Can You Change Your Diet Without Dieting?
| May 1, 2012 | Posted by Issa under Radical Self-Acceptance |
Yesterday my friend and commenter, Wendi, left a comment on the post Dieting Makes You Fatter that’s brings up a good question and raises some other issues, so I want to give it my full attention here.
Part of her comment is the basic question:
Is there any difference in any of the studies or reports for people who start a new “diet” just to be generally healthier? … I’m wondering that since the goal of this dietary change isn’t weight loss…does that count as “dieting”?… Have any of the studies addressed that issue, and is there any information you’ve found on it?
There are a few studies that address this idea. There aren’t very many, but I think more research is going to be headed this direction. This link gives an overview of some of the available research.
My understanding is that practices that involve size acceptance and intuitive eating (Health At Every Size, HAES, is one such practice) result in improved physiological health (like blood pressure), improved emotional health (like self-esteem), and improved healthy behaviors (like increased physical activity). These results are independent of weight loss. Additionally, evidence suggests that participants are more likely to continue with their improved habits, which is not the case for dieting.
The rest of Wendi’s comment goes into some of the things she’s doing to aim for more healthy eating.
I’ve started serving portioned out meals at home, to an amount of about 2000 calories a day, just because no one in my house knows what a healthy portion of ANYTHING even looks like…Of the four of us, two tend to overestimate portion sizes, and two underestimate, so it’s definitely a problem for everyone – mostly because none of us really know what we’re eating in that respect.
If you are wanting to pursue a goal of healthy eating, it’s going to be crucial that you ask yourself at every step of the way whether you are actually veering into dieting 0r disordered eating. Our culture is beyond fucked up when it comes to food, and so it can be really hard to figure out a path that makes sense.
Now, I’m not your doctor, your chef, or your mama (not that I think you should listen to any of them, either!) so take my opinion as just that! But I would say that if you’re focused on the number of calories in the food, the size of the portions, and judging the portions as over- or under-estimated, you are not on the right track.
Intuitive eating is a process of getting away from mathematical, moralistic, or checklist judgement of food. There’s no need to count calories; there is only the need to listen to yourself and find what you want or need. There’s no such thing as a portion size; there’s what you want to eat and what you don’t.
Wendi also mentioned her family’s full/hunger signals being out of whack and that’s a common problem with people who’ve struggled with food and weight issues. It can be a really long process to get back to a way of eating that’s in tune with your body.
Outlining an entire plan for a healthier relationship with food is way beyond the scope of this post. There are plenty of resources online for learning more about intuitive or mindful eating, although make sure to steer clear on any that are aiming for weight loss. Health At Every Size is a well-supported, Googlable practice.
My favorite resource is Michelle at The Fat Nutritionist. You could browse her site all day. A few posts I recommend off the top of my head:
- Eat Food. Stuff You Like. As Much As You Want.
- The Rules of Nutrition
- How to eat, in a nutshell – lesson one: Permission.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for that list of resources! I have been going *nuts* trying to find things that are focused on health that do NOT focus on weight loss. The searches I’ve been doing have been pissing me the hell off to the point of throwing my hands up and raging at the computer screen.
I love The Fat Nutritionist. The stuff she says is so… obvious, once you hear it, because she really starts with the basics. But it’s really necessary. And Health At Every Size has a lot of online information and community support if that’s a path you’re interested in. Hope it helps!
The Fat Nutritionist is AWESOME. She’s really got her head screwed on right.
PS: Now, I’m not your doctor, your chef, or your mama (not that I think you should listen to any of them, either!) made me LOL!!
I have a hard time with the judgement I get from the women I work with, they are the water-cooler gossip types- forever on some diet or another, losing and gaining and losing, using all those horrible statements (“I can cheat this once”, “I saved up my points for this weekend”, “I lost 7 pounds this week”) and it makes me cringe. At the same time, it never fails to make me judge myself more critically as I eat my PB&J and crackers without thought.
Without question, my relationship with food and eating is the one relationship I have not be able to reach a healthy compromise with. Self-esteem and emotional issues aside, I weigh 247lbs. (I know because I just ran into the bathroom at my office where there is a scale in every stall- yeah…) I am not the picture of health, but I have none of the physical markers that they identify as related to my morbid obesity. (My ‘ideal’ weight being 160 by the chart)My PCP has stopped bringing up my weight, she doesn’t believe that I am currently in any danger of physical ills due to carrying more than my ‘okay’ amount of weight.
What I do have medical proof for is how my forced dieting requirements, placed on me by someone in a position of authority when I was 9 and continuing until just after I turned 15, and the general malnutrition suffered (Slim-Fast), coupled with the resulting battle with binge and purge behavior, has resulted in joint issues, tooth erosion, non-cancer related lymphademia and is likely directly related to my inability to carry a healthy fetus to full-term.
I had a pretty fantastic therapist in my early teens who would tell me that if I was eating because I was bored or sad or angry, that what I was doing wasn’t eating, it was addiction behavior, no different than an alcoholic taking a drink. I find that slightly hyperbolic, but the sentiment is close. My eating habits change when I realize that I am not eating because I am hungry, I’m eating because that’s my ‘addiction’. So, I am more active in the summer, when the veggies are fresh and there is always something to do outside- my weight falls. In the winter, when my activity falls and it’s more meat and root veggies in season, my weight rises. My solution – more and differently sized clothing and the never ending internal monologue that I am not somehow worth less than people who are thin.
Rambling response, sorry, but this is one of those topics where I feel like I have a gob of personal experience and because I am fat, I am not allowed to talk about it. That until you ‘win’ the dieting game, you don’t get to talk about the success you have had in managing your own food insanity. So, thanks, to you and to everyone who openly says, ‘I’m fat, so what?” :)
I would be so twitchy about that kind of office-talk. And a scale in every stall? Are you serious? You don’t work at a gym! I’d be tempted to involve HR in that nonsense.
“Without question, my relationship with food and eating is the one relationship I have not be able to reach a healthy compromise with.” Congrats, that makes you pretty normal for our culture! Don’t be too hard on yourself! :-)
“forced dieting…Slim-Fast” Ugh. My first diet was Slim-Fast, at 17, at the peak of my physical fitness, so I don’t know why the fuck I was on Slim-Fast. Oh yeah, my 14 year old brother “needed” to be on it, so the rest of the family did in solidarity. 14 year old kid on the chemicals-in-a-can diet! I ended up anemic for awhile from that fuck up. Not that I didn’t try Slim-Fast several more times over the years. Gag.
“…tell me that if I was eating because I was bored or sad or angry, that what I was doing wasn’t eating, it was addiction behavior, no different than an alcoholic taking a drink.” I find this problematic. Eating is requiring for living, so I think framing it as addiction has a lot of issues. It’s a basic building block of our lived experience – it doesn’t have to have a 1-to-1 connection to a single motive. We eat because we’re hungry, because something looks yummy, because other people are eating, because we’re bored, sad, tired, because the clock says so, because it’s a party, because we want to celebrate, because because because. And there’s nothing wrong with all of that. Imagine saying, “You just took that really deep breath because a spring breeze floated by. You didn’t need that big breath for oxygen. You’re addicted to breathing.” Or, “You just had sex because you were bored, not because you’re trying to breed. Sex addiction.” Or, “You fell asleep because you wanted to snuggle your sleeping baby, not because you were actually tired. Addicted to sleep!”
“…this is one of those topics where I feel like I have a gob of personal experience and because I am fat, I am not allowed to talk about it. That until you ‘win’ the dieting game…” I know! I had to get over that, too. And isn’t that FASCINATING?! Because what’s actually being communicated here is that because we’re fat, we’re not allowed to talk about OUR OWN LIVES. Because we’re fat, our opinions about OUR OWN LIVES don’t count. That is beyond fucked up. It’s so vitally important that we speak up when we can and help other fat people speak up as well.
“So, thanks, to you and to everyone who openly says, ‘I’m fat, so what?”” You’re welcome! I’m going to talk about this so much you’re all going to get tired of it! :-)
Not feeling free to talk about my experience with my body makes me sad. I will say something about food, weight, health or nutrition, and sometimes people who have never been fat will give me advice on all sorts of things. And without fail I take it and never say “Did you really think I did not know that?” which is what I want to say.
When I was thin after loosing all that weight people treated me like a expert. I had people ask me for advice all the time, ask about the best exercises and foods. I still have all this knowledge in my head. But no one would think of asking my advice now. I guess all my brain cells were replaced with fat or something.
I don’t mean to sound like a jerk, but whenever someone loses weight and is all proud of it, and then people ask them for advice, I kind of roll my eyes, because I know that, odds are, in a year or two, it’ll all come back. It’d be like if somebody jumped out of a plane without a parachute, and, while in free-fall, said, “Look! I’m flying!” And everybody else went and asked them what their secret was.
Forced or shamed diets were a normal part of my childhood, and so many of my issue with food stem form that.
When I was very young we were super poor. So there were no diets for the first few years because I did not eat enough food to be fat.
Once we moved to GA and I started having food any time I wanted I got chunky. But never fat, looking back I really was never a fat kid. But any time I got to big for my mother tastes (all of her other daughter were very thin, I had a different father, and most of his family is fat) she would put me on a diet.
There was the water diet, from some old magazine clipping which was the most brutal. It was a 10 day diet, several of those days fasting (tea, broth, juice- in small amounts). The other days it was cottage cheese, steamed cabbage, baked meats). I remember once when I was about 14 losing more than 10lb in 10 days on this. I can’t have weight more than 120 lb at 14. So I lost about 10% of my body weight in 10 days. That is crazy.
There was slim-fast so often. I can’t stand the smell of that crap now.
I don’t even want to tell you about being made to add vinegar to all the liquids I drank to burn extra fat. I sometimes wonder if that is part of why my tummy does not work right now.
At some point I started hording food. I have not told many people about this because it is really embarrassing. I would put cracker or chips under my bed. Or small bits of food in the closet. The worst one was sliced cheese in an old locked jewelry box. I would grab several slices when my mother was not watching and put them in the box, I would eat them for several days. The cheese would turn dark orange, once opened it would get all dry and crusty. But I always ate it. Once my niece, India, saw in in the box. She told on me. My mother came in and searched my room for food and I got spanked and yelled at.
To this day, if I interact with people in my family they might bring up how I used to hide cheese. They think it is so funny. It was not funny then, it is not funny now. It is sad and stupid. And I should not have felt like I needed to hide food.
It is sad and stupid, and I understand why you say it is embarrassing, but the bottom line is that you were, literally, in a state of semi-starvation. Food hoarding is a totally normal reaction to that.
I used to hoard food, too, Kitty. I had various places in my room I would hide foods. I also developed elaborate systems and rules for sneaking food in ways that my mom couldn’t catch. Like, which foods might she be able to smell on my breath later, how much of something I could take from the pantry without her noticing that some was gone, etc. I know what you mean about it being embarrassing. It’s hard to talk about outside the moment – it almost doesn’t make sense. You say, “Oh, I hid food in my room,” and it sounds kind of like a joke or, “I had rules for whether I could take 4 crackers or 5 crackers,” and that must be funny. But the truth is, what we really ought to say is, “I was fucking hungry, that was fucking abusive, and it was never, ever funny.”
I guess the judgments I still make about food are things like: is it processed? What sorts of chemicals are in it? Is it meat? Is it full of sugar? A “yes” to any of these is going to make me feel like that food is not the best for us and we should keep it to a minimum in our home. I don’t know that this is the right approach, but I can tell the difference in my energy level and physical sense of well-being when I eat whole, fresh foods and keep my meat and sugar intake low. But at the same time it’s about balance, because I don’t try to eliminate anything, just to keep it to a reasonable amount (of the “not the best” stuff.)
Being able to tell the difference in your energy-level and sense of satisfaction in your body is a cornerstone of Health at Every Size.
Amen. Thank you for writing this. I love The Fat Nutritionist. too!
I keep having to ask myself, at every step, whenever I’m making dietary changes that I’m purporting to be “healthier,” Am I doing this to lose weight? Even if it’s on the sly. Because then I will cheat, and will just reinforce my stupid relationship with food that I’ve developed over decades of feeling bad about myself.
I do find that as I’m trying to eat more intuitively that I have a hard time tuning into my own hunger and satiety signals. I’m hoping they become clearer with more use.