Screw diet culture! Some corporate entity can’t tell me what to eat! “They” say sugar is bad? Watch me! When it comes to rejecting dieting for good, it’s natural to want to eat anything and everything just because you can.
“In intuitive eating, we call this the honeymoon phase,” says Kara Lydon, a registered dietitian in Boston who went through it early in her recovery from an eating disorder in her teens. “When you finally give yourself full permission to eat all foods, those forbidden foods are going to seem so novel and exciting that you may find yourself constantly thinking about those foods for a period of time.”
You may also find yourself always ordering the ice cream over the fruit bowl or always saying “yes please” to extra helpings because you want to “prove” you’re no longer dieting — not because it’s truly what you want or what your body needs. “I remember not even enjoying the foods [I binged on],” says Meggie Sexton, an events and marketing consultant in Columbus, Ohio, who would go overboard on “sugary garbage” like packaged pastries after periods of restriction.
And while allowing yourself to eat anything is a critical piece of recovering from an eating disorder or a history of yo-yo dieting, eating (and often overeating) just because you can or as an act of rebellion isn’t exactly healthy either.
“Eating something to stick to a very rigid diet is big problem, and eating to make a comment against a very specific diet if done rigidly is also a problem — it’s making food a moral issue, and it just isn’t,” says Deborah Glasofer, an assistant professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York who studies eating disorders in adults. “We’re humans and we need to eat … and sometimes that experience is about eating something that’s really pleasurable, sometimes it’s about fueling your body and sometimes it’s about being able to find a snack that you can make do with when you’re at an airport.”
[See: 6 Darn Good Reasons to Eat Sugar and Not Apologize for It.]
So if you’re done with dieting — and also done proving it via potato chips and doughnuts — and ready to eat healthfully enough for good, congrats. Here’s how to get started:
1. Seek support.
Permanently moving on from dieting or disordered eating isn’t easy. And in fact, nutrition is the last piece of the puzzle, experts say. “If you haven’t done the work of healing your relationship with food first — including rejecting diet culture, honoring your hunger and fullness and learning how to listen to your body,” Lydon says, it’s easy to fall into another diet.
That’s why it’s important to work with a professional like a certified intuitive eating counselor, a dietitian who specializes in a non-diet or “health at every size” approach or a therapist who focuses on eating disorder recovery. “It helps to have the language and validation that this is a normal part of the experience,” says Lydon, a certified intuitive eating counselor and blogger at The Foodie Dietitian. Folks with that credential, she says, “can help you recognize where in the process you are and give you the appropriate support given where you are in your journey.”
2. Shift your expectations.
Riding the dieting roller coaster means having an end-goal like a number on the scale or a size of jeans. Getting off that roller coaster means getting comfortable with not knowing how your body will wind up looking, says Julie Satterfeal, a registered dietitian in Huntsville, Alabama, whose book “Ditch the Diet: How to Reclaim Your Health and Enjoy Food” will be out this fall. “The thing that’s really tough is that [sustainable healthy eating] requires that delayed gratification that none of us are really good at,” she says. “We want a plan, and we want to see the results of that plan.”
To appeal to that desire, focus on non-appearance-related results, like your energy levels, mood and sleep patterns, Glasofer suggests. “It has a greater likelihood of being sustainable if it’s about the things that actually make you feel better,” she says.
3. Practice mindful eating.
While dieting means following someone else’s rules about what to eat and not eat, mindful eating means letting your own body be the boss. Glasofer suggests trying to eat mostly based on hunger and preference, as well as what will challenge some of your formerly held food rules, like that all white foods are “bad.” “Trust your body,” suggests Sexton, who worked with a registered dietitian and therapist during her recovery from disordered eating patterns. “Trust that … if you feed it a balanced diet and aren’t obsessive about counting calories or eating certain foods, it’s going to treat you well back.”
[See: 11 Things to Tell Yourself When You’re About to Binge Eat.]
4. Eat regularly.
One of the strategies that set the groundwork for Sexton’s recovery was quite practical: She started eating three meals a day and several snacks. “Once I got in that cycle and habit of eating normally and feeding my body the nutrients it needed, I didn’t crave the sweets or eating the garbage as much, because my body was adjusting to having the nutrients it needed,” Sexton says.
Satterfeal sees the same pattern in clients who think they’re unnaturally obsessed with junk food but really just need to give their bodies enough food at regular intervals. “We don’t eat and then we blame ourselves, saying I’m wired wrong — you’re not wired wrong, you’re human,” she says. “Everyone’s a carb and sugar addict if they don’t eat until 3 p.m.”
5. Switch things up.
Variety is also important to make sure you’re meeting all of your nutritional needs without swinging between the extremes of restriction and mindless bingeing. “Are you including a balance of carbs, protein and fat at most meals and snacks? Are you eating a variety of grains, fruits, vegetables, proteins, dairy and fun foods throughout your week or month?” Lydon suggests asking yourself. This concept is called “gentle nutrition” in the intuitive eating framework, since it doesn’t involve rules but rather general patterns. “Gentle nutrition is about taking a step back and looking at the larger picture,” she says.
[See: 12 ‘Unhealthy’ Foods With Health Benefits.]
6. Keep going.
Intuitive eating is a lifelong practice, meaning you’ll have to keep working on it by continuing to make small changes (a little more water here, a little less sugar there), observing how they taste to you and feel in your body, and adjusting accordingly. You may learn you actually like the taste of a plain old baked potato and not the way you feel after three chocolate chip cookies, or that diet soda actually doesn’t quench your thirst the way a glass of water with cucumber does. What works best for you is something only you can decide, Satterfeal says. While that lack of structure can be intimidating for chronic dieters at first, it will become easier — and eventually liberating, Lydon finds. “I think my teenage self would be really frightened by the notion of letting go of the reins around food and giving myself full permission to eat any food I want,” she says. “I don’t think I realized [back then] that by controlling my food intake, I let food have all the power over my life.”
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How to Eat Well After a ‘Screw It’ Phase — Without Dieting (Again) originally appeared on usnews.com
