What Diet Should I Follow?
(6 minute read)
What diet should I follow?
But, why do you need to follow a diet?
As humans we innately know how much and when to eat. Diet culture has taught us from a young age that our bodies cannot be trusted, you cannot be trusted and because you cannot be trusted you must follow a meal plan or take advise from someone external to your body.
Why?
Because diet culture says if left to your own devices you will definitely spiral into an eating frenzy that will never stop!
This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Issue with Diets
An estimated 33 billion dollars a year is spent on diets, despite a diet success rate of less than 10%.
Could you imagine if an everyday drug like Panadol was sold with a success rate of less than 10%. A drug, that caused side effects such as;
· Increased fatigue, irritability, depression, apathy
· Self-harm
· Increased obsession of food
· Decreased strength, stamina, body temperature, heart rate, sex drive
· Social withdrawal and isolation
These are all side effects seen in the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. An experiment, that put physically and psychologically fit men with no prior eating disorder history or mental illness on a diet of more calories than what a lot of diets are suggesting you eat today.
Two subjects were even dismissed from the study failing to maintain dietary restrictions during the imposed starvation phase because of the intensity of the side effects.
With that in mind, do you really still believe you are the problem?
Diet Culture
Diet culture is NOT here to help you. It is NOT here because it wants you to succeed in weight loss. It is here because it is a 33 billion dollar industry. Your misery, your failure and your self-loathing means diet culture can make more and more money.
By making you believe YOU are the problem, it creates a dependency. If diet A didn’t work, no worries try diet B, C, D…X… Y,Z. There are endless diets out there.
“The goal of the diet industry is not to help you but to make money.”
But, Sally lost weight. Diets do work!
Diets may work in the short term but at what cost. Sally may have lost weight and attained her dream body, but for how long?
Sally may post photos for the first 3, 4, or 5 months. Smiling, gloating, promoting the diet and lifestyle she used to get her dream body. But what about 1 or 2 years later? By year 5, Sally has regained all the weight she lost and some. Now she is hooked in a cycle of dieting, weight loss, weight gain and self-loathing. Blaming herself for her diet failures, blaming her body and learning to distrust and dislike her body as it fluctuates from size A to size B.
Cold Hard Truth
The reality is, only about 2-3% of dieters are able to maintain weight loss.
So what the diet industry is saying is that 97% of the population are failures, who have no willpower or self-control.
Hmmmmm…. Something doesn’t quite seem right in that scenario diet culture…..
Body Diversity
Humour me for a minute, let’s just say 97% of the population aren’t failures and diets are the problem. What can you do?
You can stop fighting your genetic pre-disposition to be a certain size and start learning to accept your body.
Even if we all ate the same diet and did the same exercise we would all be different weight, shapes and sizes.
It isn’t easy, after spending years distrusting yourself, looking for external cues to eat, external cues to validate your hunger, to switch to listening to your internal cues.
It takes time and if you’ve suffered from an eating disorder or spent years dieting your bodies hunger cues are going to be unreliable and maybe non-existent. It is possible to get them back and it is possible to learn to eat based on internal hunger signals rather than external.
It’s time to take a leap of faith
It may seem scary, as history probably indicates when you haven’t been on a diet, you overconsume the foods you love. But this isn’t because you are a failure or lacking willpower, it’s a normal side effect of diets, deprivation and restriction.
As a result, when you aren’t on a diet, the brain goes overboard. Not knowing when it will next be deprived of its favourite foods it encourages you overload yourself with these foods for fear of missing out. Fear of when the next diet will start again. This creates the self-fulfilling prophecy that you need the diet because you can’t be trusted.
It takes time for your body to trust you again, to trust you won’t starve it and take away all it’s favourite foods, to trust you won’t abuse it with exercise and you will nourish it.
But I can guarantee it’s well worth it.
Two Options
I see two paths forward.
You can keep cycling through diets, continue loathing your body, fight your genetics, spending all your money, time and effort on trying to get smaller or meet the ‘ideal’ body standards (which are forever changing).
Or
You can begin to heal your relationship with food, yourself and your body. So that you can eat without guilt, shame and self-blame.
Both paths are hard.
Both paths are painful.
But one path will lead to a less painful and more fulfilling, values based and energetic life. The life that you desire. The other wont.
Instead of spending 30minutes trying to decide what to order for dinner, ordering a salad even though you wanted the burger and going home and eating everything in your path. You could learn to order the burger, enjoy the burger then go home watch some tv and head to bed feeling content and satisfied.
Don’t listen to me, listen to Albert Einstein, who says;
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Diets are insane. You can try another diet, it’s your life and your choice. But don’t try another diet with the expectation that you will get different results.
If you need help breaking free from diet culture and diet cycling checkout my 12-week 1:1 Health Coaching Program. This program is individualized to you and your goals. To help you break free from the guilt, shame and out of control feelings diet create so that you can eat the foods you love and move your body in a way that feels good without beating yourself up or planning your next diet.
Send me an email at deb@debsarah.com or reach me via DM on Instagram. I look forward to hearing from you.
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