You’ve made the decision to quit dieting. You believe that it makes good sense to become an attuned/intuitive eater, learning to eat when you are hungry and stop when you are full. As an attuned eater, each time you notice you are hungry, you’ll decide what you will eat based on your own hunger cues, rather than following someone else’s food plan. But if you are like most diet survivors, trusting yourself around all types of foods is a challenge. After all, you’ve probably spent years believing that you cannot be trusted around your “forbidden” foods.
Letting go of judgments that foods are either “good” or “bad” is one of the many important guidelines on your journey to make peace with food. After years of counting calories, carbs and/or fat grams, it’s hard to get the voice out of your head that says, “You shouldn’t be eating that.”
Our best advice is to [private_membership circle]find a gentle, compassionate internal voice that nudges you to give yourself permission to experiment with the very foods you’ve tried to avoid. Each and every day, as you become physically hungry, you have wonderful opportunities to practice feeding yourself whatever foods you think will satisfy you. Try to suspend your judgment; instead pay attention to how you feel after eating. If you are satisfied and comfortable, you made a good match, regardless of whether it was a vegetable stir-fry, pizza, fruit salad or chocolate chip cookie and milk. If you are uncomfortable and unsatisfied, don’t beat yourself up. Instead, reflect on what didn’t feel good, and what would have made a better match. This process will help you become stronger in your journey toward attuned eating.
We’d like to tell you about a woman who recently took the first step toward giving up dieting and learning to eat according to her physical hunger. She was describing a food she believed she wasn’t supposed to eat – a cheeseburger and fries. She told us that she wasn’t hungry when she went out with her friends because she had already eaten a large breakfast, but that the burger called to her; she ordered it anyway and ate the whole thing. We focused on how she felt when she was finished with the burger and fries, and it was clear from the grimace on her face that physically, she had felt very uncomfortable.
Fortunately, this same woman had an experience several days later where she was at a barbecue, and there were cheeseburgers on the grill. At this event she was in tune with her hunger, and she knew that the cheeseburger would hit the spot. When we asked her how she felt this time, she said that her stomach felt great after she ate it.
This was definitely an “aha” moment for this diet survivor. She realized that it was not the food itself that was “good” or “bad.” Rather, what’s important is whether she felt “good” or “bad” after eating the cheeseburger.
This thinking is an essential part of breaking the diet mentality – focusing on what feels good to you rather than categorizing foods as good and bad. With that ability comes an understanding that it’s not the food itself that matters – it’s your relationship with that food that counts! We hope you’ll keep that in mind as you stay in charge of your eating and make the matches that feel caretaking to you.
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Eat well! Live well! Be well! Judith Matz and Ellen Frankel, are co-authors of The Diet Survivor’s Handbook, Beyond a Shadow of a Diet www.dietsurvivors.com Chicago Center for Overcoming Overeating: 847.267.1200
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