A New Trend - Ditching The Diet

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People everywhere are tired of constantly dieting, trying to lose weight just to gain it back, being food focused, counting everything they eat, having anxiety and fear around food, and putting all their self worth into what the scale says and what they look like. The practice of intuitive eating solves all these problems by honoring one’s mental and physical health simultaneously. Although this new trendy “diet” didn’t become extremely popular until around 2018, it was created by two dietitians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch in 1995, intuitive eating integrates instinct, emotion, and rational thought using 10 principles throughout the process: 
  1. Reject The Diet Mentality
  2. Honor Your Hunger
  3. Make Peace With Food
  4. Challenge the Food Police
  5. Respect Your Fullness
  6. Discover the Satisfaction Factor
  7. Honor Your Feelings Without Using Food
  8. Respect Your Body
  9. Exercise - Feel The Difference
  10. Honor Your Health With Gentle Nutrition
The practice of intuitive eating works by helping you become in tune with your body to meet your biological and physiological needs and removes barriers or obstacles such as false beliefs, feelings and thoughts around food. We as humans were born intuitive eaters. Overtime through social exposure and expansion of nutritional knowledge we’ve developed these irrational thoughts about food that don’t allow us to trust our instincts. Intuitive eating helps people grow a stronger, healthier relationship with food. It is a practice, which means it takes time, patience, and might take professional assistance in order to master intuitive eating. If you are interested in the practice of intuitive eating, taking advice from a registered dietitian who specializes in the field of intuitive eating is the best step you can take. It also might help to talk to a therapist/psychiatrist during this process. 
The regain of weight you lost throughout dieting is almost inevitable, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be at that higher weight forever. This is explained through The Set Point Theory which states your body is programmed to stay at a range of weight in order to properly function. The weight lost by dieting will almost always be regained, but the additional weight you gain from intuitive eating (or no longer dieting) will come off once you are finally in tune with your body. There is much more information revolving around The Set Point Theory, comment down below if you would like me to do a blog post on it.
Intuitive eating stresses that body weight is not of primary importance when evaluating and improving dietary health. Many dietitians still rely on the approach that weight and ideal body weight is the only thing that matters, but this practice states that deprioritizing weight in favor of other indicators of well-being can have a profoundly beneficial effect on people’s overall health. The cycle of weight loss and weight gain is unhealthy on it’s own, but the emotional effect is another issue. Intuitive eating sounds crazy, eat whatever you want, however much you want, whenever you want, have no rules around food, no foods are off limits, and there are not “good” or “bad” foods. Intuitive eating isn’t to say all foods are nutritionally equal or deny public health incentives, but it is to primarily help people who have poor relationships to food “reset” their mind and body when it comes to how they eat. Dieting a food restriction has become ingrained in America and it’s time for change!
AB

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