I learned to hate my body at a pretty young age. It almost felt expected. Then I bought into the lie that dieting would fix all the unseemly things about me (not just my body, but me as a person). Thus started my descent into years of eating disorder and painful self-hatred.
My experience led me to a career in Nutrition. It wasn’t until years later that I realized that my initial reasons for turning to nutrition (to learn how to finally fix myself forever) were flawed and that nutrition has never been about hating your body and limiting yourself to only eat certain foods–that is dieting.
What is Dieting? (And Why It’s Harmful)
Dieting is pretty simple to explain. It is a set of external food rules to augment and control weight. These rules encompass everything from what to eat, how to eat, and when to eat. The rules do not care what feedback your body gives, they teach you to distrust your body.
How Diet Culture Hijacks Our Relationship with Food:
It’s About Restriction Not Actually About Your Health
Dieting is all about restriction of one type or another. It teaches that your body is something disgusting that must be changed. Inherent in all of dieting and diet culture is a built in message of shame and guilt. Shame that we are the way we are and guilt that we aren’t strong enough to fix ourselves, or that we let ourselves “get to this point” in the first place.
Hyper Focuses on the Wrong Wrong Numbers & Creates a Morality Complex
Dieting and diet culture place food on a scale of morality labeling some foods as “good” and some as “bad.” Therefore, if I eat “good” foods I must be a “good” person. Definitely better than anyone eating “bad” foods. It feels great to be morally superior, until I eat something “bad” and feel all the shame of what an awful person I am. This gives a person whip lash going from superior to dejected based on a meal or snack.
A regular scale that only shows weight is only one factor to consider when you are looking at your overall health. This is why we look at bloodwork, and your labs, and even get a more in depth look at your specific body, because we want to look at the right numbers and step outside of morality about what’s happening.
Dieting Encourages Disordered Eating
Dieting encourages and even teaches disordered eating. As an example, some diets have rules that you can only eat during specific times of the day. If you are hungry outside of those times you had better ignore it…your body can’t be trusted. This deteriorates the communication between body and mind and sets us up for a lifetime of not being able to tune into our body’s cues, especially the more subtle ones.
Dieting Harms Our Health & Increases Risk for Diseases
Dieting actually harms our health–both physical and mental. The weight fluctuations caused by dieting wreak havoc on our cardiovascular system causing strain and damage to your heart and blood vessels. For the majority of the population (95%) dieting leads to long-term weight gain. Additionally, dieting increases your risk of metabolic diseases.
The Mental Health Toll of Dieting
Dieting Leads to Guilt & Feelings That Limit Us
Dieting and diet culture lead to increased anxiety, stress, and obsession with food. This happens for many reasons such as the guilt and shame over not looking how we think we should look, but also from the very real consequences of being undernourished. A hungry brain is a stressed and anxious brain.
Chronic dieters report high levels of guilt, self-blame, irritability, anxiety, depression, fatigue, and struggling to concentrate.
Dieting Disconnects Us from Our Body & Cues
As stated above, dieting leads to a disconnect between our hunger/fullness cues. If we can no longer feel subtle signs of hunger and fullness we also tend to struggle with feeling our subtle emotions. Our bodies become alien to us, a thing to be hated and feared.
Weight Cycling Does More Harm than Good
Weight cycling harms our mental health as well as our physical health. The sense of failure and shame we experience as we regain weight is devastating. We think we are the only ones who can’t keep it together. Even if we have lost weight it is never enough. There is no winning in dieting. We always come up short in one way or another.
This is just a small list of the many ways dieting and diet culture negatively impact our mental and physical health. It profoundly influences our mental and physical health, impacts the ways we see and interact with each other, and reduces quality of life as we obsess over never aging, always shrinking, and never being good enough.
What is Nutrition? (And Why It Supports Well-Being)
Nutrition is defined as the process of providing or obtaining food necessary for health and growth. It’s pretty vague and does not have any prescriptive language as to when, how, and what that means. Nutrition is nourishing our bodies in a way that supports energy, health, and enjoyment in life.
How True Nutrition Supports Your Body and Mind
Focusing on Nutrition Supports Your Life & Quality of Living
Nutrition is needed for our bodies and mind to do anything: work, play, think, and love. Shifting from dieting to nourishing our bodies moves the focus to our overall well-being both body and mind. Nutrition supports our whole person so we can actually live, not spend our days spiraling in self-hatred and body/food obsession. Nutrition improves our quality of life.
Nutrition Connects Us to the Power of Our Bodies & Mind
Our bodies have incredible innate wisdom. Nutrition seeks to connect us to that wisdom so that we can eat intuitively based on our individual needs. This internal focus promotes satisfaction (both physically and mentally), variety, and flexibility in our eating. It leads to freedom and enjoyment as we work with our bodies to feel the way we want to feel.
Nutrition is About Taking Care of All of You – Your Body, Mind & Heart
A true nutrition approach to eating recognizes that food plays a big role in our mental, emotional, and social health. Where dieting reduces food down to fuel that should only be used in specific ways, nutrition leaves space for enjoyment and nostalgia in food.
There is no space for guilt and shame over every bite. Food should be free of moral struggles and self-flagulation. Your mental health is your health. Your relationship with food doesn’t need to be something that diminishes that health.
What Does Nutrition Look Like in Real Life
Fact: Nutrition is About Appreciating & Taking Care of Our Body
We are able to honor our body’s innate cues. Honoring our body leads to more harmonious living and an ability to appreciate the only body we will ever have. Living more in tune with our hunger/fullness cues is harmonious living. It’s peaceful. I wrote about my experience here: https://integrativefunctionalnutrition.com/life-as-an-intuitive-eater-no-more-eating-disorder/
Fact: There Are No Good or Bad Foods
When there are no “good” or “bad” foods you get to listen to your body and choose what will make you feel your best. That isn’t the same for everyone or every circumstance. If I’m missing my grandma, making her cinnamon rolls and sharing them with my family is the best choice in those moments.
The fear many have that if they give themselves full permission to eat they will never stop eating “junk” is understandable and relatable. Yet in my experience, and that of my clients, allowing ourselves full permission to eat ultimately leads to a more balanced diet. No longer does the emotional pull of forbidden foods drive us to overeat, rather, we seek out balance.
Fact: The More We Listen to Our Body the Easier it is to End Food Obsession
Food obsession begins to decrease the longer we eat by our own body cues. The longer we do this the more we come to appreciate our body and its innate wisdom. This can lead us to a place of body neutrality where we respect our bodies and no longer live in self-hatred at all times.
Many of us wait to go on that dream vacation or swim with our kids assuming that someday our bodies will be ideal and THEN we can go live and enjoy life. That day never comes. Either we do go and stress about our bodies the whole time because they could have been better, or we just never go. Eating to honor our body and listening to internal cues frees us from the clutches of body shame at all times and allows us to live and enjoy life.
Fact: There’s Ways to Improve Our Health Beyond Losing Weight
Eating to honor our body and not to lose weight leads to better health outcomes. Research shows that those eating intuitively and focusing on weight-neutral health improve their cholesterol and other health markers.
Additionally, stepping outside of diet culture helps us stop internalizing weight stigma. This reduces our stress and improves hormone function.
Why Shifting from Dieting to Nutrition is Life-Changing
Deciding to embrace intuitive eating and stop dieting forever has changed my life. It has cleared up so much noise in my head and given me space and freedom that I never experienced while stuck in diet culture.
In the effort to improve our health and live fulfilling lives we need to stop buying into the dogma that weight loss is worth the price of our sanity and our health. Research shows that weight-neutral nutrition approaches to improving health lead to the best long-term and sustainable health (8).
Your Health Deserves Better Than a Diet – You Deserve Nutrition
Dieting is about controlling your body and your life. It diminishes your quality of life and damages your mental health. Nutrition is about partnering with your body to find complete well-being in body and mind.
If your relationship with food has become a source of stress, guilt, and shame it is time to take a step back and consider if you are ready to stop dieting and seek true nourishment. Start today by tuning into your hunger/fullness cues and eating by your own body clock rather than some diet rules.
Need extra help? That’s what I’m here for. Schedule your free 20-minute consultation and let’s get you started on your way to a truly nourished and happy life.
Works Cited
- https://nedc.com.au/eating-disorders/eating-disorders-explained/disordered-eating-and-dieting?utm_source=chatgpt.com
- Montani JP, Schutz Y, Dulloo AG. Dieting and weight cycling as risk factors for cardiometabolic diseases: who is really at risk? Obes Rev. 2015 Feb;16 Suppl 1:7-18. doi: 10.1111/obr.12251. PMID: 25614199.
- Tribole E, Resch E. The Intuitive Eating Workbook. Oakland, CA, New Harbinger Publication, Inc., 2017.
- https://lindnercenterofhope.org/blog/why-dieting-can-be-harmful/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
