It’s that time of year when the New Year’s Resolutions kick into HIGH gear. Everywhere you turn it’s diet culture and fat phobia. On the other hand if you have been following people in the Intuitive Eating and HAES(R) world, you may be exposed to the ant-diet message as well. You might even be ready to give up on dieting all together, yay!
But what can seem so simple in theory, often proves to be much harder in practice. Trust me, if you ever read a “self help” book and thought, “Wow, that was mind blowing” but then never put any of the ideas in practice, you are definitely not alone!
Sadly, it’s totally normal to want to diet, to believe dieting is the answer and to be terrified of not dieting, and yet there are numerous studies showing it isn’t helping to improve our health and in fact may actually be a very big factor in us gaining weight as a whole.
IMHO, it’s impossible to become an intuitive eater unless you give up dieting. So it’s an important first step! If you keep hoping that if you found the right diet, or had more motivation or willpower, you would be able to lose weight, you won’t be able to tune into your body. You certainly won’t gain body trust. You will have difficulty honoring your hunger and satiety cues and joyful movement may never happen.
So, whether you have been on a million diets and have hit diet rock bottom or never had the willpower to even start to diet but you still don’t like your body but feel guilty about not dieting – let’s dig in!
Giving up dieting for good. Seems easy enough, right? Maybe? Wrong!
Turns out, diet culture has made some deep grooves in our brains. As much as we might want to turn our backs on diet culture, the 70+ billion dollar narcissistic diet industry isn’t going to just let us walk away that easily. Like an abusive partner, they want you to keep coming back for more even though they treat you like dirt.
So if giving up dieting is simultaneously super important and also super hard, how do we do it?
Step 1. Recognize the damage (emotional, physical, social and/ or financial) and long term negative health issues dieting lead to. In your experience, has dieting fulfilled all the promises it made?
Have you been able to lose weight with dieting and keep it off for more than 2 years? Were you happy while you were dieting? What level of satisfaction were you at with your life? Do you currently have the bandwidth and/ or time to commit to the same level of control you did before when you lost weight in the past or were “at your smallest?”
Step 2: Be aware of diet mentality thinking. This is super tricky, especially in our culture where diets such as Noom, Whole30, Paleo or even WW are thought of as “a way of life.”
Dieting mentality can show up as:
“I just want to be healthy.”
“I was good today, I ate a fruit or vegetable at each meal.”
“I am so bad for getting take out, having another serving of dessert or eating more than one carb per meal.”
“But I DO let myself have sugar sometimes, but when I eat too much of it I feel horrible.”
Diet mentality can be dangerous because while a doctor would never expect a person to have enough willpower to cure their broken ankle, physicians routinely expect patients to “lose weight” even though a person’s weight is determined by many things outside of their control including genetics and socio-economc factors.
Diet mentality can also backfire. When we can’t hold out any longer we can easily binge on the food we had previously been restricting, which can lead to feeling out of control around food. We beat ourselves up for not doing it right, falling off the wagon or lacking willpower and can slide down the shame spiral.
How does diet thinking or pseudo dieting show up for you?
Step 3: The final step is getting rid of the dieter tools such as the scale, calorie trackers, or books on how to lose 10 pounds by next week.
How many times have you bought pills that promised a thin body, a diet book that promoted the idea that weight = health, a program that required you to buy all your food through them or wasted a birthday wish on wanting to be smaller?
It’s time to smash the scale, toss the books on the curb and start using those birthday wishes for anything other than a smaller body!
Be honest with yourself… Does seeing the Keto book on your shelf make you feel positive?
Does the number on the scale help you to love your body?
Can you come up with a better wish than “I wish to lose X pounds?”
So often we find ourselves romanticizing our first diet. It was so easy, it worked!
The weight practically melted off! But talk to a life time dieter and you’ll soon hear how dieting leads to misery.
Or, you might be thinking… if not dieting then WHAT?
You might be afraid that if you give up dieting you will never stop eating or you will eat only the wrong things or that people will think you, “let yourself go.”
But fear not, giving up dieting will allow you to begin to tune in to your inner wisdom. Not right away, but it will happen!
I want you to think about what your personal benefits of letting go of dieting might be.
Once you call out dieting for what it truly is, it can be easier to let go of the fantasy. And, you may find you have a lot more bandwidth for resolutions that have nothing to do with changing your amazing body!
Of course, if you feel you might benefit from working with an expert, I would be honored to hold your hand and work with you on your journey to body respect and food freedom! Let’s let go of dieting once and for all in 2023!
Wishing you a happy and healthy holiday season and a merry and bright 2023!