The First Step to Becoming an Intuitive Eater
I am so excited to share with you the first step in how to start living a life free of diets and getting back to your healthy God-given relationship with food. The very first principle of Intuitive Eating is to “Reject the Diet Mentality”.
What does that mean? And how do you start living this out? Well, first we must understand and fully realize that diets do nothing for us. Truly. Diets do not make you healthy. Maybe you have had some success on diets – but let’s be honest.. you would not be here if the diet had truly work. Diets are just bandaids on broken bones. And by putting a bandaid on a broken bone - the broken bone ends up getting worse. It is the same thing that happens with a diet. The diet does not change the real issue. The longer you leave keep reaching for bandaids (and in this case diets), the worse the original problem becomes. That is why your first diet was “easy” and you had great results, but each subsequent diet is harder to follow and not as effective.
Research has found that dieting has been proven to promote weight gain. And this has been a well-established fact since the late 1940s. And yet despite the research, we still run to diets to fix all of our health problems. Culture, social media, and TV have promoted diets for so long it has become a natural reaction to look to diets and other “success stories” for the fix. But take, for example, a six-year follow-up study on some of the contestants on “The Biggest Loser” found that their metabolisms were suppressed by 500 calories compared to their baseline metabolism. Therefore, all of their hard work, effort, and dieting led them to weight gain in the end. This diet that did help change their health and weight for a short while ended up hurting them. Quick weight loss is not the answer - for them or for you.
Along with many societies and cultures pushing weight loss as a cure-all for health problems, many high-quality studies have proven that the war on obesity has actually caused a greater health problem in the world. Research has found that lower body weight does not equal better health or outcomes. And lastly, the diet industry has caused so many mental health issues.
“All of this to say that the very first step is to realize that diets do not work.”
All of this to say that the very first step is to realize that diets do not work. To start this journey, we have to get mad a what we have been taught to believe and get down to the real issues that matter in health.
We have to come to a point in realizing that even though diets seem to have all the answer they are actually the problem and will never be the solution to any of your health issues. Intuitive eating is a process of taking care of yourself right now, not punishing it, and treating it poorly as we do on most diets. And unlike diets, which put all the emphasis on external cues, eating intuitively teaches you to listen to your internal cues and learn to trust your body again.
To start this process, I challenge you to examine your past diets and see where they have gotten you? What worked and what didn’t? Why didn’t you stay on them?
I am here for you – just reach out! I want to help you say goodbye to diets. I know you can do this.
