Intuitive Eating Principle 1 - Rejecting Diet Mentality
Have you been on so many diets you cannot remember them all?
You are not alone. It is very common for people to have been on numerous diets throughout their lifetime, generally more than they can remember. Many of these diets have strict rules to follow. A diet can be initiated with the hopes of changing our body size or for improvement of health and oftentimes it can be a subtle way to take control over something in our lives. Dieting offers some hope, a solution to your “problem”. It is no wonder that the excitement and motivation at the beginning of a diet are so tempting, the feel-good neurotransmitters are released just thinking about starting a new diet.
It is worth mentioning that you don’t have to be on a formal diet to be fully participating in a diet mentality. We often aren’t “dieting” but have thoughts that some foods are morally superior to others or we follow rigid rules about how and what we eat.
The first principle of Intuitive Eating: Reject the Diet Mentality, is everything.
For me this was the principle where the carpet was pulled out from under me, where I began to really see and learn all of the lies I’d been fed over a lifetime were useless and harmful, this is where I learned about diet culture.
What does diet culture refer to? Anti-diet dietitian, Christy Harrison, does a great job of defining diet culture as a system of beliefs that:
Worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue, which means you can spend your whole life thinking you’re irreparably broken just because you don’t look like the impossibly thin “ideal.”
Promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status, which means you feel compelled to spend a massive amount of time, energy, and money trying to shrink your body, even though the research is very clear that almost no one can sustain intentional weight loss for more than a few years.
Demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others, which means you’re forced to be hyper-vigilant about your eating, ashamed of making certain food choices, and distracted from your pleasure, your purpose, and your power.
Oppresses people who don't match up with its supposed picture of “health,” which disproportionately harms women, femmes, trans folks, people in larger bodies, people of color, and people with disabilities, damaging both their mental and physical health.
The conscious choice to rid yourself of dieting, or a diet mentality, is a rebellious one in our society where dieting is the socially accepted (and expected) norm. There is a fear of stepping outside of our comfort zone. Years of listening to messages of diet culture have told us that you are not to be trusted with knowing what your body needs.
Some examples of diet mentality are:
Feeling as though you have to pay penance to “earn” a favorite food or food in general
Tracking food intake or counting calories and macronutrients
Restricting carbs, fat or any other type of food that you fear is unhealthy or may cause a change in body size
Reducing your portion sizes or food intake for an upcoming event or to fit into a certain style or clothing size
Choosing foods that are considered “diet”, “health foods” or “clean”
Judging and comparing your meal or food choices to others or eating a certain way in order to impress someone else
Recognizing diet mentality in your life and noticing when it comes up for you is the first step to rejecting diet culture. It will take time, lots of time, to begin to correct these old thought patterns and behaviors.
A powerful way to nurture a new way of thinking is to remove the junk in your environment that is not serving you such as the scale, “skinny” clothes, diet books, food tracking apps, and diet pills or diet program foods and shakes. Also, consider starting to follow anti-diet accounts and body positive folks on social media.
Rejecting the diet mentality is no easy feat. You may revisit these ideas and this principle time after time. When we’ve lived with a lifetime of influence of diet culture we must have compassion for ourselves as we work through the unlearning, relearning, and as we take the steps toward leaving the diet mentality in our past.
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