Rejecting the Diet Mentality

The first and most important step of intuitive eating is rejecting the diet mentality. It’s rejecting the belief that you have to starve yourself to be healthy, loveable, or accepted. And it’s rejecting the belief that dieting actually works! Because the truth is, it doesn’t. 

Dieting has the allure of short term success. You restrict and control and you lose weight. And you feel great! The part of you that believes that being thin means being worthy is elated. The part of you that believes that other people’s opinions matter feels great every time someone tells you how good you look. 

But other things are happening, too. 

Your body is hungry! It’s thinking more and more about food, because that is a normal and natural way for it to communicate that it needs more fuel. Thinking about food all the time makes it harder to restrict and control.

You are losing muscle mass. During weight loss your body uses its stored energy to compensate for what you aren’t taking in through food. It uses some fat, but it uses some muscle, too. 

Your metabolic rate is slowing. Your body is becoming more efficient, which is a natural adaptation to food shortage. It’s your body’s way of surviving, which it is wired to do as priority number 1. 

Your self trust is eroding. You are silencing your inner wisdom to follow a set of external rules that my have nothing to do with what is actually going on inside your body. This disconnection to your inner cues breeds self doubt and erodes confidence. 

Eventually, fighting against all these forces is too much. The diet ends. You return to your former eating patterns, sometimes eating even more as your body tries to recover from what it experienced as starvation. All the good feelings you felt when you were losing weight are replaced with body shame and sometimes even self hate. 

Our bodies are meant to be cared for. They have needs that are normal and natural. They have healthy and important ways of communicating those needs to us. Food and nourishment is one of those needs. It gives our body the energy and fuel it requires to do all the amazing things it does for us. Hunger is your body’s way of telling you it needs replenishment of this vital fuel source. 

There is a better way. As you leave dieting behind for good, truly reject the diet mentality, you can rebuild trust and attunement to your natural body cues. Through the intuitive eating process you will rebuild that attunement and trust. But it starts with finally rejecting that dieting ever was or ever could be the solution.