Breaking free from dieting - Articles

With the dieting mind, we are caught between a rock and a hard place. It can be hard to diet after so many failed attempts, yet it seems the only option we have to get to that happy place where we imagine we can stop dieting one day and we will just somehow stay at our target weight forever, and live happily ever after.

If we stop dieting, we fear we will endlessly balloon to astronomical proportions and have to live out our lives in floral tents and baggy trousers, never realising our dream and pretending to be a happy fat person.

This fear is not without base, because unless we listen to our bodies and allow our eating choices to be self determined, we will continue to eat for all the reasons that got us fat in the first place - habit, social compliance, and avoidance of emotion. We probably will get fatter if we don’t have another strategy.

It is a quandary. So what can we do? We can take back our own power, start to trust ourselves and unravel our non-hunger eating. We can start by eating to our body’s natural hunger. 

 When I started on my journey and gave up dieting, I decided to just eat when hungry and to stay with the feelings when I wanted to eat when I was not hungry. I  wondered how I would fill that emotional void without food. But I also saw it as an opportunity to understand myself better and deal with my feelings and non-hunger eating.  A lot of the time it was easy and enjoyable to have freedom and balance around food.

I threw away my scales because I saw them sabotaging my efforts. I wanted to give myself the time and space to get to know my tastes, hungers and feelings without the stress of the scale going up (my God this isn’t working!) or down (This is working, now I am in diet mentality again).

In my head I had many rules and judgements about food. There were foods that I considered illegal, naughty or bad or others that I thought legal, healthy and good. Thsee value judgements were making it hard for me, because the foods that were banned were the ones I usually overate when I was breaking a diet.

So I decriminalised all foods. I ate whatever I wanted. I felt empowered in a way that I had never experienced before. I was enjoying the process and discovering what I really liked to eat and what felt good in my body. It was a little scary at times, because I wondered if I was being foolish and maybe I wouldn’t lose weight. What would I do then? 

I talked myself out of my fears, and trusted the process. I decided that whatever the outcome, my mental health needed me to like myself more and that meant no more diets. A few weeks later I had lost fat, for the first time in my life, eating what I liked and not dieting. It felt so good. 

When you decide to give up dieting and make your own decisions about food, you take responsibility for your eating, maybe for the first time not just in years, but in your life.

It is amazing that I consistently see this transform my client’s self perceptions and self belief. Suddenly they have a new confidence. This should not be surprising really. If you can’t trust yourself to feed yourself, what can you trust yourself with? Taking back your power over food is immensely transforming.