Embracing Intuitive Eating - 5 Ways to Reject the Diet Mentality
“Throw out the diet books and magazine articles that offer you the false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently. Get angry at diet culture that promotes weight loss and the lies that have led you to feel as if you were a failure every time a new diet stopped working and you gained back all of the weight. If you allow even one small hope to linger that a new and better diet or food plan might be lurking around the corner, it will prevent you from being free to rediscover Intuitive Eating.”
Welcome to my Intuitive Eating series, where I am breaking down each of the ten principles of Intuitive Eating and giving real life tips and examples on how to put them into practice. If you got here from my original post on Intuitive Eating, you already read about Principle 1 - Rejecting the Diet Mentality. You may have seen this term being thrown around and are not quite sure what it means. Figuring out how to stop dieting might make it hard to jump into intuitive eating, so let’s talk about it!
So, what exactly is the diet mentality?
Diet mentality is the belief that dieting is the key to health and happiness, and that if we can be successful at dieting, our life will then be full of unicorns, magic, and feeling AMAZING about ourselves. It makes us feel that we absolutely, under no circumstances, can trust our own internal hunger and fullness cues and that, instead, we need to follow a diet plan that will give us the *exact* amount of food and exercise that we need to live our best lives.
Signs you might be stuck in the diet mentality:
You follow a specific diet plan which tells you the where, when, and how of what to eat. This could look like counting calories, macros, or eliminating certain food groups
You exercise to burn calories, even at the expense of an injured, tired, or “just not into it” body
You don’t allow yourself to eat certain foods even though you truly enjoy them
You are constantly on the search for your next diet, and often have “cheat days” or the “I’m starting my diet on Monday so I can eat whatever I want today” mentality
You are often seen reading the latest health and wellness book that centers specifically around what foods to eat (and not eat) and the “best way to exercise”
You judge your food choices based on what those around you are eating
You categorize your day as “good” or “bad” based on your food and movement
Does any of this sound familiar to you? Now I want to be perfectly clear that if you see yourself in any of the above - it is not your fault. We live in a diet culture obsessed society that has likely been telling you since you were a tiny kiddo that being fat = bad and that you must be thin in order to live a healthy and happy life. AND in order to live in that thin body you must be on a diet and monitoring every bite that goes into your mouth. Sound like something you have heard before? I encourage you to take a moment to reflect upon the messages that you have received around bodies up until this point and just how insidious the role that diet culture plays in your life is. The first step in learning how to stop dieting is thinking about how you ended up here.
So why is the first Principle of Intuitive Eating focused on rejecting the diet mentality?
Recognizing how the diet mentality and diet culture have inundated your life and figuring out how to move past this is the key to being able to fully embrace intuitive eating. The goal of being an intuitive eater is to be IN your body, feeling all of the sensations and information that it gives you, so that you can make the choices for you. If we are stuck in the diet mentality, we are staying OUT of our body and using external rules to guide the way in which we nourish and treat ourseles. The only way to get back in our body is to let go of that control (easier said than done, I know) and start listening.
A few notes…
This could be the point in this post where I tell you about all of the ways in which dieting itself hurts your physical and mental health. We could talk about how dieting leads to weight gain (95% of dieters will gain back the weight they lost over a few years, and many of those dieters will end up gaining MORE weight than where they started), how weight cycling (the subsequent losing and gaining of weight that most dieters experience) can have an extremely negative effect on your body, or how the constant focus on shrinking your body or obsessing over your health can have a serious effect on your mental well-being. I am neither a researcher nor a doctor, but I have consulted with and read about the effects I listed above and have full faith in the amazing people who are doing this work to look into the negative effects dieting can have on our bodies and minds. There are many places on the internet that you can find and read these studies and I’m happy to share them with you if you want to reach out. My hope here is to provide you with some hands on ways to get started on this journey.
5 Ways to begin to Reject the Diet Mentality
Reflect upon your dieting history
In order to move forward, we often need to look back at where we’ve been. You had a lot of very valid reasons for dieting and investing in diet culture, and those reasons won’t simply vanish without some real reflection.
Some questions to ask yourself:
How many diets have you been on throughout your life? Try to make an extensive list - this can include anything from trying to “eat healthier” to calorie or macro counting, an exercise “plan,” or a specific diet. Be honest with yourself and write it all down
Did these plans or ideas give you the results you wanted? If yes - did these results last? Was that something you could keep up for the rest of your life? Were there downsides?
How did you feel while you were dieting? Were there any negative mental or physical effects?
What happened at the end of the diet? Did you feel a sense of shame or guilt over it “not working”? Did you blame yourself that you “didn’t work hard enough?” What was the impact of this on your mental health?
Take note of how much time you have spent engaging in dieting behaviors
Look back at what you wrote above and ask yourself the question - how much time and energy did I put into dieting? It might be surprising to really picture how much time was spent planning (and perhaps worrying about) the diet that you were on. Did it monopolize your life? Did it take up brain space or make it difficult to focus on the things that were important?
If you learned how to stop dieting, what might you have time for instead? You might not know the answer to how you would like to be spending your time, especially when you have spent so much time “playing by the rules” of diet culture. Take the pressure off of yourself! For now, simply reflect on the fact that diet culture has stolen precious time from you and stay curious about what your life could look like without it.
Picture what you have been avoiding in your life due to the impact of dieting
The next step is to think about what you might be avoiding in your life and what you might be waiting to do until you “reach your goal” of being in a smaller body. Have you avoided applying for the job that you really want? Turned down an offer for a date? Said no to social events with family and friends? What have you stopped yourself from doing, waiting until you reached your goal?
Diet culture keeps us in a never-ending loop . What could it feel like if you reject the diet mentality and embrace your life now, in the body you are currently in? What might you be do that you have been putting on hold until your body reached a certain goal?
Imagine what it feels might be easier for you if you were in a smaller body
Take a moment to think about what you feel weight loss might bring you and how you imagine it would make your life better. Is the appeal of weight loss truly about being in a different body or is it about what that body feels it would give you?
Perhaps you imagine that being in a smaller body would give you more confidence and allow you to do the things you always wanted. Maybe the idea of being in a smaller body makes you feel that you would have more energy or that your joints would hurt less. Write down what feels true for you! Next - think about what you might do with that newly found confidence or energy - how might you care for yourself differently? Would you buy some new clothes to make you feel your best or bring some movement back into your life? How might it feel to do those things NOW instead of waiting for your body to change? How might things feel different in your day to day?
Look for the sneaky ways diet culture has made its way into your life
Diet culture is a sneaky little devil. You might have an easy time recognizing it in things like weight loss plans, but what about all of the other ways it might show up in your life? For example, are you letting dieting or calorie/macro counting apps stick around on your phone “just in case” you need them? Do you have diet or “wellness” books hanging around on your bookshelf, staring you in the face every day? Getting rid of your diet crutches (sneaky or otherwise) is a great way to reject the diet mentality. Also remember that “lifestyle” changes such as cutting out certain foods or forcing yourself to do a specific workout class (even if you don’t like it) can be sneaky diet culture in disguise.
So what do you think? Are you ready to start to reject the diet mentality and lean into intuitive eating? What steps above can you implement to help you take the leap? Recognizing the diet mentality and calling out diet culture is only the first principle of intuitive eating, but a really important one that cannot be passed by or rushed through. Give yourself space and compassion to recognize where the diet mentality is showing up in your life and how to call it out when you see it. And as always, get some extra support if you don’t want to go it alone.
