As we approach the start of a new year, you may be feeling overwhelmed since diet-related New Year’s resolutions and weight loss talk are looming on the horizon. January is the month where diet culture is running rampant, between the Noom and Weight Watchers commercials, diet talk on the radio, and social media. Diet culture may seem like it’s everywhere right now, so I wanted to touch on the first intuitive eating principle: (1) Reject the Diet Mentality.
If you have decided that you will no longer let diet culture get to you in 2022, rejecting the diet mentality is the first step toward your food freedom journey. We recommend that you work on rejecting the diet mentality before moving on to the other nine principles of intuitive eating. It boils down to this: if you cannot first reject the diet mentality, you probably aren’t ready to dig deep into intuitive eating and start your journey to make peace with food.
So what does it mean to reject the diet mentality?
- Throw away the diet books and magazine articles that offer you false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently.
- Get angry at the 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 gain back all 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.
Diet culture tells us when to eat, what to eat, and how much to eat. Intuitive eating is just about getting comfortable with listening to what your body is actually asking for. There are a lot of fears surrounding intuitive eating, common ones being “If I stop dieting, I’m never going to be able to stop eating,” or “I will feel out of control around food without diet rules.”
You have to remember that dieting is a form of restriction. When you implement rigid food rules into your life, you are more likely to binge and end up overeating. Once you start your intuitive eating journey and allow yourself to incorporate normally restricted foods into your life, you will find that you stop overeating or binging as much or altogether.
Here are a few tips to help you reject the diet mentality in the new year.
1. Clean up your social media feed
Get rid of anything on your feed that promotes diet behavior or culture. If you are on social media, it’s really important to clean all that sh*t up and get rid of that stuff because a lot of it will be triggering.
2. Focus on your relationship with your body
Get in touch with your hunger signals to truly listen and give your body what it needs. This involves listening to your cravings and giving into them. Once you start to drop the guilt and shame associated with food, you can really learn how to trust your body again.
3. Practice self-compassion
Be kind to yourself! Do not come from a place of judgment as you start your journey to food freedom. Years of following the strict rules and restrictions of dieting involve so much judgment and guilt. It’s time to throw those feelings out the door and give yourself grace throughout this process.
As you go forward with intuitive eating and building that trust up over time, you will find it freeing to live a life where your thoughts no longer surround food, your body, or what you’re putting in your mouth.
If you enjoyed this blog, I know you will also love my blog titled: How to Navigate Feeling Out of Control Around Food!
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