If you’ve ever struggled to lose weight, you can probably name at least a few different diet programs you’ve tried to drop extra pounds. Whether you counted calories, used an app, had weekly meetings with other folks trying to lose weight, tried supplements, or ordered specially prepared meal kits, you likely ended up facing the same results with every new program: Failure.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, 49.1% of American adults tried some form of dieting between the years 2011 and 2016. Google reports that one of its top search engine queries is “how to lose weight.”
Despite this high number of dieters and folks looking for weight loss plans, nearly every diet attempt fails–about 80% of people who lose weight on a diet will eventually gain it back, according to research from Scientific American. If so, many people are dieting, why are most of these attempts ending in failure?
The answer lies within dieting culture. Diet culture, or the world that exists around the idea of altering your eating habits drastically to lose weight, gets in the way of our bodies’ natural method for controlling hunger and fullness.
The diet culture is full of apps, plans, strict eating rules, products, influencers, and other aspects of weight loss programs designed to give people hope about weight loss. Unfortunately, these dieting programs are often unsuccessful because they steer the human body away from Intuitive Eating.
Intuitive Eating is the art of listening to your body’s natural hunger and fullness cues. All people are born with the ability to eat intuitively naturally.
For example, when babies are hungry, they begin to wail. Once they’ve had enough to eat, they’ll turn their heads away or push away from their food source to indicate that they’re finished. If we’re all born with this natural ability, how do so many people end up losing it?
And if you have lost your ability to sense and listen to your body’s natural fullness and hunger cues, can you regain these skills? The answer is yes!
How Going On A Diet Plan and Being A Part of Dieting Culture Affects Your Natural Intuitive Eating Senses
Diet culture is an industry that depends on a particular cycle to stay in business. While all diet programs boast results to make you feel better about yourself, in the end, they are businesses who depend on folks wanting to lose weight or change their bodies in order to make money.
Here is an example of what that cycle looks like:
- You feel unhappy about your current weight or how your body looks
- You learn about a new diet program; the program gives you hope to finally get your weight under control
- You participate in the program by following all the rules and guidelines set forth by the program (and even see some results!)
- You eventually break one of the programs’s rules about eating, etc. and feel guilty
- You begin to lose faith in yourself to stick by the program’s rules and backslide
- You abandon the diet program entirely
- You’re back to feeling unhappy about your current weight or how your body looks again
As this cycle continues, you regain that sense of hopefulness with each new advertisement or promise from a weight loss company “guaranteeing” that you’ll see amazing, lasting results. When you fail to stick to the diet program’s specific rules about eating, you feel like a failure and continue to be unhappy about your body and your ability to control yourself around food.
The reason why these diet programs don’t work lies within their strict rules and guidelines. Dieting programs encourage people to eat in ways that go against Intuitive Eating, or the ability to listen to our bodies’ current needs.
Here are some examples of strict dieting rules and guidelines that push against your body’s natural hunger and fullness cues:
- On an intermittent fasting diet, you may feel very hungry outside of your “eating window,” but since it isn’t time to eat yet, you choose to ignore your body’s requests for sustenance.
- On a sugar-free diet, you refuse to eat even a bite of anything sugary, despite feeling some cravings. At a friend’s birthday party a few weeks after you start this diet, you end up eating five giant slices of cake because you finally gave into your sugar craving and ended up bingeing.
- On a points-based eating system diet, you reach the end of the day and realize you haven’t “spent” all your available points. Even though you aren’t hungry at all, you go ahead and eat some extra snacks because you don’t want your spare points to go to waste.
These examples, plus countless others, describe why diet programs and diet culture aren’t supportive of your body’s natural ability to tell when you’ve had enough, had too much, or need more.
No wonder why so many diets fail!
They constantly push against your body’s natural abilities to regulate itself. Eventually, after you’ve explored countless dieting programs and picked up on all their individual quirks, rules, and guidelines, you begin to think about them constantly–with all that loud, bossy dieting chatter happening in your mind, it’s easy to lose touch with your natural Intuitive Eating skills!
2 Key Reasons The Dieting Culture Is Toxic and Dangerous
Although so many people follow along with numerous diet programs, they are participating in a toxic, dangerous dieting culture. This culture, held together by widespread beliefs that losing weight and being thin is the most ideal way to live life, depend on millions of customers feeling bad about themselves in order to stay in business. Dieting culture is toxic for a few main reasons:
1| Diet programs tend to have a lot of restrictive rules and guidelines to follow in order to be successful.
When you stick to these strict rules, you are likely to see results. However, the results are usually short lived-after a while, your body will fight against these strict rules and you’ll break off from the program. This usually leaves you feeling like a failure.
Diet programs’ rigid rules are the very root of why they don’t work. These rules set an impossible standard to follow on a permanent basis. Dieting programs restrict access to either types of foods or amounts of food you can eat each day; this leads to feelings of deprivation. Eventually, you’re bound to “fall off the wagon” and break one of the strict rules (and feel bad about it afterward).
2| Diet programs hold thinness as the most ideal body shape.
Thinness is at the center of dieting culture’s existence. A favorite marketing tactic among different dieting program companies usually involves the promise of “achieving your dream body” or “a better, thinner you,” often accompanied by shocking before-and-after shots of happy customers who lost a drastic amount of weight using their systems.
Although we do live in a society highly influenced by dieting culture’s demands that thinness is the ideal body type, becoming thin simply isn’t possible for everyone. Body types and shapes are unique, just like your fingerprints or the sound of your voice.
Deep in your genes, these different factors exist–including ones that determine what your body type and shape will be. Some people are naturally ultra lean, some people are naturally larger, and many people fall somewhere in between those two poles.
Rather than focusing on nourishment and health, dieting culture is more concerned with reaching society’s ideal of the perfect body by achieving thinness, which isn’t possible for everyone.
When folks following diet programs rail against their bodies’ natural hunger and fullness cues, they are setting themselves up for failure. Since their bodies aren’t designed to be thin, they’ll only find frustration in dieting culture’s pressures to become thinner.
What It Means To Be Intuitive Eater?
Intuitive Eaters depend on their bodies’ natural abilities to let them know when it’s time to eat and when to stop eating. Simply put, they are able to understand and detect the unique ways their bodies communicate their sustenance needs with them.
Intuitive Eaters also view eating as an enjoyable experience. They don’t let the mean “food police” of the dieting world keep control over what they eat, when they eat, or how much they eat. Instead, Intuitive Eaters take their time eating, enjoy all the flavors, and choose a variety of different foods, depending on their day and current needs.
For example, consider Jerry. Jerry has always had a problem with his weight and he suffers from binge eating in the late evenings. When Jerry thinks back from his teenage years to the present, he is pretty sure he’s been on a diet more often than not.
One of the rules he picked up from a diet he tried dealt with breakfast. This particular diet harped on the rule of “skipping breakfast to give your body time to wake up in the morning.”
Once he began to rediscover Intuitive Eating, Jerry realized that on most mornings, he felt a gnawing hunger in his stomach shortly after waking. Normally, he’d let the dieting rule take control in his mind–he’d skip breakfast despite feeling hungry.
On one particular morning, Jerry realized this was the “food police” talking. That rule never served him well in the past, so he decided to listen to his body’s signals instead and have some breakfast. After a few days, Jerry realized his evening binges were going away. Now that he was listening to his body and eating breakfast in the mornings, he no longer felt completely ravenous by the end of the day!
If you are a chronic dieter like Jerry used to be, rediscovering your Intuitive Eating abilities can take lots of patience and practice. Diet culture had a lot of time to teach you tons of different, ineffective, and restrictive eating rules.
Think of practicing Intuitive Eating like using a shovel–after a while, you’ll be able to dig your natural Intuitive Eating abilities out of diet culture’s yucky dirt pile.
10 Ways To Rediscover Your Intuitive Eating Abilities
You can rediscover your Intuitive Eating abilities with some patience and practice. Patience is a must–if you’ve been immersed in dieting culture for years, it’ll take time to ignore dieting culture’s rules and guidelines in order to listen to your body’s natural signals. There are some basic principles for getting started, though:
1| Begin rejecting the diet mentality.
This is one of the toughest principles to follow to rediscover Intuitive Eating. Dieting culture may have been a part of your life for many years. The rules and guidelines of dieting programs teach you that you can’t trust yourself, and that you need rules to follow in order to eat right, but this simply isn’t the truth.
Give yourself constant reminders about why diet mentality isn’t helpful or healthy. How many diets have you tried and failed? How many times did you find yourself repeating the dieting cycle? How many diet programs encouraged participants to skip out on whole categories of food or seriously limit their food intake each day? How many diet programs taught you to ignore or distrust your body’s natural signals? Say “no” to these unhealthy tips and say “yes” to trusting yourself!
2| Honor your hunger.
Do you remember Jerry from earlier in this article? Long ago, a dieting program taught him that eating breakfast was bad for him. Even though he felt hungry first thing in the morning, he’d skip breakfast and start his workday on an empty stomach.
By the time he got home in the evenings, he’d binge eat everything in sight! Jerry changed his perspective and decided to start honoring his hunger–when he woke up with that hungry feeling in the mornings, he’d make breakfast instead of skipping it. When Jerry honored his hunger by giving his body some nourishment, he noticed the binge episodes disappeared!
Honoring your hunger can feel scary for a chronic dieter, but it’s a crucial step in regaining trust with yourself. Your body can and will send you hunger signals when it’s time to eat something. Honor those feelings by eating.
3| Make peace with food.
Dieting programs have a tendency to demonize certain types of food. For example, a no-sugar approach diet program will preach the dangers of cakes, cookies, and candy. A no-carb diet program will tell you to avoid bread and pasta at all costs. While these approaches may show some results, in the long run, they aren’t realistic!
All foods are meant to be enjoyed. While some are more nutritious than others, it’s important to allow variety and enjoyment in our diets.
Rather than thinking of different foods as either good or bad, think of some foods as “play” foods. If you find yourself craving a specific play food in a moment of hunger, let yourself enjoy some of that food.
Reintroduce previously banned foods back into your diet. For example, if you are a previous no-sugar dieter who was taught to avoid ice cream at all costs, let yourself eat a serving of your favorite ice cream. As you begin to give yourself permission to enjoy foods you crave, you’ll notice some interesting things:
- Your fears of constantly craving these foods will go away (when you realize you can have these items at any time, your body will stop going into overload mode when you have an opportunity to eat them again).
- You’ll likely discover that some of your previous “forbidden favorites” foods aren’t that appealing to your taste buds….you only craved them because you tricked your mind into thinking they were off limits!
4| Challenge the Food Police.
What does the “food police” sound like to you? Everyone experiences the food police a little differently. A few examples of the food police include:
- Strict, unrealistic dieting program rules and guidelines that stay in the back of your mind, even when you aren’t following that specific diet program anymore
- A loved one commenting about your food choices, how much you’re choosing to eat, etc.
- A stranger commenting on your food choices, how much you’re choosing to eat, etc.
- The voice in your mind that says your “good” or “bad” for choosing to eat certain foods
It can be tough to silence these annoying food police voices, but it is possible with practice. If you allow the food police to keep calling the shots on how, when, and what you eat, you aren’t allowing your Intuitive Eating voices to speak clearly.
5| Discover the satisfaction factor in eating.
Food is meant to be enjoyed. When you allow yourself to really enjoy your entire eating experience, you’ll feel more satisfaction from it. Here are a few ways you can discover the satisfaction factor during a meal:
- Turn off the TV, smartphone, or any other distracting devices when you’re trying to eat. Allow your attention to focus completely on your food–the textures, aromas, and flavors.
- Chew slowly and savor each bite of your meal.
- Make eating a pleasant experience–enjoy a meal with a friend or family member. If you prefer a peaceful experience, create an enjoyable space to have your meal in golden silence.
- Eat in a pleasant environment. Although the atmosphere isn’t directly related to what’s on your plate, it helps you enjoy it even more.
When your eating experiences are more pleasant, you derive more satisfaction from the meal. When you leave a meal feeling satisfied, you’re more likely to listen to the fullness cues when it’s time to stop eating.
6| Feel your fullness.
Being full can feel differently from person to person. Allow yourself to stop periodically when you’re eating so you can gauge how different levels of fullness feel to you.
For example, after a few bites of your meal, put down your fork and set your plate aside. Concentrate on how you feel after those first few bites. Are you feeling less “empty” or “hollow”? Continue eating and stop about halfway. Are you comfortably full or do you need more bites? If you eat too much, how does it make you feel, specifically?
Understanding your different fullness levels and being able to gauge them helps you determine how much fuel your body truly needs.
7| Address your emotions with kindness.
Emotional eating is common–if you’ve ever reached for a candy bar or the chip bag when you’re feeling stressed out or upset, you can probably relate. However, the quick hit of dopamine brought on by bingeing on favorite snacks isn’t the answer to handling tough emotions.
Spend some time sitting with uncomfortable or tough emotions to better understand why you’re having them. Getting to the root of emotional upset rather than dampening them with food will help you address your emotions more clearly.
Eating to heal emotional wounds doesn’t actually solve the problem causing the emotions. Allow yourself to feel your emotions and give yourself the opportunity to really do something to solve your issues.
8| Respect your body and accept it for what it is.
Everyone has a unique genetic blueprint. For some folks, this means natural thinness, but for many, it means a naturally ultra-thin body isn’t possible. This is okay! While dieting culture wants us to believe thinness is the best way to be, it simply isn’t the case.
When you learn to love and accept your body for what it is–a unique masterpiece–you can really begin to let go of dieting culture’s yucky rules and guidelines.
9| Practice regular, comfortable movement.
Move your body in a way that makes you feel good. Militant, extreme exercise can make you feel miserable. Rather than forcing yourself to do exercises you don’t actually like, find methods that make you feel good afterward. This can be the key difference between getting up and choosing to take a brisk walk in the morning or hitting the snooze button, for example.
10| Honor your health with gentle nutrition.
Nutrition and dieting culture’s rules are two different things. Make food choices that will honor your health, indulge your taste buds, and make you feel good!
Choose foods that respect your choices for that day–do you want something sweet, salty, or savory? Find different foods to incorporate into your meal that indulge these different cravings. Your eating choices over time are what matters. One day, one snack, or one meal of pure indulgences won’t break your progress toward Intuitive Eating success.
The Bottom Line
Choosing to rediscover your Intuitive Eating abilities helps you break free from dieting culture’s depressing cycle of restrictions and failures.
To achieve happiness with your body, health, and self-image, choosing foods based on the principles of Intuitive Eating will keep you in line with your body’s natural signals for nutrition and nourishment.
Stay well and take care!
