Want A Healthier Relationship With Food? This Habit May Help

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Mental Health

This Habit Promotes Healthy Eating Habits & Body-Image

Author:

Sela Breen

October 22, 2026

Assistant Health Editor

By Sela Breen

Assistant Health Editor

Sela Breen is the Assistant Health Editor at mindbodygreen. She is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied journalism, international studies, and theatre.

Image by David Prado / Stocksy

October 22, 2026

Much of the advice about fixing your relationship with food centers on rules about what to eat, when to eat, and how much to eat. But rules can often feel restrictive, which in turn, can strain your relationship with food again.

But what if you could improve your relationship with food with a habit that has nothing to do with food at all? Researchers surveyed 500 adults 1in the UK to understand how time spent in nature connects to intuitive eating, the practice of eating based on your body’s internal hunger and fullness cues rather than external diet rules. Here’s what they found.

The real driver isn’t nature

The study did not find that time in nature was directly linked to eating more intuitively. Instead, the connection between the two worked indirectly, via increased body appreciation and self-compassion. People who spent more time in nature tended to report higher levels of both, and it was those two traits, not nature exposure itself, that were associated with more intuitive eating.

If nature directly improved eating habits, the takeaway would simply be “go outside more.” But the study suggests a more specific pathway: contact with nature seems to help people appreciate their bodies for what they can do, not just how they look, and to treat themselves with more compassion rather than harsh self-judgment. Those shifts support a more attuned relationship with food.

Put more simply, nature appears to work on your eating habits by first working on your self-image and self-talk.

Why body appreciation & self-compassion change how you eat

It’s not hard to see why these two traits would matter for eating behavior. When people are harshly critical of their bodies or caught in cycles of shame, it can shows up in how they eat, whether it’s restrictive dieting, emotional eating, or ignoring hunger and fullness cues altogether in favor of external rules.

Body appreciation and self-compassion work against that pattern. When someone feels less judgment toward their body and more kindness toward themselves, they may be more willing to trust their body’s signals instead of overriding them with a diet plan. That internal trust is the foundation of intuitive eating.

This reframes what nature is for

Nature is often framed as a stress reliever or a mood booster, and that’s true. But this research shows that spending time outdoors works as a low-pressure way to support how people see and relate to their own bodies. That’s a meaningfully different mechanism than “getting outside reduces stress, so you eat better.” It’s closer to “getting outside helps you feel more at peace with your body, and that peace changes how you eat.”

For anyone who has tried to fix their eating habits through willpower or restriction alone, this is a useful reminder that the work might start somewhere else entirely, somewhere far removed from food, meal plans, or nutrition labels.

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How to put this into practice

Nature is often framed as a stress reliever or a mood booster, and that’s true. But this research shows that spending time outdoors works as a low-pressure way to support how people see and relate to their own bodies. For anyone who has tried to fix their eating habits through willpower or restriction alone, this is a reminder that the work might start somewhere else entirely, somewhere far removed from food, meal plans, or nutrition labels.

And you don’t need to treat nature as a new type of prescription for body positivity. Just see how you can fit extra time outdoors into your everyday life. Here are a few low-lift ways accomplish that:

• Take short walks:Walk in a park, along tree-lined streets, or anywhere with greenery. It’s worth it even if it is for just 10 to 15 minutes.
• Eat with a view: Have a meal outside or near a window with a view of trees or sky, instead of at a dark desk or dining table.
• Swap one workout: Trade one indoor workout a week for an outdoor one.
• Start your morning outside: Spend a few minutes in a backyard, garden, or balcony feeling the sun on your face before checking your phone.
• Choose outdoor seating: When taking a call on the go or meeting up with friends, opt for a coffee shop patio or a park bench.

The takeaway

If you’ve spent years trying to fix your relationship with food through more rules, more tracking, or more restriction, this research offers a different entry point. Time outside won’t single-handedly change how you eat. But by supporting body appreciation and self-compassion, it may help build the internal trust that intuitive eating depends on.

The goal isn’t to turn nature time into another task to optimize. It’s to build in small, repeatable moments that give your mind room to settle, which, according to this research, can help you feel more at home in your own body.

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