The first Intuitive Eating principle is Rejecting the Diet Mentality. Evelyn Tribole, the co-author of Intuitive Eating, says “If you do not truly commit to that first principle it’s really hard to progress in your journey because you’re still holding on to that ideal” or the idea that weight loss is the sole purpose of your life.
I want you to think about what this fear means to you. If you have a fear of gaining weight then do you believe that gaining weight and/or being in a larger body is bad?
You may say “No, I have friends in all sizes of bodies and I don’t think they’re bad.” But that might not be true when talking about yourself in your own body. And negative self-talk can be very powerful.
So this is something we need to dig deeper into. I encourage you to pull out a journal and write down what you think of when:
- You hear the word fat
- You think about weight gain
Because if we think that weight gain=bad, unhealthy, not accepted, not loved, or not worthy we need to dig into that.
Once we can get curious about the why behind it, then we can really really open up and make progress.
Just like with food, if you think there are foods that are bad, you can’t make peace with food if you have morality tied to it. The same thing goes with our bodies. If we want to accept our body or even just feel neutral about our body, not necessarily even love it. We have to start to remove some of the morality tied to body size. Or when we look deeper, internalized fatphobia.
There’s a 99.999% chance that most of us, including myself, still have internalized fatphobia because of the ever-present $72 billion diet industry. It tells us it’s better to be smaller, and you will be more loved if you are smaller.
When you are 90 years old, you aren’t going to remember what you ate for lunch today, but you will remember an entire lifetime of fear around weight gain or not being present because of it.
So ask yourself these hard questions. When will you say enough is enough? This is when we can have an awakening and an awareness. Where has dieting gotten you thus far?
Go back to that notebook. Write down every single diet you have participated in. Where has that gotten you TODAY? What effect has that had on you?
There’s no guilt, no shame behind these questions. Just curiosity.
When will it be enough? Because obsessing overweight has gotten me nowhere. We also know that dieting increases disease risk, stress, fatigue and decreases self esteem.
So when you get really honest with yourself and decide to quit dieting, you may need support. That’s why it is so important to invest in professionals that have the tools to help you start this journey. Assessing where you are now will help determine how you will Find Food Freedom. ✨ Click here and Snag a free training and dive into our beginner’s training for all you Intuitive Eating newbies!
If you enjoyed this blog, I know you will also take great pleasure in my blog titled: Why we do NOT support Noom.
