating in pregnancy, and a 2024 review links the practice to helping pregnant women with depressive tendencies to better manage their symptoms.

Challenges of intuitive eating in pregnancy

While I can’t imagine approaching food and eating in pregnancy any other way (and would never recommend anything else, as a registered dietitian), intuitive eating while expecting can feel tricky for many people. Here are some of the challenges you might come up against:

• There are some “rules” to follow. Intuitive eating is all about releasing food rules and letting your body lead, which is mostly still possible in pregnancy, but there are some necessary limitations (like excluding raw fish and unpasteurized cheeses). It can feel difficult and hypocritical to follow food rules within an intuitive eating practice, especially when you’ve spent ample time setting yourself free from them. However, through an intuitive eating lens, avoiding sashimi, for example, is in fact a form of gentle nutrition (one of the principles of intuitive eating that encourages eating to honor your health, and, in this case, your baby’s health).
• Your body needs more food. Another foundational part of intuitive eating is honoring your hunger, which will likely increase as your pregnancy progresses. While the notion of eating for two is kind of an overused exaggeration, your energy (calorie) needs increase significantly throughout pregnancy, especially in the second and third trimesters, to support your baby’s growth and health. Especially in eating disorder recovery, honoring heightened hunger can feel scary, and if your body isn’t clearly communicating its increased need for food through bodily cues, you’ll need to mechanically eat (or as I like to call it, “eat out of self-care”) more than before pregnancy. Eating this way may feel confusing, but your body still needs adequate fuel regardless of its signals.
• Pregnancy symptoms can throw a wrench in your eating. Every woman has different experiences with pregnancy symptoms, but some of the most common ones, like nausea, can make your typical intuitive eating practice more challenging. “In the first trimester, many women are nauseous and extremely tired, and this makes it very difficult to be mindful and check in on cues,” explains dietitian Amy Goldsmith RDN, LDN. She says you need to push harder to support your body with adequate nourishment, regardless of how you physically feel. While it may be difficult to eat when you’re not feeling it, you can make it more intuitive by checking in with what your body can tolerate. In my first trimester, I could only tolerate a relatively small variety of foods from each food group, and I let that be enough (along with my prenatal vitamins) until I felt like I could expand my palate again.
• Diet culture makes it harder. Unfortunately, we live in a world largely dominated by the dieting mentality, and so intuitive eating can feel hard to follow with all of diet culture’s noise in such a vulnerable time. Bloom says societal expectations about what you should eat and how much you should move your body during pregnancy can make being intuitive more difficult. Plus, harmful messaging about pregnancy weight gain (mostly saying, “don’t gain too much”) can make trusting your body even more difficult.

Strategies for intuitive eating during pregnancy

While you can practice intuitive eating throughout pregnancy, there are some differences between doing so while pregnant versus not pregnant. For one thing, pregnancy cravings or aversions may change your typical eating habits or preferences, while your hunger cues can also change drastically from trimester to trimester—and not necessarily reflect your intake needs, requiring you to eat mechanically.

Plus, you may be applying the gentle nutrition principle more than typical, depending on your symptoms and metabolic health during pregnancy. Since prenatal constipation is common, “you may need to incorporate foods and hydration differently to support bowel movements,” Castellano adds. During my pregnancy, my iron levels were slightly low (a common occurrence in pregnancy), so I applied gentle nutrition by increasing heme iron sources, like red meat, and adding a daily iron supplement.

Here are some strategies to help you practice intuitive eating during pregnancy:

• Review the 10 principles. “I'd suggest looking back on the 10 principles of intuitive eating and developing a plan of how to integrate this throughout the pregnancy,” Goldsmith says. Remember, they won’t be the exact same as when you’re not pregnant, so consider how each principle may support you during this finite period and write it down to revisit when necessary. Feel free to tweak your intuitive eating plan throughout pregnancy, since symptoms typically shift from stage to stage.
• Work with a dietitian. If you’re in eating disorder recovery and unsure or struggling to find your footing with intuitive eating in pregnancy, working with an eating disorder dietitian who teaches intuitive eating and has prenatal experience will go a long way. They will help you learn or relearn how to use intuitive eating practices to help keep you and your baby healthy, as well as help to manage symptoms like nausea and heartburn or conditions like anemia or gestational diabetes. If you don’t have any eating disorder history but are new to intuitive eating or uncertain in how to apply it to your pregnancy, working with an intuitive eating and prenatal dietitian is a great idea.
• Combine brain and body wisdom. “Remember that part of eating intuitively is using your ‘brain knowledge’ and not just hunger and fullness cues,” Castellano says. As mentioned earlier, some pregnancy symptoms can throw off hunger cues, making it critical to feed yourself often—even if your body isn’t directly asking for it. “Lean into regular eating and focus on consuming meals and snacks every two to four hours throughout the day,” Castellano suggests. Additionally, if you have any nutrient deficiencies, be sure to inform yourself (perhaps with the help of a dietitian) on how to properly supplement and use gentle nutrition to adjust your food intake.
• Find resources that resonate. From social media accounts to books and podcasts, there are many resources that can help support a prenatal intuitive eating practice. My favorite workbook and book are The Intuitive Eating Workbook, to learn the ins and outs of intuitive eating and Expecting Better, to understand the scientific truth behind food and drink consumption in pregnancy. Fellow dietitian Christy Harrison has a helpful podcast episode on intuitive eating in pregnancy, and another intuitive eating dietitian McKenzie Caldwell (@fertility.prenatal.dietitian) has an informative Instagram account for expecting mothers and those trying to conceive.
• Practice body and self-trust. “Continue to trust yourself and the process,” Bloom encourages, which could look like honoring your cravings and aversions throughout pregnancy even if they feel foreign (I couldn’t look at sweet potatoes but loved white potatoes during the first trimester, and craved breakfast sausages throughout the second and orange juice throughout the third, which were all out of the ordinary for me). If you’re medically cleared to exercise, it could also look like approaching joyful movement (another intuitive eating principle) on a day-to-day basis and letting your body tell you how much and what type of movement feels right.

Consider how an adapted intuitive eating practice will help support your pregnancy values, you and your baby’s health, and eating disorder recovery (if applicable) for the nine months ahead. Perhaps it’s greater flexibility and enjoyment, or maybe it’s overall health and well-being—whatever your “why” is, name it (and perhaps jot it down), in case self-doubt or diet culture trickles in. Remember, your job is to show up and offer your body stability through intuitive eating and other forms of self-care—like adequate rest and hydration, and prenatal medical visits—and it will take care of the rest.