Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating

by Christy Harrison

First, pay attention to whether you experience any of these symptoms throughout the day: • Difficulty making decisions • Feeling irritable or annoyed • Losing focus • Bad breath or weird taste in your mouth • Burping or gas • Heartburn or acid reflux • Feeling increasingly restless, uncomfortable, or agitated • Thinking about food; fantasizing about your next meal or what to cook for dinner • Fatigue or listlessness • Sweating (without exerting yourself or being in a hot place) • Headaches • Nausea • Ringing in the ears • Anxiety or panic If and when you notice any of these symptoms, try eating a satisfying snack or a meal

When it comes to recovering from diet culture, your body and brain are like that stray cat. You might need a long time to work up the courage to stop dieting, then even longer to adjust to life without diet rules. You might feel like a scared baby animal that’s gone through a lot of trauma, because that’s what it is. “Diet culture is trauma in and of itself,” explains Lilia Graue, a marriage and family therapist and medical doctor who specializes in recovery from disordered eating. “It threatens our most basic need, which is the need to belong. You’re bombarded by messages of ‘Your body is wrong,’ ‘Your body doesn’t belong,’ ‘Your body doesn’t conform to what we think is worthy or lovable or acceptable.’ How can you not be traumatized by that?”

As I’ve alluded to throughout this chapter, stopping eating in response to fullness really tends to fall into place once you get the hang of honoring your body’s needs for food, and once you trust that you’ll always have enough—both enough food in general, and enough variety and pleasure in your food choices. You need to trust that you’re allowed to eat as much as you want of the foods you desire, anytime. Part of what keeps people eating past the point of comfortable fullness is the belief that their food is going to be taken away or placed off-limits again, so they have to get it all in now while they can. So if you want to be able to honor your fullness and stop before getting painfully full, you have to focus on allowance—allowing yourself to eat consistently throughout the day, and allowing yourself access to all foods, rather than making certain things verboten.

That’s why one of the key tenets of intuitive eating is that there’s no such thing as “good” or “bad” food. This thinking flies in the face of everything diet culture teaches us about food. Yet when you destigmatize foods and look at them all as equally worthy options, it takes away the irresistible pull toward “forbidden” foods (don’t those always taste the sweetest?). Instead, you’re able to choose what you truly want and need in any given moment. Refusing to follow diet culture’s rules about “good” and “bad” foods gives you back the power and the agency to make your own decisions about what to eat. It removes the physical and emotional deprivation that go along with “being good” by diet culture’s standards. It restores your autonomy.

Truly holistic health encompasses physical, mental, emotional, and social aspects—including freedom from stigma, reliable access to food and shelter, and sufficient resources for transportation, childcare, and medical care, as well as the right to pleasure and satisfaction in your life as a whole, including your food. Truly holistic health is about so much more than what you eat. Thus, making peace with all kinds of foods, even the formerly “forbidden” ones, supports your mental and emotional health as well as your physical well-being. Research has shown that intuitive eaters, who don’t have any “off-limits” foods or follow any diet-culture rules, have better health outcomes on an impressive array of measures: lower cardiovascular risk, decreased triglyceride levels, more-favorable levels of HDL cholesterol, lower rates of disordered eating, less likelihood of feeling out of control with food, less food-related anxiety, less internalization of the thin ideal, lower levels of body dissatisfaction and shame, greater enjoyment of food, increased body appreciation, less self-silencing behavior, higher sensitivity to their own internal states, higher levels of self-compassion, greater life satisfaction, more proactive coping skills, and better self-esteem.2 People don’t drop dead when they let go of diet culture’s rules, tune in to their bodies’ cues and desires, and figure out what they enjoy eating. On the contrary, they increase their chances of having positive health outcom...

Taking pleasure in food is a central force in intuitive eating: rather than trying to talk yourself out of your desires for so-called “forbidden” foods, you give yourself full, unconditional permission to enjoy them—along with every other kind of food—as often as you like. You’re able to seek out and find satisfying things to eat, instead of trying to convince yourself you enjoy the things you’re forcing yourself to eat. Savoring food becomes an everyday experience—not something reserved for weekends or “cheat days”—so you never have to panic that you’re not going to be “allowed” to have any more of your favorite snack once this bag is gone. It’s here for you again whenever you want.

People relearning intuitive eating often go through a “Honeymoon Phase”: when you’ve been restricted for a while from eating certain foods, you’re going to reach a point where those foods are all you want. It’s like you’re at the beginning of a new relationship with them where you can’t get enough, and nothing else seems appealing (much like the Honeymoon Phase with a new romantic partner). This is a common part of the process. Remember the Restriction Pendulum, where you go from restricting food to eating all the food? The Honeymoon Phase is similar: you go from restricting particular foods to having intense cravings for and eating larger amounts of those foods—namely, the ones you’ve been deprived of. It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you. On the contrary, it’s to be expected when you’ve been dieting.

there’s no scientific justification for demonizing and cutting out whole categories of foods, the way the Wellness Diet tells you to. Trying to do that usually backfires: you end up bingeing on or feeling “addicted” to those foods when you gain access to them again. Ironically, once you break free of diet culture’s rules, heal from the trauma of food deprivation, and start following your own inner wisdom about what to eat, you’re much likelier to end up in good health than those who obsess about nutrition. You’ll find yourself naturally relaxing around the foods that diet culture demonizes. You may even stop wanting to eat as much of them as a result—not because you consider them “bad” in any way, but simply because you know you can enjoy them anytime, and you have lots of other foods you enjoy, too.

When diet culture demonizes certain foods while elevating others, it conveniently distracts our attention from the real issues. Rather than admitting that its methods of deprivation, restriction, and self-blame don’t work—and that they instead actively harm our physical and mental health—diet culture points the finger at particular foods it falsely labels as “toxic,” “addictive,” or just plain “bad.” From cookies to gluten to tomatoes, the foods that diet culture demonizes vary based on trends and flimsy science. But for the vast majority of people, restricting those foods never leads to long-term benefits. That’s because the problem isn’t the food. The problem is the deprivation, shame, and guilt that diet culture instills in us, which leads us to swing wildly between restricting and feeling out of control, never able to access the peace and trust in our bodies that is our birthright. The problem is diet culture itself.

Your health isn’t entirely within your control, either, despite what diet culture wants you to think. Health isn’t something you can wrestle into submission by sheer force; certain circumstances beyond our control—genetics, socioeconomic status, experiences of stigma, environmental exposures—can affect our health outcomes. We can’t permanently change our body size through food intake and exercise, the way we’ve been told we can, and the same is true of our health—which, of course, is not dependent on body size. That is, even if everyone ate the exact same things and moved their bodies in the exact same ways, we’d all still have different health outcomes because of genetic differences, experiences of poverty and discrimination, and even deprivation that our mothers experienced during pregnancy. Many things contribute to health, meaning it’s not all down to personal responsibility, the way diet culture wants us to believe—not by a long shot.

When it comes to the food part, an approach based on self-care rather than self-control goes something like this: • making food choices that care for your mental health—honoring desire, satisfaction, spontaneity, and flexibility—as well as your physical health; • pursuing joy and pleasure in food rather than deprivation and restriction; • caring for your body by meeting its need for food—enough food overall, and a wide variety of foods that bring you both energy and happiness (and that definitely includes dessert, by the way); • grabbing a bite or a drink with friends after work without worrying about what you ate earlier in the day; • serving yourself enough to truly satisfy your hunger, which might mean going back for seconds; • packing snacks when you know you’re going to be out for a while; and • having, say, hot chocolate on a cold day because it’s comforting, or watermelon on a hot day because it’s refreshing.

Diet culture messes with our ability to engage in these acts of self-care by putting the focus on control. It’s constantly telling us that we “shouldn’t” need or want as much food as we do, “shouldn’t” be as hungry as we are. It tells us to control our desires, to fight our body’s natural cues. It keeps us stuck in mere survival mode, obsessing over food and our bodies, at the expense of so many other things we could be doing with our time and energy.

“Self-care, not self-control” likewise means letting your weight settle where it may. As my fellow HAES dietitian Dana Sturtevant succinctly puts it, “It’s not possible to heal our relationship with food and body while trying to control the size and shape of our body.” In other words, you have to let that shit go if you want to stop feeling unhinged around food. Diet culture makes this difficult, but getting to a place where you’re not actively trying to shrink your body is an essential ingredient in your physical and mental well-being. Breaking free from diet culture means breaking free from all of it, including idealizing smaller bodies and equating thinness with health and moral virtue. In a truly self-caring relationship with your body, weight loss or management can never be the goal.

How exactly does that work, in terms of health? The thing is, your body is way smarter than you think. It will determine whatever weight it needs to be when you’re practicing self-care behaviors to the best of your abilities, to the extent that you’re able to prioritize self-care. Your body will figure it out. Remember the weight set range from Chapter 3? When you stop trying to control your size, your body will eventually find that set range and stay there. When you’re consistently practicing self-care and you haven’t engaged in dieting or disordered-eating behaviors for a good long time (like months or years), it’s likely that whatever size you are is the size your body wants to be.

There’s no magic diet. For the vast majority of people, there’s no way to lose weight and keep it off for more than a handful of years. Even if you’re one of the minuscule percentage of people for whom that does seem to be happening, there’s still no diet that won’t create chaos in your relationship with food. There’s no form of intentional weight loss that lets you live peacefully with food and your body.

So let’s stop believing diet culture’s false promises—and recognize that there’s no way to play by its rules and win. You don’t have to keep chasing that dragon. It’s a quest that can end only in misery, and meanwhile there’s so much life happening right here, right now. Instead of devoting your time on this planet to finding the perfect diet, work to make peace with food and your body so that you can free your mind for the things that truly matter in life.

Guidelines for Health-Care Providers to Prevent Weight Stigma and Disordered Eating • Focus on evidence-based interventions to improve health, which do not include weight loss. Don’t use body mass index (BMI) as a measure of health; using this measure is likely to lead to misdiagnosis for both larger- and smaller-bodied people.2 • Recommend the same evidence-based interventions to patients in larger bodies as you would to patients in smaller bodies. For example, if someone in a larger body has a bacterial infection, prescribe antibiotics. If they have knee pain, recommend physical therapy. Don’t recommend weight loss. • Don’t require patients to step on the scale, except in cases of true medical necessity such as administering anesthesia or monitoring their recovery from a restrictive-eating disorder. In those cases, allow patients to stand backward on the scale without looking, and don’t show or tell them the number (or let anyone on your staff do so), including on visit-summary printouts. • Don’t give nutrition recommendations to anyone with a history of chronic dieting or other forms of disordered eating, except perhaps in cases where the scientific-evidence base for the recommendation is airtight (for example, celiac disease or anaphylactic allergy). For conditions where the scientific evidence for food restrictions is inconclusive, nonexistent, or emerging—such as irritable bowel syndrome, thyroid disease, or Crohn’s disease—limit your recommendations to non-nutrition...

some of the basic principles of HAES: that weight doesn’t equal health, that restrictive and disordered eating cause harm for people of all sizes, and that weight stigma is a form of discrimination just like racism, sexism, or homophobia.

Denigrating people’s bodies has never improved anyone’s well-being. Our culture has been tearing down larger bodies for more than 150 years now, and where has that gotten us? Epidemic levels of disordered eating, body loathing, and fatphobia, which have never been shown to help individuals—or society as a whole—be any healthier or happier. On the contrary, weight stigma makes people less likely to engage in physical activity or so-called “healthy eating”; more likely to struggle with their mental health; and more likely to develop a host of chronic diseases and conditions they might escape if our society didn’t treat them like garbage.

You needn’t convince them in one sitting. Sometimes the best thing you can do is plant a seed by saying something tiny and quick, such as, “Actually I don’t like to moralize about food,” or, “I’m not an advocate of weight loss, because in my experience it does more harm than good.” You never know when that seed is going to take root—when someone else’s anti-diet awakening is going to happen.