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

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.