Hello Internet,
Right now I am in the process of change. A process I like to call pivoting. I am learning new and wonderful things and walking away from core beliefs that have been hurting me for a long time. Beliefs based on diet culture. What is diet culture? Its our culture today. Its everywhere, and in everything. Its anything that tells you that you are not good enough as you are but that's okay buy this product, do this meal program, work out til all your bones break and you will be fixed. Its so embedded into everything in our society its very difficult to pick out. The best way to describe it is in question form, so here is a sample:
Do you feel guilty eating certain foods? Diet Culture
Do you feel guilty eating at certain times of day? Diet Culture
Do you stress about the amount of food you eat in a day? Diet Culture
Do let yourself starve? Diet Culture
Do you feel shame about your weight, or body shape? Diet Culture
Do you believe that confidence can be found in weight loss? Diet Culture
There are lots more questions I could add but I said it was a sample so i will stick to that. Here is my story and what has brought me to this crossroads. At the beginning of the blog my goal was to loss weight. I had an excellent diet plan that worked well for me. I also had an awesome life coach cheering me on and helping me combat all the mental hiccups I had. The diet was a 28 day meal and exercise plan. I lasted the entire 28 days and at the end I was very proud of the 14 pounds I lost. I was feeling good and thinking I could easily keep this up and lose lots of weight. What went wrong? Nothing and everything if that makes sense. What happened was life. More importantly what happened was biological, not MENTAL. That is a huge point that I did not understand at the time. After the 28 days I went back slowly to eating normally but I was really overeating. After 28 days of obsessing about food. (Which by the way is another biological response your body makes in a state of starvation Ref: Intuitive Eating) I began eating foods I had been dreaming about for such a long time. I ate and I ate and I ate. The whole time feeling much shame and guilt believing what diet culture has taught me my whole life, that it was my will power that was the problem. The real problem was I stayed in a state of starvation long enough that my body reacted by overeating. There have been countless studies on this and if your are interested in the studies you can find them in the book referenced in this blog (ref: intuitive eating) Simply put my body was believing that is would not be fed again, so it told my brain to eat as much as possible.
I am thankful to my life coach Becky Smith who nudge me into the path of Stephanie Webb and her podcast Nutrition Redefined which then pointed me in the direction of a life changing book called: Intuitive eating: A revolutionary program that works by Evelyn Tribole M.S., R.D. and Elyse Resch M.S.,R.D.,F.A.D.A, C.E.D.R.D
I will be discussing this in more detail as I continue my journey down the rabbit hole of intuitive eating. If you wonder what that phrase means. Intuitive eating is the most basic human instinct that for whatever reason we as a society ignore. It means eating when your are hungry and stop eating when you are full. It means trusting your body to do what is was made to do. Its eating well and loving yourself just as your are. And most importantly it is trusting yourself.
I end today with a quote that really changed my thinking, and it came from the book, intuitive eating: "When a diet fails, why do we blame ourselves and not the diet?"
