Reject the Diet Mentality - Principle One of Intuitive Eating

The Intuitive Eating anti-diet approach has 10 principles through which a person goes through to heal their relationship with food, their body and movement. It’s specifically designed this way to help the person unlearn unhelpful beliefs, learn how to respect their body through taking appropriate care for themselves and building appropriate support systems to help them through their journey for the rest of the life. The first principle of the Intuitive Eating journey, Reject the Diet Mentality, is about wiping the slate clean of any weight-centric content and beliefs you’re surrounded by and letting go of the belief you need to be a certain size. If you’re reading this, you’re at the start of your journey and you may be feeling a lot of fear and apprehension. You may feel lost at the idea of what you’ll do if you stop dieting and you may fear that if you allow yourself to eat in an unrestricted, how will you ever stop eating? These are all normal worries at this stage, and the best way to calm your nerves is to know more information.

Dieting, restriction, be it portion control tactics, intermittent fasting, calorie counting or food avoidance, they all lead to one thing - overeating. People tend to believe they need a diet because they feel out of control with their body and their eating habits, but it’s through attempting to tighten the reins, you are actually causing more chaos and dysregulation. The common messaging you hear is that if you control your food and you exercise, you can have control over your body. However, the process is not so clear-cut. Many people turn to dieting as an attempt to feel in control in some way, to bring a sense of security and ownership. The desire to diet, lose weight, fit in, it’s much deeper than a problem with food. Food is sometimes not the actual problem, but a scapegoat.

The first thing you understand is why weight loss attempts fail. Firstly, the size you are is mostly controlled by genetics, that’s pretty hard to beat! Your body has a weight range it likes to stay at. Your body doesn’t like to lose weight because, to your body, weight loss is a risk factor for death. Not getting in enough food means your body must conserve it’s energy, fat stores, because it doesn’t know when it’ll get enough food next. When the body enters this starvation mode, it impacts your hormones so you feel more hungry and it’s harder to feel satiated, you begin craving foods, your body performs less NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis) actions to preserve energy. It’s why it’s so difficult for people to lose weight! Your body is literally fighting you because it doesn’t want you to die! Then, after the diet ends and you stop restricting your food intake, your body does all it can to restore the fat stores in order to be prepared for the next starvation period. Your body makes it much harder to lose the weight next time you try and diet, this time because it’s more prepared. It’s like a spiral that keeps getting tighter and tighter the more you diet. With more and more cycles of restrict-feeding patterns, the more your body is prepared and the higher the ideal weight range goes up to prevent weight loss. It’s honestly a brilliant internal system.

Now, to address some of your fears.

If you do not diet, how will you ever stop eating?

Through the process, you learn to notice and respond to your internal cues of hunger and fullness. You’ll never need a meal plan or calorie counter to tell you how much food you need, because your body will tell you if you learn to listen. You’ll learn more about signs of hunger and satiety, and how to navigate feelings around eating enough for you. You’ll also learn more about the different types of hunger and how to respond to them.

How will you manage to not overeat on the foods you most avoided?

If there are certain foods which you find really hard to resist and you often find yourself restricting them because you have no self-control around them, you’ll first learn the food isn’t the problem. You’ll start by unpacking all the beliefs you hold regarding those foods, and after learning how to respond to your body’s hunger and satiety, you’ll be able to consume these foods without negative feelings and just enjoy them.

How do you reject diet mentality?

There are a few key elements to explore and learn about in this principle.

Our world is weight-centric. Your existing thoughts and feelings about your body, and the impact that has on your eating habits is a result of the Thin Ideal of our society. The Thin Ideal is society’s belief that being bigger is bad and that being thin is healthy. This is not always the case, that you can be in a larger body and be healthy, and that not every thin person you see is healthy is first. By exploring how dieting has impacted you physically, how it can impact your health, your autonomy, your self esteem and confidence, you’ll start to let go of the Thin Ideal.

I help people navigate this principal, allowing them to work through all the different ways diet culture has impacted them and how to move on from it. This principal relies on the person to reflect and work through emotions.

If you are interested in starting your intuitive eating journey and need help, book a Discovery Call here and lets get started!