Are you a dieter without realizing it?
“I’m not a dieter”. I love hearing that, but I’ve come to understand that it depends on what your definition of dieting is. Non-dieters describe things like not eating after a certain time, restricting certain foods like carbs or sugar, not eating between meals, without connecting that these are rules or ideas that come from diet culture, they have nothing to do with trusting that your body knows what it needs.
Losing the diet mentality is the first principal of Intuitive Eating but it comes up throughout the process because there are so many rules and ideas we’ve ingested, consciously or not, that dictate our eating habits.
Simply put, if your eating is determined by:
Thoughts (I should/shouldn’t eat this; I can’t be hungry I just ate an hour ago)
Rules (I don’t eat after 6pm; dessert only on the weekend)
Beliefs (carbs make you gain weight; snacks are bad for you)
You are dieting. You don’t need someone to tell you when, what, or how much to eat, any more than you need someone to tell you that you need to use the bathroom. Yet we’ve come to accept that ‘they’ (diet and nutrition ‘experts’) know our bodies better than we do.
What I want you to know is you are the expert when it comes to your body, you just need to reconnect with it, to relearn that you can trust your body cues to tell you when, what and how much to eat. There was a time, before you were inundated with diet messaging, that you stopped when you’d had enough.
Intuitive Eating is a way to get back to relying on, and believing in, yourself. Self-reliance and believing in yourself can affect far more than your eating habits. If you can rely on yourself to know how to eat what else might that impact? If you believe that you can have a healthy relationship with food what else can you believe about you?
In over 90 studies looking at Intuitive Eating we’ve seen that Intuitive Eaters have a better sense of overall well being, improved self esteem and coping skills, not to mention better health markers like HDL and triglycerides.
Awareness of the thoughts, rules and beliefs you have around food is a way in to the process of becoming an Intuitive Eater.
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