When you’ve been following food rules all your life, like I did, it’s hard to let them go (remember, as Leon says, it’s all about time and patience). But when I did, lo and behold, all of this happened organically. So many natural parts of eating had been tainted for me, thanks to a lifetime of dieting and disordered eating, and it took so much work to unlearn those lessons and teach myself new ones. But balanced eating was never a focus in my dieting days, and so it wasn’t something I had to wrestle with now. I never had to fret over putting some greens on my plate or making sure I got enough protein in the morning. It just happened, truly intuitively. Watching myself just do this, without effort, was like finding out I’d been a wizard all this time.