Intuitive Eating Basics: Rejecting the Diet Mentality and Challenge the Food Police
If you’re here, you’re likely curious about intuitive eating and its principles. That’s great! These principles are a great jumping off point to healing your relationship with food. Notice I said jumping off point: these principles cannot replace the wisdom of your body. In fact, the point of them is to guide you into developing a stronger relationship with the wisdom of your body! The most important thing to remember on your intuitive eating journey is this: The second you feel like the intuitive eating principles are rules that you either succeed or fail at following, something is wrong. The truth is, you cannot fail at intuitive eating. You can practice, struggle with, and feel more confident in your intuitive eating journey, but it is not something you can do “wrong.” With that said, let’s dive into two of the more basic intuitive eating principles: Rejecting the Diet Mentality and Challenge the Food Police.
reject the diet mentality
The diet mentality is essentially thinking about food and eating habits through the lens of diet culture. Diet culture is is a system of beliefs that worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue (1). Basically, it states that you’re a better person if you’re thin or pursuing thinness. Diet culture promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status and it demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others. By doing that, it’s instilling this idea that there are “good” and “bad” foods, and that by following diet culture’s rules, you will lose weight, which will result in a myriad of beautiful wonderful things happening to you.
That’s a huge problem, especially when they leave out some pretty important facts. So let’s talk about it: Long story short, diets don’t work. 95% of people who diet will regain the weight in less than 5 years. Two thirds of those people will gain more weight than they started with (2)! This is how we get the binge/restrict cycle. The dieting, or desire to control our bodies comes first, only to then experience cravings because our bodies do not like to be starved, we lose control around food and/or eat past comfortable, we regain any weight we may have lost, and most people will then plan how to lose it again. And the cycle continues. The dieting industry profits over 72 billion dollars a year by convincing you you’re not good enough (3).
You also don’t have to be following any sort of official diet to be caught up in the culture of dieting. There are so many ways we can be participating in or perpetuating diet culture or the diet mentality without following a strict or specific diet. It can also look like:
Telling yourself you’re only going to have a “little bit” of something before you eat it
Putting any sort of expectation on portion sizes or amount you’re going to eat before you start eating
Not keeping binge trigger foods in the house
Setting strict meal times or eating “windows”
Determining what you eat the rest of the day beased on what you ate earlier that day or the day before
Or determining what you’re going to eat (or not eat) based on upcoming meals or events
Labeling foods as “good” or “bad” like I said earlier
Having “should’s” or “shouldn’ts” around food
Using “mindful eating” with the goal of eating less
Feeling called out at all? Rejecting the diet mentality is largely going to be throwing away the idea that dieting works, and that you’ll be a better person for being thin, or pursuing thinness. The way to do that is by simply noticing when the diet mentality comes up (step 1), challenging that thought (step 2), and choosing a behavior that does not align with any of the above bullet points (step 3).
challenge the food police
You can think of the food police as your inner critic. Specifically, that inner critic that tells you you’re “good” or “bad” for eating certain foods, places a ton of judgment on your food choices, or makes you feel guilty over how/what/when you eat. Let’s make one thing super clear: guilt is not an ingredient.
Here are some blatant examples of food policing:
“I was so bad, I ate dessert.”
“I shouldn’t eat anything past 7pm.”
“I can’t eat fruits, they have too much sugar.”
“Bread is bad for you.”
“You should have gotten in more steps today.”
Are we hearing the themes? “bad,” “can’t,” “should,” “shouldn’t” “too much,” all of these value judgments. Let’s cancel them! These statements are rooted in anti-fat bias and diet culture. By believing your food police, diet culture gets to profit off of you. It also doesn’t do wonders for your self-esteem, as you probably know.
If you struggle with not creating moral judgments around food, it might be helpful to debunk something real quick: all foods have nutrients and all foods fit in a “healthy” diet. Yes, some foods may be more nutrient-dense or less, but that does not make them better or worse. Your body will take what it needs, and eliminate the rest, if you know what I mean. That will mean your body will eliminate unneeded nutrients from your superfood smoothie, just as it will eliminate unneeded nutrients from your cheeseburger. Your body will also absorb different nutrients from those things every single time you eat them, depending on your body’s needs at the time. Your body is really smart, and you can trust that it will take what it needs and leave the rest.
Although your body is really smart, it also has no idea what time it is - only if it needs fuel or not. Before someone comes at me with the “what about your circadian rhythm??!” I’m not here to reject that sort of science, this is simply my way of telling you that your stomach does not have a closing time. Your body is just as good at absorbing nutrients at 8am as it is at 11pm. However, if you’re stuck in a cycle of eating in the middle of the night and it’s interrupting your sleep, that might be something to game-plan around. Intuitive eating can help!
If you’re struggling with calorie counting, or super loud and harsh inner critic voices or food rules in your head, they will go away with time. You just have to keep directly challenging them by following the 3 steps outlined in Reject the Diet Mentality.
Both these principles of intuitive eating are about changing your mindset around how you view food. Both require you to unlearn some beliefs you might have held onto for a very long time (maybe even your whole life), so please be gentle with yourself as you unlearn these things and learn to approach your intuitive eating process with self-compassion. It’s not something that can be done overnight. It takes practice and time to reject the diet mentality and challenge your food police. Implementing some of the other intuitive eating principles alongside these two (suggested below) will help you out as you start this journey off!
looking to heal your relationship with food and your body?
1: Harrison, Christy. Anti-diet: Reclaim your time, money, well-being, and happiness through intuitive eating. Hachette UK, 2019.
2: Brody, Jane E. "Panel criticizes weight-loss programs." New York Times 2 (1992).
3: Mann, Traci, A. Janet Tomiyama, Erika Westling, Ann-Marie Lew, Barbra Samuels, and Jason Chatman. "Medicare's search for effective obesity treatments: diets are not the answer." American psychologist 62, no. 3 (2007): 220.