Intuitive Eating Challenge Day 1: Reject The Diet Mentality

There are fears that come up for people when they hear this principle:

What if I can’t stop eating?

What if I lose control?

What if I don’t know what to eat without a diet plan telling me what to do?

While these fears are completely valid, they are also what keeps someone in a vicious cycle of disconnecting from their inner hunger/fullness cues, and falling into diet after diet after diet.

Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, the creators of the Intuitive Eating approach, developed 4 steps to take to begin rejecting the diet mentality (These are just brief descriptions of the steps. If you want more information, I highly recommend reading the book, Intuitive Eating!):

1. Recognize and acknowledge the damage that dieting causes

• Biological/health related - Dieting decreases metabolism; increases binges and cravings; and teaches the body to hold on to fat for survival.

• Psychological/emotional - Dieting is linked to eating disorders; causes stress; leads to feeling like a failure or having a loss of control.

2. Be aware of diet mentality traits and thinking

• Diets lead people to think that they do not have the willpower or obedience to follow the diet, and contributes to people feeling like a failure and it is their fault the diet did not work

3. Get rid of the dieter’s tools

• Throw the scale away!

• Delete diet or calorie-counting apps from your phone

• Throw out those diet books and cookbooks

• Unfollow diet-focused Instagram influencers

4. Be compassionate towards yourself.

• This is absolutely easier said than done. The process of intuitive eating can be challenging, and it is important to treat yourself with kindness along the way.

Please be gentle with yourself today as you try this first principle of Intuitive Eating, and if you are interested in getting my emails filled with reflective questions and ideas for practicing today’s principle, click here and sign up for my newsletter!