A great way to begin the journey of unmasking your diet mentality is to start un-dieting both your eating and thinking. That may sound easier said than done. As such, I have found it to be immensely helpful to know dieting facts from fiction, and curiously explore your own personal history with dieting.
Since you are here reading this, I’m assuming that you are ready (or at least curious) to leave diet culture behind. Meaning, you are mentally and emotionally exhausted from dieting, cleansing and adhering to rigid food rules and restrictions. You likely have found that these often painful approaches simply aren’t sustainable, nor do they give you the results that you were hoping to get from them.
You might even be saying to yourself that you’re sick of dieting and you’re ready to just throw the idea of dieting out of the proverbial window. And yet… you might suddenly find yourself going along this new non-dieting path and one day, all of a sudden, something triggers that deep (and commonly subconscious) part of your psyche that makes you want to change your body and therefore default to start dieting yet again.
Maybe it’s an ad or a comment on social media, or perhaps a hip magazine professing the latest and greatest diet to “get thin fast” - or maybe it rears it’s nefarious head when you run into a friend or acquaintance with a body that you perceive to be better and more beautiful than your own. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, you suddenly find yourself feeling less than, like you’re not good enough and the only way to be “good enough” is to diet.
Even though you logically know that that is not the answer, your emotions in that moment are ruling your thoughts. When this happens we can feel desperate to try anything to make us feel better about ourselves.
This is what I call the diet mentality trap, and it can be obnoxiously loud and sneaky as it tries to reel you back into its fold.
That is why it is important to have a fact (or several) that you can turn to in order to help you shift out of this diet-as-default mentality. Many of the people who I have worked with around diet mentality experience a deep-seeded shame about their diet history, mainly because time and time again they have turned to diets in desperation only to be left feeling disappointed and like a failure when the diets inevitably don’t work. Plus it is not unusual for these folks to then feel ashamed for not being able to just ditch the diet mentality when they logically know all of the reasons why dieting is not the answer.
But like I’ve said time and time again, this is a practice that makes progress NOT perfection! Ironically enough, it can actually be kind of a good thing to experience a trigger here and there because it encourages you to check in with yourself and your values; it can help remind you of why you have begun to practice undieting in the first place.
So in case this is resonating with you, I’d like to share some dieting facts to help you shift out of your diet mentality, and we’ll follow this up with a helpful practice that you can keep in your toolkit when you’re feeling the dieting temptation calling.
DIETING MYTHS DEBUNKED
First and foremost, we must remind ourselves that DIETS DON’T WORK! If they did, 95% of people who diet with the intention of losing weight wouldn’t regain all of the weight they lost within 5 years. Sadly two thirds of these people will actually regain even more weight than they lost in the first place. Unfortunately dieting is one of the biggest predictors of weight gain because it is perceived as a stress by the body, which down-regulates and slows down your metabolism. This pretty much means that your body is going to bring its A-game fight against your diet because restriction is interpreted as starvation… which is a guaranteed way to stress out your body and make it want to hold onto any potential energy it might need to get you through the “famine” it perceives you’re in. The end result is weight gain, because too often restriction leads to binging later on and the vicious cycle continues.
Dieting effectively stifles your intuitive ability to know what and when to eat. Diets are unlikely to provide your body with what it truly needs to feel physically, mentally and emotionally well. We as a human species wouldn’t have gotten very far if we had to be reliant on numbers and grams and rigid eating rules in order to survive and procreate. Look at other animal species - if we were to observe deers grazing or lions hunting we would see that they eat when they’re hungry and do other things when they are not. They don’t have diets stifling their inner wisdom, so why should we stifle ours by continuing to diet?
Dieting encourages emotional hunger. If you think about it, we have been emotionally eating since we were babies. What do babies do best? They cry! They cry when they’re hungry, when they’re wet and need a diaper change, when they’re in need of comfort, or warmth, or… you get the picture. We learned early on that we felt comforted when we were given a bottle or breast. Food is a celebratory experience where we can have community and connection; it is both physically and emotionally nourishing in many positive ways. So when we’re on a diet, we not only cut ourselves off from others by feeling nutritionally restricted, but we also starve ourselves from the emotional comfort that we have learned to love and rely on for positive emotional nourishment.
Dieting encourages disordered eating behaviors. When a person diets, they often end up falling off the proverbial “wagon” (meaning they end up overeating, emotionally eating and/or binging). The sad reality is that we have been taught that it’s our fault for participating in these unwanted eating behaviors because apparently we lack the willpower to be successful with the diet. They say the diet isn’t at fault - we are. Well that looks like a whole hell of a lot of bologna from where I’m standing because these behaviors and habits are actually results of the food deprivation that is an inherent aspect of dieting! When we are deprived of nutritional nourishment, our body’s biology kicks into high gear and effectively directs us to eat for our survival! It doesn’t know that this physical and/or emotional famine is occuring by choice; to your body, that doesn’t matter because your body KNOWS what you need to function best. We just have to make sure we listen and respond accordingly.
Diets don’t make you healthier. Diet culture has excelled with equating thinness as health. But just because someone is in a thin or lean body doesn’t automatically mean that they are any healthier than the person in a larger body standing next to them. Now don’t get me wrong, weight gain can be a result of an imbalance and unhealthy lifestyle (as can weight loss), but this isn’t as common as the diet industry would have you think. What will bring you health is by embracing healthful behaviors, not focusing on weighing a certain number. Everybody has a different happy weight and body composition, and as long as we are embracing the behaviors and practices that support our healthful well being, we can best support our health long term.
Diets don’t lead to lasting weight loss. I said it before and I’ll say it again, there is no scientific evidence to suggest that diets lead to or support sustainable and lasting weight loss. In fact, the opposite is true. There are countless studies that reveal this, but these often get buried behind the many studies that indicate a diet is successful for a short-term period (a few months at most). But if a restrictive diet isn’t sustainable to maintain, which none of them ever are, the weight comes right back. That’s why it’s more important to focus on a healthful lifestyle and NOT a quick-fix diet to achieve a lasting happy weight.
Diets don’t provide the nutrients that you need to thrive, let alone live long-term. The restrictive nature of most diets can result in malnourishment in the long run because they don’t provide the right variety or quantities of nutrient-rich foods. They also tend to lead to less healthful food choices because they profess all calories to be equal, therefore if given the option to eat a 100 calorie cookie or 100 calories of broccoli, many people will opt for the cookie, right?
Furthermore, dieting is a lonely and isolating experience, even when done in community or group settings. People tend to come together and socialize and celebrate over and around food, so when we’re restricting our diets we end up restricting our socialization because of the fear of failure that accompanies all dieting practices. Social connection is perhaps one of the most important aspects of our health needs. By restricting our time with others due to a fear of dieting peer pressures or unavailable food options, we end up inhibiting the social aspects of our nourishment needs as well.
As you may already have experienced, diets and dieting are psychologically taxing. There is a myth within diet culture that thinness equals happiness, but the reality is that dieting negatively influences our self-perceptions. Dieting often leads to more anxiety, more depression, clouded thinking, decreased self-worth, and preoccupation with food thoughts and facts - all of which can further perpetuate disordered eating behaviors that can dangerously lead to severe eating disorders and other mental health issues.
Dieting disengages you from being mindful of yourself and your nourishment needs. When you’re dieting, you’re restricting many aspects of your nourishment, which causes you to be perpetually preoccupied with food, the numbers involved with food (such as calories, grams of this or that, weight, etc.), and other negative self-perceptions that can only be described as self-loathing. How can we possibly live in the moment and be present for ourselves and cognizant of our needs if our bodies are constantly hungering for sustenance that causes near-constant food obsession? If you’re missing out on your life due to your pursuit of thinness, then are you really living as fully as possible? Something tells me maybe not…
Diets are generalized approaches - and therein lies their downfall. They don’t take into account bioindividuality, which is the primary reason why some people supposedly experience success (albeit usually short term) with one particular diet while others see little to no effect whatsoever with the same approach. Bioindividuality is about embracing the pieces that work for you and letting go of the parts that don’t; this is a lifelong exploration & experimentation. Following rigid dieting rules and restrictions is not the way to tap into your bioindividual knowledge or honor your needs.
Finally, diets entirely miss the point because they are founded on the basis that you are not good enough exactly as you are right now. Which is simply untrue. You and your body and your being are beautiful and unique and entirely right just as you are right now in this moment. I implore you not to forget this because this embodiment and appreciation and acceptance of yourself as you are in this moment is key to giving your body and being the space to balance in the way that makes you feel your best.
REFLECTING ON YOUR DIETING AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Now even if you logically know that diets don’t work and that you are exactly right just as you are right now, sometimes we forget and need a little reminding. At these times it can be helpful to do a little reflecting on your dieting and eating experiences throughout your life and answer the following questions for each experience or dieting attempt:
Describe the dieting experience. When was it?
What caused you to begin the diet?
How did you physically feel on the diet?
How did you emotionally feel on the diet?
What was the outcome of the diet experience?
This is what I like to call a Dieting Autobiography. It essentially gives you the opportunity to lay out your dieting history throughout your life so you can reflect and make some connections about how dieting has either positively or negatively impacted you throughout your life.
As you go through this process I encourage you to journal about the reflections and patterns you (curiously) observe so you can deepen your reflections further and glean a greater understanding of your origin history with dieting.
Knowing these origins will serve your long-term journey of disengaging with diet mentality for good.
