Would You Feed That to Your Bestie?

A Not-So-Scientific Guide to Trusting Yourself with Food

This week’s newsletter is a response to a question I hear often — sometimes directly, sometimes between the lines:

“I don’t know how much to serve myself. I can’t tell if I’m eating too much or too little. How do I know what’s enough?”

This uncertainty makes so much sense.

When you’ve lived through years of dieting, food rules, or disordered eating, your definition of hunger (and your relationship to it) can get scrambled. When your internal signals are muted or misfiring, it’s hard to know what “enough” feels like — physically, emotionally, or both.

As far back as many of us can remember, we’ve been absorbing messages about how we should eat. But these messages didn’t come from places of embodied wisdom or personal attunement — they came from magazine headlines, celebrity meal plans, calorie-tracking apps, “what I eat in a day” videos, and programs promising transformation.

In fact, when I share my joy of yogurt bowls on Instagram, my DMs are inevitably flooded with messages like:

“How much granola? How much peanut butter? What kind of yogurt? The whole banana?”

And I’m not surprised — we’ve been trained to eat only with a set of rules in hand.

From Weight Watchers to Whole30, Noom to Keto, we’ve been told to look outward for guidance. We learned to follow the portion sizes on the back of a box or the red-yellow-green traffic lights on an app, rather than tuning into our own cues. We learned that fullness was suspect, and that appetite should be suppressed, controlled, or ignored.

So of course the question comes up:

“How do I know how much to eat?”

The subtext often being: Because I’m not sure my body knows the “right” amount.

Clinically, we know that hunger cues can become dysregulated — whether in the context of chronic dieting, eating disorders, neurodivergence, or other stressors that impact interoception (your ability to perceive internal signals). For many people in recovery from diet culture, part of the work is gently rebuilding that connection. Sometimes through structured eating, sometimes through curiosity and experimentation, often with support.

But even for those who do have hunger cues, it’s still common to feel unsure about the “right” amount to eat.

Even when we want to eat with more freedom and permission, there is often a lingering and ironic fear of eating “too much” — as if there’s still a line we need to find and toe just right. A desire to eat intuitively, but not too intuitively. A wish for freedom, with just enough control to keep us in the safe zone of “not excessive.”

And that’s not a personal flaw, it’s a reflection of how deeply we’ve been conditioned to treat fullness with suspicion, and to believe there’s some perfect serving size that threads the needle between “not restricting” and “not overdoing it.”

Here’s the liberating — and, at first, disorienting — truth:

There is no perfect amount to eat.

Eating is experimental. It always will be. No one can give you the exact portion size, the grams of protein, the just right ratio of food groups that unlocks some mythical balance.

Because our bodies aren’t robots. (Wouldn’t that be convenient? But then we’d miss the wild, intuitive, beautifully messy reality of being alive.)

No influencer, guru, or tracking app can tell us exactly how much we need. Our bodies are actually pretty damn cool, and tend to know what they need — moment to moment. And yes, that can be disarming, because there’s a certain comfort in believing there's a “right” amount to eat.

But finding comfort in a lie that disconnects us from self-trust? I decided I didn’t want that for myself. And I don’t want it for you either.

So I want to offer a tool.

Not a rule, not a should, just a question. One that helped me notice how far I’d drifted from treating myself with basic nourishment and respect. One that pointed out — albeit uncomfortably — the gap between my own food choices and the food I offered others.

“What would I serve to a friend?”

Or:

“How much would I serve someone I love?”

This isn’t a perfect science, but it’s a useful reframing tool — especially in moments when your internal compass feels fuzzy, or you’re unsure whether your portion is guided by preference or by leftover restriction. It’s a way of backing into this with a self-compassion-directed approach to feeding yourself.

Here’s what this looked like for me:

I remember once, early in my recovery, standing in my kitchen making lunch. I had half of a bagel on a plate with a thin spread of cream cheese — the kind you’d see through if you held it up to the light. I was about to sit down and eat when something in me paused. I imagined handing that plate to someone I cared about — my best friend, my sister, a future client.

And in that moment, it hit me:

I would never serve that to someone else.

Not because it was “bad,” not because I was “failing,” but because it was incomplete. Not enough food, not enough pleasure, not enough care. It reflected how little I believed I deserved.

I added the other half of the bagel. A real slather of cream cheese. Some fruit and potato chips on the side. Nothing complicated — just a meal that would actually meet a body’s needs.

That small act created a crack in the old pattern; a place where a new kind of self-respect could take root. Because repeating that small act every day, multiple times per day, added up to something much bigger.

This reframing question isn’t about comparison or perfection. It’s about calibration and compassion.

If you wouldn’t serve your friend some carefully portioned plate and call it lunch, then maybe your body deserves more than that, too.

It invites us to consider: Am I feeding myself with the same baseline care I offer to others? If not, why? What might need attention there?

It’s a practice in curiosity that can challenge our tendency towards exceptionalism. It shows us where we’re buying into the idea that somehow we’re the outlier to the truth that all humans deserve to feed themselves without restriction. It illuminates the dissonance between our values and our choices.

And if this question brings up guilt, fear, or discomfort — that’s part of the work too. Because learning to eat enough often means confronting the ways this control once felt safe. And that’s not a personal failing; that’s often a protective strategy formed in response to a culture that praises deprivation and teaches us to mistrust our hunger.

So the next time you’re not sure, try asking:

• “What would I serve to a friend?”

• “Does this look like a kind plate of food?”

• “How much would feel like enough for someone I love?”

And see what comes up. Not as a final answer (because you can always have seconds, thirds, etc.). But as a doorway into more curiosity, more connection. And — eventually — more trust in your own body.

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Talk to me in the comments: What comes up for you with this reframe? Had you considered it before? If so, has it helped?

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