New Year’s Resolutions and Rejecting Diet Culture
Well, it’s that time of year. The diet adds are everywhere. There is heightened commentary about food and bodies. People are flocking to the gym.
This time of year can create so much heightened anxiety about what our bodies “should” look like. Diet culture tells us that being in a small body is more important than your well-being. Even if that means moving your body in rigorous ways even when you are sick or injured, having poor body image, experiencing obsessions with weight, macros, or calories, having food phobias, engaging in self-shaming or negative self-talk, or feeling like you have to “earn” your meals.
What does losing that weight really represent for you? Maybe you feel like if you lose the weight you will be accepted, lovable, respected, seen, attended to, or safe.
If this is you, I am so sorry you have received the message that your worth is tied to your weight.
Diet culture can lead to severe mental health concerns. The National Eating Disorders Association reports that 35% of “normal dieters” progress to pathological dieting and that 20%-25% of those individuals develop eating disorders.
I think it’s time to take a new approach.
Intuitive eating, created by two dietitians, Elyse Resche and Evelyn Tribole in 1995, is an approach that focuses on increasing behaviors that promote health, teach you how to attend to your internal cues, meet your physical and psychological needs, and heal your relationship with food. This is a non-diet approach.
Resche and Tribole teach us how to reject diet culture and weight obsession and instead be in touch with yourself. You are the only expert on what your body needs at any given time!
Dieting often involves intense restrictions. When our bodies don’t get enough calories, the brain releases a chemical called Neuropeptide Y (NPY), which makes you crave carbs. Intuitive eating explains how after a period of restricting through dieting, our survival mechanism kicks in, triggering a binge. Binging behaviors or episodes usually increase feelings of guilt or shame. This then begins the oh-so-common binge-restrict cycle.
Cutting back on calories can work for the short term. Although restriction of calories or food groups is such a common approach, it’s not sustainable. Your body fights back against calorie restriction through increasing hunger cues, slowing metabolic rate, and heightening the production of stress hormones. This is because your body cannot tell difference between dieting and famine/starvation.
Intuitive eating describes how you can listen to your body, let go of external rules, find lasting peace with food, and rebuild a sense of trust with yourself and nutrition. Intuitive eating focuses on ten principles. These ten principles include:
Reject the diet mentality
Honor your hunger
Make peace with food
Challenge the food police
Discover the satisfaction factor
Respect your fullness
Cope with your emotions with kindness
Respect your body
Joyful movement-feel the difference
Honor your health (gentle nutrition)
This time of year is difficult. If you are finding your thoughts or behaviors becoming consumed with making your body smaller, know that it’s not your fault.
If you are interested in learning more about how to experience food freedom, build a deeper connection with yourself and others, and ditch the diet mentality, book a session with me today.
-Annie Bretches, LPC, PLPC