Reject the Diet Mentality
Throw out the diet books and
magazine articles that offer you false hope of losing weight quickly, easily,
and permanently. Get angry at the lies that have led you to feel as if you were
a failure every time a new diet stopped working and you gained back all of the
weight. If you allow even one small hope to linger that a new and better diet
might be lurking around the corner, it will prevent you from being free to
rediscover Intuitive Eating.
~Intuitive Eating, by Evelyn Tribole and ElyseResch
I have tried in the past to learn this first principle of inutuitive eating, but I never quite got there.
There was always still a part of me that was looking at IE as a diet. I never truly rejected the diet mentality.
And I'm still working hard on this priciple of IE.
Every day is a challenge and an opportunity to learn.
Failure is not a part of Intuitive Eating, and I'm glad that I'm finally embracing that fact. As long as I'm trying to learn this, I am not failing at it.
I'm not tracking my food. I'm allowing myself to eat ANYTHING (besides meat, but that's because I don't want to eat meat). I'm working steadily on my "all or nothing" approach to eating.
For now, what this means for me besides not tracking, is not caring about nutrition. The authors of this book openly admit that during the first stage of IE, you will probably be nutritionly unbalanced, and this is not the way that you will want to eat forever.
I'm not eating a lot of healthy options right now. I just don't really want many whole foods right now. I'm working on truly rejecting the diet mentality and letting my food preferences make my decisions.
Surprisingly (or not, according the the book), I'm not overeating as much as I did when I was counting calories and PointsPlus.
I think that I may be finally learning to trust myself around food.
The food, whatever it may be, will always be an option for me to eat. Even in an hour, if I get hungry again. Therefore, there is no need to overeat it.
I have found that there is an online community for Intuitive Eating, found here which is really great. It's full of supportive intuitive eaters, many of them IE-in-training, like me. :-)
Anyway... that's how I'm working with the first principle of Intuitive Eating: Reject the Diet Mentality.
Personal Update:
School started back up today, and with it came a whole slew of mixed emotions. Happy to be back into a routine, happy to be learning again, happy to be progressing towards my degree... but devestated that I cannot call Mom to tell her how my first day went.
However, I am not going to dive head-first into a bag of chips in an effort to suppress my emotions. Instead, I'm going to embrace the emotions for what they are. Emotions are normal, and are a wonderful thing. I am learning to feel them instead of supress them, and this will be a key part to furthering my recovery from EDNOS.
Blog posts in the works and coming soon:
- book review: Eating in the Light of the Moon: How Women can Transform their Relationships with Food through Myths, Metaphors, and Storytelling
- IE Principle #2: Honor Your Hunger
- IE Principle #3: Make Peace with Food
- My Thoughts on Health At Every Size
4 comments:
I completely understand. As I'm trying to loose my baby weight, but not hurt my milk supply, I'm trying to figure out intuitive eating. It's so hard! Such an easy concept, but so hard to actually put into play!
I find this to be a great thing that you are doing, but challenging in its own ways. However the thought of practicing this myself scares me, I don't trust myself enough to do this yet. I would love to one day give up tracking and simply eat when hungry. I look forward to reading more from you about this in your future posts.
Hey Leah! I totally get what you mean with that bit of discomfort around "trusting yourself around food." This is kind of embarrassing, but it was only a few years ago that it finally dawned on me that I did not need to eat everything in one sitting. I'm by myself. I don't have to fight the rest of the family for that last slice of pizza. It'll still be there tomorrow, lol.
These sort of mental understandings are the key to permanently losing weight. For instance, it's easy for us to get caught in bad habits like eating because we're stressed out or having a bad day. It's easy to say that we can skip the run today because we're bored of running the same route for ten days. It's a way of filling our different human needs.
I'd encourage you to take a look at the video in my link of Beverly, who lost 230 lbs. without any surgery or weight loss "magic bullets" aside from diet and exercise.In it, our different human needs are explained along with ways to become healthier. It's not that long, and you might find it to be pretty interesting.
Intuitve Eating has been such a wonderful resource for me! I've truly made peace with food and my physical body.
I think for me in the early stages of IE, was not figuring out what my mind wanted to eat, but rather what my body wanted. The tongue is only one part of our whole bodies.
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