“You were born into this world an intuitive eater”: Healthism and self-transformative practices on social media

Abstract Our bodies and food consumption are increasingly becoming markers of social identity in contemporary societies. We often participate in “diet culture” by monitoring and controlling our food intake through eating restrictions and physical exercise to keep a bulging body in check. This contemporary “diet culture” has been criticized for embodying impossible fitness ideals and producing a pathological obsession with food. In this article, we will analyze the growing contemporary phenomenon of intuitive eating (IE) as an alternative to diet culture and explore how it is explained, promoted, and legitimized on the social media platform TikTok. By using the Foucauldian concept of self-transformative practices, we illustrate how self-discipline is performed by IE content creators. The analysis shows that the IE approach is psychologized as part of a therapeutic discourse and, at the same time, it is a way for young women to resist the “diet culture” to become empowered in their self-transformation. The analysis illustrates how the IE approach can be understood as a part of a self-transformative project, and how achieving the position as an “intuitive eater” requires an increase in self-awareness. As such, we argue that the content creators produce a specific psychologized discourse of hunger and an affectively-disciplined subject, all represented as “freedom from diet culture.”


Introduction
There is a long history of dieting for weight loss and food restrictions to keep a bulging body in check in accordance with prevailing ideals (Nilsson 2011).For decades, dieting has been criticized for being harmful to young people's body image and ineffective, as it is difficult to maintain new eating habits and "ideal" weight after dieting (McKenzie and Watts 2021).The difficulty of changing eating habits includes more than "just eating less or healthier," it is also about incorporating these new food habits into everyday life (McKenzie and Watts 2021).Intuitive Eating (henceforth, IE) has become an increasingly common strategy for healthy eating and generated research interest within several fields (Faw et al. 2020;Linardon, Tylka, and Fuller-Tyszkiewicz 2021).
IE aims at developing a more positive relationship with food (Tribole 2019).It was developed by dieticians in 1995 to prevent and heal disordered eating and is described on the official IE website (https://www.intuitiveeating.org/what-is-intuitive-eating-tribole)as a "non-diet."It is often framed in opposition to contemporary weight-loss diets, as a means of resisting dieting and food restriction and unlearning "diet culture."In this article, we will analyze how this growing contemporary phenomenon is represented, promoted, and legitimized on the increasingly popular social media platform TikTok.
Today's societies are in many ways preoccupied with food and eating.Jovanovski (2017) argues that we live in a pathogenetic or bulimic culture where eating is intimately tied to restrictions and anxiety, and where many have a (more or less) conflicted relationship to food.Our eating and our bodies are increasingly becoming markers of social identity through which we communicate ideals and personal characteristics.Therefore, we must control our bodies and eating through food restrictions and physical exercise so that they can become the symbols we want to present to the outside world; this is what Jovanovski (2017) calls body policing.These body-taming regulations work both on an individual level and as part of a normative societal framework that controls the population (Foucault 1982a).
The contemporary biomedical food and body discourse influences not only public policies and organized "health" promotion practices, but it also influences the public psyche and the mindset of young people (Sykes and McPhail 2008).As a form of resistance to this "bulimic culture" and food regulations, the "body positive" movement has emerged.The body-positive movement rejects neoliberal ideals of "choice-driven, bodily-oriented self-improvement" (Sastre 2014, 932) as well as a societal obsession with health and exercise (Cwynar-Horta 2016), instead promoting a positive view of one's self and body regardless of how one exercise, eats or looks.We argue that IE, in its rejection of "diet culture" and emphasis on removing shame from eating, is aligned with a body positive, rhetoric, while simultaneously being connected to ideas of "healthy" living (Eriksson and Machin, 2020) (Van Dyke and Drinkwater 2014;Gast and Hawks 1998).
Social media afford people a vital space for identity-making and provide researchers with valuable data about self-representation and communication (Cheng Stahl and Literat 2022).Bhandari and Bimo (2022) argue that while TikTok is similar to many other social media platforms, the app's popularity among young people can in part be attributed to the algorithm's strong influence over which content users see, leading to the creation of "the algorithmized self," where users' self-making online intersects with algorithmic enhancement (Bhandari and Bimo 2022).Content about health, eating, and dieting is something that young people on TikTok can actively seek out, but also have shown to them through the algorithm, which is designed to refine and enhance user experiences.Accordingly, only brief interactions with content can affect what the algorithm delivers to the users' feeds, as it searches for similar content to share.

A history of eating, a history of food restrictions
There seems to be an almost infinite interest in food, "healthy" eating, and the human body (Eriksson and Machin 2020).Different food regimes have been a central part of people's lives for millennia and have had both moral and religious influences.During the nineteenth century there was an increasing focus on weight loss and the search for a "healthy body" (Foxcroft 2011).The concept of "diet" has gradually changed meaning from the food we normally eat to the food restrictions we use to lose weight (Madrone 2022).Many researchers have highlighted how this has produced a contemporary "diet culture" (Foxcroft 2011;Jovanovski 2017).In this text, we understand dieting as any form of food restrictions with the goal of losing weight and "diet culture" as the normative discursive framework that values the slim, fit body and equates such body size to health and moral virtue (Jovanovski and Jaeger 2022;Madrone 2022).Furthermore, this normative framework attributes value to different foods and eating practices as a way to produce moral and social status.
Today, "disordered eating behaviors" and obesity are two of the most investigated areas in public health and social science research (Hazzard et al. 2020;Linardon, Tylka, and Fuller-Tyszkiewicz 2021;Sastre 2014).Research has focused on mapping the risks of obesity on individual and societal levels by demonstrating socio-economic effects and causes, and offering advice about how to lose weight and avoid diseases that are categorized as obesity-related (WHO 2020).In the last two decades, interest has turned to illuminating peoples' experiences of living with a non-normative body, and the cultural messages about food and eating that surround us in our everyday lives (Counihan and Van Esterik 2013;Faw et al. 2020).
Our eating and bodies have a long history of being intertwined with personality and personal characteristics (Featherstone 2010).Although the fat body has been a normative ideal and a status symbol in some eras, the concern about overeating and its consequences has deep roots (Nilsson 2011).Throughout history being described as "overweight" or "a voracious glutton" has been closely linked to ridicule, moral judgment, and a lack of self-control (Västerbro 2019).The idea of physiognomy from the ancient Greece, stating that the status of the psyche is dependent on the shape of the body, and that personality will shine through the outer appearance, still remains a contemporary reality in many Western societies (Featherstone 2010).Thus, dieting and food restrictions are seen as important self-improving activities (Jovanovski 2017).Orbach (1978) emphasized that dieting, fatness, and body dissatisfaction are feminist issues in the sense that it is mainly young women who engage in dieting.In a Scandinavian study, Frisén, Holmqvist Gattario, and Lunde (2014) have shown that an overwhelming majority of all young women have dieted, and an increasing proportion of the teenage girls today say that they are dissatisfied with and want to change their bodies.Bell and McNaughton (2007) argue that fatness in itself is not the problem, it is the female fat body that is stigmatized.Although this has gradually changed during the last decades with an increase in the marketing of diets and dieting products for men (Contois 2020;Nilsson 2011), dieting still seems to be predominantly targeted at young women and considered a gendered activity (Frisén, Holmqvist Gattario, and Lunde 2014).
However, in recent decades there has been an increasingly strong opposition to such a toxic diet discourse (Lupton 2013).Jovanovski (2017) highlights two dominant food femininities-one characterized by food restrictions and weight loss and the other by pleasure-seeking, hedonic femininity characterized by a permissive attitude to food and diet resistance.Although these discourses are seemingly opposites, they both contain the quest for self-surveillance and self-reflective eating practices.In the 1990s IE emerged as a practice of renouncing diet restrictions and, instead, emboldening people to listen to their primordial intuition toward food and eating (Tribole 2019).It includes prompts to satiate, rather than suppress hunger (Ruiz 2023).Such a permissive approach to food has had a significant impact and is still a widespread movement, not the least on social media.However, the approach has also been criticized for oversimplifying complex relations to food and eating or for just being an ineffective method of weight reduction (Ruiz 2023).

Healthism in contemporary society
An increasingly central part of our lives is devoted to "living healthily" and making "healthy food choices" to live a better life (O'Hagan 2020).These implicit and explicit expectations, and the demands they place on individuals, have come to characterize the ideology of the twenty-first century: healthism.The concept was first introduced by Crawford in 1980 to highlight how a "healthy lifestyle" has become central to the individual citizen.Crawford explains healthism as "a process that also serves the illusion that we can as individuals control our existence, and that taking personal action to improve health will somehow satisfy the longing for a much more varied complexity of needs" (Crawford 1980, 368).Moreover, healthism includes expectations of (and responsibility for) a healthy lifestyle and self-improvement.Such a social order needs self-reflection, self-surveillance, and self-control especially when it comes to food choices and eating.Thus, dieting and weight control are not simply a pursuit of beauty, but about showcasing self-control (O'Connor 2013).Developing, having, and maintaining health becomes a question of individual responsibility and personal character, visible in our everyday actions, as a part of a neoliberal healthism discourse that emphasizes self-care as an individual responsibility (Clark 2018).
Many discuss eating habits and weight in everyday encounters and display their bodies and eating on social media.In this healthism discourse, many see eating behaviors that are "unhealthy" or categorized as fattening as moral failures that are in many aspects socially stigmatized (Lupton 2013).Consequently, this stigma has also given rise to areas of resistance against a contemporary "diet culture" and evoked social communities to resist the hegemonic healthist norm of a thin body (Farrell 2011).These areas of resistance emerge from the cultural meanings of fat and from personal experiences of having a non-normative body size (Lupton 2013).Many online health and dieting communities, especially those associated with IE, use the term "diet culture" to criticize contemporary dieting norms characterized by food restrictions and prohibitions and the pursuit of a slim body (Jovanovski and Jaeger 2022).

Intuitive eating
The IE approach encourages varied over restrictive diets, promotes food enjoyment as well as nourishment, and differentiates physical or biological hunger from an emotional one (Resch 2013).IE is framed as a body positive (Intuitive Eating 2021a) and a weight-inclusive approach on the official website.Rather than using weight as an indicator of health, it focuses on non-weight-based markers and emphasizes that it is not a weight-loss approach (Tribole 2018(Tribole , 2019)).As such, the IE approach aligns with the current body positive movement, as it promotes guilt-free consumption of food and attempts to move away from the idea of certain foods being "bad."Moreover, in research on anorexia and bulimia, the IE approach is often highlighted as a forceful intervention to reduce disordered eating behaviors, such as binge eating (Hazzard et al. 2020).
The ten principles of IE are rejecting the diet mentality, honoring your hunger, making peace with food, challenging the food police, discovering the satisfaction factor, feeling your fullness, coping with your emotions with kindness, respecting your body, moving and feeling the difference, and honoring your health with gentle nutrition (Intuitive Eating 2021b).Paradoxically, research on IE describes it as a new weight-loss paradigm, which combats overeating by focusing on physical or biological rather than emotional hunger (Gast and Hawks 1998).In more recent work, IE and other contemporary approaches are analyzed as part of an ongoing movement to create more confident relationships with food (Faw et al. 2020;Jovanovski and Jaeger 2022).Such an approach nevertheless overemphasizes an individualized bodily control with too little consideration of societal structures in which our ideas and practices of health are formed (Schwartzman 2015).Healthy habits include several aspects beyond individual choices, such as availability and cost of healthy foods (O'Hagan 2020).
In the 1960s, Tomkins introduced the concept of affect to describe specific innate physiological responses and argued that these are the human primary motivational systems (Tomkins 1962).In brief, according to Tomkins' original theory, affect is the biological part of an emotional expression, the automatic and immediate response.Affect theory has also been used in trying to understand bodily experiences outside of "emotional representation" (Massumi 1995).This is often labeled the affective turn, described as a pre-personal intensity that corresponds to an experiential state of the body to another; it also implies an enlargement or reduction of the capacity to act (Deleuze and Guattari 1987).In a similar vein, IE turns its interest to the idea of a primary biological affective system to guide the individual's "natural craving" for food.IE emphasizes the importance of "the natural" or "biological" hunger, which we call affect.In our analyses, we are interested in affect from a discursive point of view, and how affect is used by the content creators to understand and manage hunger and regulate eating (Wetherell 2012).Thus, we do not understand affect as a "pre-discursive emotion" ready to be unveiled.Instead, we analyze how the idea of affect, here often described as biological hunger, is interpreted and used by the content creators.By emphasizing cravings, and desires as central to the IE approach, eating becomes an affective endeavor, where normative and socially influenced emotions should be avoided in favor of affective (biological) hunger (Wetherell 2012).The concept of affect is therefore both an embodied and meaning-making discursive practice (Wetherell 2012), and in talk about eating and hunger, producing and circulating affect plays a vital role in spreading and getting people interested in, or engaged with intuitive eating.

Theoretical considerations
By studying videos on TikTok, this article will analyze how the IE approach is rhetorically performed by IE content creators, who can also be considered IE influencers.The food we eat and the food we do not eat or choose not to eat is expected to tell us something about who we are (Clark 2018).Through our food consumption, we can display personal values and ideals, as a central part of our presentation of self (Lupton 2013).By studying how everyday practices of eating and food choices are represented by young influencers on social media, recurrent repertories can illustrate norms and societal morals (Potter 1996).
For decades, scholars have emphasized how our identity formation involves various forms of self-presentations (Crawford 1980;Gonick 2006;Jovanovski 2017).Increasingly, these self-presentations are displayed online and involve descriptions of self-improvement practices (Cheng Stahl and Literat 2022).However, the public display of self-improvement and transformation is by no means a new phenomenon.Foucault explores the ancient Greek techniques of caring for the self through dietary regulations or dietary regimes and highlights the concept of self-transformative practices (Foucault 1982b(Foucault , 1983;;Taylor 2010).In all societies, people are controlled by practices that construct and regulate the framework for normality and desirable behavior (Foucault 1982a).Such regulations involve different techniques (or practices) for self-improvement, which function within a normative framework of regulation, that produces docile bodies within the biopolitical control of populations (Foucault 1977).In this article, we are interested in how norms and techniques of self-improvement are produced by the IE content creators in their videos.Foucault also emphasizes that self-technologies, as techniques of self-governing, that are not connected to particular institutions, are active in all societies and function as practices of self-transformation.Self-technologies are self-governance based on normative expectations of the individual, in contrast to the exercise of power based on external disciplining (Foucault 1982b).These technologies of power are exercised by acting in accordance with social norms imposed on us.In our analyses, technologies through which these individuals engage in self-transformation, are at the very core of the analysis (Pylypa 1998).

Methodology
The material for this article comes from a small field study on TikTok.TikTok is a social media, video-sharing platform that allows users to upload videos that are up to 3 min long.The app hosts a "for you" feed and a "following" feed.The "for you" feed is generated by TikTok's algorithm, while the "following" feed features what a user actively follows.Bhandari and Bimo (2022) argue that a key element that distinguishes TikTok is the "for you" algorithm which makes it less user-driven than other social media.Instead, the algorithm plays a large role in determining what content users are exposed to.At the same time, users actively engage with the algorithm by interacting with videos to reinforce the content being presented through likes and comments (Bhandari and Bimo 2022).The "for you" page, therefore, can become a reflection of the self, of interests and personality traits, through which people produce (and reproduce) personal identities.
The Association of Internet Researchers emphasizes the importance of having a process and context-based approach to ethics (Franzke et al. 2020).Social media materials, such as TikTok videos are tricky to work with as they, on the one hand, exist openly on the internet while, on the other, are also being created by actual people.The topic of eating and eating disorders online, and how validation from others can exacerbate eating disorders, further complicates the process of engaging with participants (Svedmark 2016).As we are interested in how the IE approach is conceptualized on the platform, rather than by specific individuals, the videos we analyze are not cited and the creators have not been named.As we have disclosed both the platform and hashtag, however, these creators are not completely anonymous.The content they create is also public and framed as informational, to be disseminated.The article therefore provides some protection for individual creators, while being transparent about the source of the material.
All empirical material used in this paper is available on TikTok in its entirety.The videos were all made available for download by the content creators, a feature that TikTok users can set themselves.All quotes used in the findings section are reproduced verbatim, but all names are removed.The purpose of the article is not to analyze the individual videos or critically examine the legitimacy of the statements.In this material about the concept of IE, the empirical data does not process sensitive personal information.The study follows the guidelines for ethical research practice within social sciences established by the Swedish Research Council (2017), as we have sought to protect individuals from harm by not naming content creators while remaining transparent about the research process.In addition, to ensure analytical validation, our provisional understanding of the empirical material has been discussed at several data sessions with colleagues at the Discourse Seminar at Stockholm University.

Data and analytical procedure
The material we collected were videos found under the #intuitiveeating hashtag.As they were collected from a hashtag, they were organized and appeared in order of popularity rather than chronologically.The focus of the data collection was videos that appeared informative about how the approach works, rather than other IE-related content that focuses more on the individual practice of the approach.These videos were often accompanied by text covering the videos, such as "What is intuitive eating?" and other captions, such as "intuitive eating-how to" and "the stages of intuitive eating" that established them as educational and informative videos about the intuitive eating framework.Some of the creators work as dieticians or IE counselors while others are IE practitioners sharing information.The fact that several of the creators have some training related to food, eating and IE is particularly interesting in relation to how such credentials may influence the audience.Hoare et al. (2022) argue that content on social media in general may influence young people's choices, but especially when information is given by someone claiming credibility, such as relevant training.The IE content creators included in the dataset were all young adults or in their late teens, and the majority were based in the US.
Using interpretative repertoires as an analytic tool is based on the works of Foucault and illustrates ways in which discursive practices are organized, or how discourse is performed "in action" (Potter 1996).In short, interpretative repertoires are the different ways people talk about an event in a coherent manner (Potter 1996).Interpretative repertoires are interesting as they demonstrate similarities rather than variations within and between accounts, enabling collections of these accounts into different social categories, such as female, fat, healthy or, as in this case, an intuitive eater.In this study, interpretative repertoires are the rhetorical building blocks used in the online videos to make truth-claims, explain and justify a specific version in this particular context.
The empirical material in this study was collected from the video sharing platform TikTok during the spring of 2021 from the hashtag #intuitiveeating; it comprises 28 videos of up to 1 min.In the first part of the analysis, all videos were viewed in their entirety by both authors, and an overall thematic coding was carried out.For example, recurring content themes were feelings related to eating and hunger, how to deal with norms of healthy/unhealthy food, and how to navigate expectations of "being healthy."In the second step, the themes were clustered as interpretative repertoires based on similarities within and across accounts in the empirical material (Potter 1996).The analysis resulted in three interpretative repertoires: (1) Psychologizing eating and "honoring your hunger," (2) "Walking away" from diet culture, and (3) Self-transformative practices and the neoliberal subject.Several recurrent and typical accounts from each repertoire were then transcribed verbatim by both authors, based on the transcription conventions of Jefferson (2004).

Findings
The chosen examples are based on an analysis of the entire corpus of data and illustrate recurrent and similar accounts from the entire set of data.Based on our discursive approach, the analysis focuses on how IE is represented and legitimized by the content creators in the videos and how specific norms and discourses about eating, health, and identity thereby become visible.

Psychologizing eating and "honor your hunger"
One of the more central parts of the material is the talk about eating and emotions.It is emphasized by the content creators in this study that you should pay attention to your cravings or feel your hunger, and instead of resisting the desire for food assigned as "unhealthy" you should give in to the feeling and eat.A central part is the psychologizing of eating; although eating is often only understood as an act for the purpose of satisfying hunger, it also includes the satisfaction of something deeper than hunger.In the excerpt below, one IE content creator describes that craving is good, as well as the kind of behavior not honoring your cravings will result in.
So, let's say you are craving a slice of pizza and a chocolate chip cookie.With intuitive eating you listen to your body, you eat a slice of pizza, you eat the cholate chip cookie and you move on with your life.And that's because you've satisfied your body.You're all full and you'll just eat next time the hunger calls.Without intuitive eating you will not allow yourself to have your pizza and a chocolate chip cookie and instead you will maybe go for an option such as grilled chicken and steam broccoli because that's what diet culture has taught us is a "balanced meal" [making quotation mark with fingers].And instead of listening to your body, the next two weeks you're gonna be dreaming, wishing, you're gonna be salivating over that slice of pizza and your chocolate chip cookie that you wanted so bad but you restricted your body from.And then, one Saturday night, you are going to be so deprived that you're gonna call Dominos at 2am or any other pizza company order an extra-large pizza, order a twelve pack of chocolate chip cookies and binge out on them and restrict your body for the next two weeks to punish yourself.
The example illustrates how the hunger is psychologized and at the same time shows a dichotomy between affective/biological eating and emotional eating.Here, craving (as an affect) is emphasized by the content creator as positive which means honoring your inner physical, natural, or biological desires, e.g."next time the hunger calls."Moreover, the psychological effect of restriction results in binging.In IE it is our affects or biological and pre-discursive emotions that are supposed to guide our eating.Restrictions are part of the oppression from a wider contemporary "diet-culture."In a medical discourse on obesity and eating disorders it is argued that using food to deal with everyday problems is a bad way to cope with personal issues and that eating should be disconnected from emotions (Hazzard et al. 2020).In the case of IE content on TikTok, hunger is described as part of something deeper, as a form of biological, pre-discursive state.Accordingly, if you try to limit, be restrictive to, or resist your eating affects, this will be counterproductive and harmful.Ultimately, this is argued to result in harmful eating behaviors and thinking.Instead, it is only when you honor the biological stimuli related to eating that you can feel and honor emotions and, thereafter, start to crave a variety of foods assigned multiple categorizations.
In another example of how biological signals will guide your eating, one of the IE-content creators emphasizes: I got a signal from my stomach that I am hungry.So, let's eat!I always start with a good stare at the fridge.Hm, hm.I think we have turkey.Yes!But do we have bread?Oh my God, I'm so lucky we just had two pieces left.I'm gonna make a turkey sandwich because it sounds good to me [singing].I'm a Miracle Whip-girl.No shame.Shall I put a little cheese on it?Shall I cut it this way or this way?This way or this way.Help.We're gonna be fine and different today, okay.I usually always go for Doritos but Ìm not in the mood for them today.Ìm going for carrots and ranch.Ahh, we did it.I'm gonna start with carrot.Mm [showing thumbs up].Happy.
The example illustrates the recurring issue posed by content creators of listening to your body, and a recurrent repertoire involves "a signal from my stomach" or to look into the fridge and consider the options available, often described by the content creators as feeling their way to the right food.The choice of food should therefore not be based on diet culture influenced choices, but start on an affective level.The example also shows how the diet culture is still present when the IE-content creator exclaims, "I'm a Miracle Whip-girl.No shame."Accordingly, the examples show that there are stigmatized cultural and socioeconomic norms around eating, in this case, (a cheaper form of ) mayonnaise with fewer calories and its links to feelings of shame.However, this social and cultural "emotion" shall be ignored ("no shame") in favor of the "primary affect" ("a signal from my stomach").This illustrates another form of self-transformation, from conscious choices based on cultural norms, expectations, and emotions, to choices based on inner pivotal feelings or affects.However, this repertoire still works within a neoliberal discourse of self-improvement based on primary biological cravings.Instead of self-transformation through preformulated rules and food-restrictions, this transformation is characterized by a focus on affective, biological desires, thereby considered to be (more) natural needs.Rose (2019) underlines that this form of self-transformative practice where the problem is to be found within the psyche of the individual rather than in the surrounding context, fits well into a contemporary psychologized discourse of governance.
Furthermore, this form of psychologized bio-power seeks to biologize human emotions in a turn to affect.Affect is often explained and understood as something that precedes emotions (a form of pre-or asocial emotion), and it is considered primary and, therefore, more valid to listen to and follow.Accordingly, this self-governance works within a present psychologized discourse of introspection and listening to your emotions in an aspiration to follow your "gut feeling" (Rose 2019).

"Walking away" from diet culture
IE is consistently framed by the TikTok content creators as a non-diet, in that it does not intend to restrict eating or produce weight loss.Through the focus on developing a more "guilt-free" relationship to food, intuitive eaters are positioned as non-dieting people, who have rejected restrictive diets.Any approach to eating categorized as a "diet" is therefore understood as weight-loss focused, restricting food intake either by excluding certain "bad" food groups or counting calories.Diet culture is understood as a value system that promotes thinness and appearance over health, well-being, and honoring one's agency and cravings.IE proponents reject diet culture, instead promoting health and transforming how they think about eating.One prominent IE-content creator on TikTok argues: Want to know a secret from a registered dietitian and a certified intuitive eating counsellor?You were born into this world an intuitive eater.Living in diet culture has turned off your internal cues but we can absolutely turn them back on.
Along with this, the text "Everyone is naturally an intuitive eater.Diet culture (food rules, diets, calorie counting, etc.) builds a distrust with your body but we can learn how to trust our bodies again " appears on screen.Here, IE is framed not only as an approach to food to unlearn diet culture but something natural or biological.By arguing that everyone is born an intuitive eater, IE becomes a universal state of being that has been disrupted over time, resulting in an eating disordered society.IE is framed as the alternative to diet culture, as it is the natural, original state.In response to a comment on a previous video that IE doesn't work because of cravings, a commentator argues: You want to have those things for breakfast because you're not allowed to have them.You're restricting yourself and you're telling yourself that you're a bad person.You probably even feel guilt and shame when you eat those.When we learn to become intuitive eaters, it's not just about eating those kinds of foods all the time.Yes, it is about knowing that you have unconditional permission to eat those, but when you do eat them, we want to really tap into being present and saying, "how did that feel, if you ate those things for breakfast?".Physically, mentally, emotionally.Did those foods satisfy you when you ate them?There might be days when you do want to eat pie for breakfast and you're an intuitive eater, but then there might be days when a veggie omelette with some whole grain toast with some avocado spread on top sounds pretty damn good as well.Until you have unconditional permission to eat, you're going to continue restricting and binging on these foods.
Restriction due to labeling certain foods as inappropriate for different meals is seen by this content creator as an effect of diet culture.Further, restricting or failing to restrict is connected to feelings of shame, and associated with binging or "overeating."In contrast to restriction and dieting, the aspects of satisfaction, physical (affective) hunger, and the need for nutrient dense, enjoyable foods are pointed out by the IE content creators on TikTok.These core principles of IE focus on fulfilling a need for nutrients and by not listening to these signals, there is a risk of producing emotionally driven eating.Accordingly, IE is presented as emphasizing that biological aspects of hunger should be given greater importance than emotional values as part of a wider societal diet culture and healthism discourse.
Further, diet culture is mentioned as a hindrance in becoming intuitive because it has resulted in certain "nutrient dense" foods becoming coded as part of attempts of dieting for weight loss.As one content creator describes it: Just thought of another reason why diet culture sucks.So, I'm sitting here, enjoying my green smoothie, there is nothing wrong with enjoying a green smoothie.But when you first start to walk away from diet culture, drinking a green smoothie can be kind of triggering, because you're thinking "this used to be all I could have when I was on xyz diet".Am I really allowed to have a green smoothie now that I'm not dieting anymore?Does that mean I'm dieting again?That is such a common myth about intuitive eating.You are allowed to have nutrient dense foods with Intuitive Eating.You are allowed to have whatever you want, and your body will actually start to crave nutrient dense foods, once you stop dieting, restricting, and binging.So, cheers to fucking hating diet culture.
The text "you are allowed to enjoy nutrient dense foods with Intuitive Eating" also appears on screen as the content creator speaks, further emphasizing that food coded as "healthy" within diet culture is also considered acceptable food for IE.At the end of the video, she takes a sip of the mentioned smoothie, showing that she allows herself nutrient dense food despite its previous connection to dieting.The shift from referring to certain foods as "good" or "healthy" to "nutrient dense" could also be read as an attempt to destigmatize eating and foods.IE is framed here as anti-restriction, in that no specific food is off limits.In the rejection of diet culture, the IE approach is elevated by its advocates as part of transformative, body-positive culture, creating a counter narrative to dieting for weight loss.In contrast to diet culture's promotion of thinness over health (and thinness as health), IE promotes an unconditional right to eat all foods, as a means of preventing harmful relationships to food.Schwartzman (2015) argues that IE provides a promising alternative to diet culture, in that it decreases shame and increases self-esteem.However, Schwartzman criticizes IE for failing to consider the structural conditions that shape people's food choices, such as food insecurity and unequal food-access that hinder the practice of IE.
At the same time, IE supports ideals of self-transformation and body positivity.Unlearning "diet culture" means taking control over one's psyche, and relearning internal biological cues.Additionally, IE's focus on paying attention to physical or biological hunger (as an affective, pre-discursive guideline) contrasts with a medical emphasis that hunger and eating should be separated from emotional states (Linardon, Tylka, and Fuller-Tyszkiewicz 2021).IE is emphasizing a form of healthism packaged as "food freedom" and a body positive approach that does not focus on weight or weight loss, and therefore, connects to a more hedonic and accepting approach to eating (Jovanovski 2017).While rejecting diet culture, the IE content creators also often highlight the importance of exercise, nutrients, and "healthy living," and are therefore, at the same time, at odds with strands of the body positive movement.
In addition.while IE rejects "diet mentality" and is framed as a "weight-neutral" approach, aligning with a body positive rejection of a "choice-driven, bodily-oriented self-improvement" (Sastre 2014, 932) and societal obsession with "health" (Cwynar-Horta 2016), it nevertheless originates from dietitians and promotes health through nutrition and exercise.As such, it fails to fully embrace a "radical" body positivity (Sastre 2014).Further, most research conducted on IE connects the approach to attempts in preventing obesity and other harmful outcomes, further reinforcing its connection to a "healthy" life (Van Dyke and Drinkwater 2014; Gast and Hawks 1998).

Self-transformative practices and the neoliberal subject
While rejecting dieting for weight loss and the idea of an ideal body shape, the IE approach nevertheless promotes an individualized, self-improving, or self-transformative philosophy developing mentally and physically "healthy" people craving nutrient dense food.Schwartzman (2015) emphasizes the need to account for how desires are shaped by society and social structures, such as race, class, and gender.The idea that we are born intuitive eaters, as is claimed by some of the content creators, and can return to being such, disregards the impact that society has on body and health ideals, on how culture shapes what we eat, and on how inequity impacts what food we can access.The emphasis on the nutrient dense foods that are promoted implicitly frames certain foods as better than others, without explicitly categorizing any food as "bad."The green smoothie mentioned in the previous section provides an example of food associated with "diet culture mentality, " while also being something nutrient dense that one is allowed to crave.In fact, in the green smoothie video, nutrient dense foods are framed as what you will crave once you free yourself from restrictions, and relearn the internal cues that you were "born with."This demonstrates that IE, as presented on TikTok, has a variety of moral contradictions.This representation of IE asserts that if we follow our biological stimuli, "healthy" food cravings will result.In other words, while we are permitted to eat "unhealthy food," doing so will make us yearn for "healthy food." IE stresses a resistance to dietary restrictions while still supporting a contemporary healthy food discourse.This method therefore seems to incorporate a food morality that, despite its claims to the contrary, shares many characteristics with contemporary diet culture.The distinction is that for intuitive eaters, a "healthy lifestyle" is achieved by relying on your own (affective) cravings, rather than on governmental food recommendations and restrictions.Such therapeutic services can be found for "free" on social media apps, such as TikTok.Social media platforms can function as pedagogical spaces for deliberative conversations, enabling other conversations than those in one's everyday life, while also inviting users to be personal and to engage (Papacharissi 2014).While social media can amplify marginalized voices and spread awareness of various social issues, the creation of small communities focused on specific issues also tends to promote a neoliberal discourse centered on self-actualization (Primo, Zamperini, and Testoni 2019).Additionally, in studies on body dissatisfaction among young women, it is argued that perceptions of bodies, fatness, and dieting are significantly influenced by one's social network and the way women talk to each other about their bodies.Such talk is associated both with negative self-esteem and relational benefits (Faw et al. 2020).Social media facilitates the move of such conversation from immediate surroundings to an online setting, where different conversations can take place, offering both reinforcing and alternative ways of thinking.
The IE content creators on TikTok make informational videos about the approach and answer questions from followers.Beyond that direct engagement of addressing comments, other videos about the approach frequently address the viewer (as "you").One IE enthusiast describes her own experiences, before finding IE, of transitioning from being an athlete to working out less and feeling like she was undeserving of carbs.She ends the video by telling the viewer: "So just in case you needed the reminder, you don't need to work out to earn your food." Drawing on these ideas of social media as a space for the creation of like-minded communities as significant in the formation of body (dis) satisfaction (Faw et al. 2020), IE videos on TikTok propagate an ongoing neoliberal project of self-improvement and self-transformation.The rationale behind these videos seems to be that society fails women in the promotion of "diet culture" and labeling certain foods and body shapes as "bad," so platforms like TikTok can emerge as alternative spaces for learning about eating and "health."By using their personal experiences and directly addressing their audience, IE content creators build relationships with their viewers and allow young women to discuss their bodies with each other, constructing an affective bond between them (Faw et al. 2020).Therefore, they simultaneously spread information about IE, share their personal struggles with food, and show their individual paths to embracing the approach.
Within IE self-transformation is achieved through an increased awareness of "internal cues." The emphasis on honoring one's body, providing it with exercise and nutrient dense food, and learning to identify "real" (biological) hunger produces a highly disciplined subject.At the same time, the focus on rejecting diet culture produces this disciplined subject under the guise of being "free." The approach promoted in these videos is thoughtful rather than carefree, in that it promotes thinking and consideration.This emphasizes a high degree of bodily awareness, where the practice of eating without thought is not enough.Instead, you must become an intuitive eater, where food freedom requires a heightened self-knowledge.Ultimately, the IE promotes a self-transformative practice toward body positivity and resistance to "diet culture," and reproduces a highly regulated body in control of its health.

Discussion
For decades, research has argued that we live in a bulimic, body-policing culture, characterized by food restrictions and weight loss diets in the search for a "healthy" life and a "beautiful" body (Gonick 2006;Sastre 2014).Simultaneously, this healthism discourse has created resistance that emphasizes the right to enjoy food, and to avoid guilt in relation to eating (Jovanovski 2017).This study illustrates how IE, and particularly how it is being represented on TikTok, is part of this growing movement that resists contemporary "diet culture."At the same time, it is also part of a neoliberal governing logic characterized by a strong belief in biological cravings and a pre-discursive idea of affect as a guideline for human behavior.By framing IE as "honoring" oneself, this approach to food enables a sense of reclaiming control over one's psyche and body, framing it as liberation from a patriarchal "diet culture."Nevertheless, the way it is framed online perpetuates healthism and certain diet-related discourses.
Moreover, we have illuminated how this approach to food and eating functions within a wider therapeutic ethos and a contemporary psychologized understanding of ourselves.The content creators emphasize the importance of affective, "natural" desires to explain and legitimize the intuitive relation to eating.The psychologization of hunger can also be illustrated through the dichotomy of affective eating and emotional eating.While affective eating is seen as a positive response to inner biological food desires, emotional eating is a dangerous response to negative emotions.Accordingly, to resist the normative framework of diet culture is, within IE, considered a new form of personal freedom.Paradoxically, this freedom seems to have the same goal as contemporary diet culture-to create a "healthy lifestyle." IE is also framed online as an act of resistance against diet culture.In that sense, this phenomenon illustrates a rebranding of the neoliberal subject.From being based on free will and rational choice, freedom is achieved by paying attention to biological stimuli and listen to your body and your hunger.Another form of biologized self-discipline is created by not disciplining cravings, feelings, and desires for snacks or food assigned as "unhealthy"; it is a self-discipline through eschewing self-control and surrendering to biology.As we have shown, this is like a new form of biological self-transformative practice based on a diet culture resistance, which still operates within a neoliberal discourse of self-transformation through "the natural," "the biological," or "the affective."

Conclusions
In this article, we have studied how online representations of the IE approach, as framed by content creators on TikTok, can be understood as a form of self-transformative practice.The emphasis on "honoring your body," through nutrient dense food and stressing "biological-hunger-cravings," and rejecting diet culture and its food morality, produces a highly self-disciplined subject under the disguise of personal freedom.Rose (1996) underlines that the rise of the psychological has changed the way we make sense of ourselves, our relations, and social problems.In contemporary Western societies, we understand ourselves through psychological terminology: we have anxiety and cravings and we seek mental balance.Thus, the social problem of eating, along with other social problems, can be found in our psyche and is managed by psychology (Rose 2019).Furthermore, our analysis shows that IE is, moreover, much more than an act to satisfy hunger or enjoy eating.It is also a central part of our