The Benefits of NOT Dieting

We often wear our diets like a badge of honor. In the past I loved being able to say things like “I haven’t had a single potato chip in 3 years” when I was on a low-fat diet or “I haven’t had any sugar in months” when I was on a low-carb diet. Diets give strict rules and I tended to feel righteous when I followed them. Unfortunately, I would not be able to be strict for long and my self-esteem often took a hit. On diets, foods are often allowed or not allowed. When you eat foods that aren’t allowed, it contributes to guilt and low self-esteem. It often leads to an overall feeling of failure. It can make you not trust yourself. I know that’s what dieting did to me.

Over the years you may have tried lots of different diet or weight loss plans. It can make your head spin. How can you keep up with the latest “rules”? The good news is that mindful eating practice makes it so you don’t have to! It helps cut down on that noise in your head about food; your mind doesn’t have to continually evaluate your choices and compare them to what it thinks you “should” be doing based on your latest diet. Mindful eating practice helps you stop judging yourself all the time.

I had tried calorie counting, low-fat, low-carb, fasting, juice cleanses, and extremely low calorie diets. Nothing worked long-term until I started to practice mindful eating. Diets have you looking outside of yourself for the “answers”. Mindful eating helps you turn inward, learning how to tune into what YOU need. It takes practice to go from trying to follow those external rules to following your own inner knowing, but once you truly embrace it, it becomes automatic.

Paying more attention to yourself, your inner cues, leads to a greater awareness of your hunger and fullness. Do you know how that feels? I did not recognize physical hunger until I made it my priority, so I did not recognize my fullness cues either. I used the diet rules to tell me when and what to eat instead. As I worked on tuning into my own body it also became obvious which foods made my body feel good and which foods did not. When I eat the foods that make my body feel good as often as I can, I end up feeling good. There is freedom in that! I get to choose!

People can be afraid of that freedom. They are afraid they will “go off the rails”, eat all this “bad” food, and gain weight. However, when you pay attention to how your body feels, you will naturally lean towards the foods that make your body feel good (most of the time). For me that means eating fruits, vegetables, whole grains/starch, dairy, eggs, nuts and meat. I naturally stay away from fast foods and processed foods at least 90% of the time. This is not by using “willpower”; the choice to honor my body and give it what it needs overrides the desire to have the types of foods I would have typically binged on in the past, like cookies, cakes, candy, etc. I still have sweets, but in a much smaller quantity than I would have in the past and I use all my senses to enjoy every bite. Overeating usually makes your body feel “gross”, as one of my first clients had said; you will learn to stop eating much before you get to that point.

I don’t recommend doing anything that you can’t see yourself doing for your lifespan… like the latest fad diet. A quick fix may lead to the desired result, but as soon as you stop following that exact behavior it’s common to gain the weight back that you lost. Often, we end up gaining more back, being heavier than when we started. And, unless you are lifting weights and focusing on protein intake, it is common to lose muscle mass as well. So, it’s common to end up heavier AND physically weaker. Who wants that?!!!

With mindful eating there is no “falling off the wagon”. No “failing”. There is no starting over Monday. No bingeing on your “last supper”- you know those meals/snacks you eat because you won’t be able to eat that way again for a long time on your current diet? No ridding your kitchen of all the “forbidden” foods. No “I was bad today” because you ate something on the list that is considered “not allowed”. There is no need to sneak around when you “cheat” because cheating does not exist in mindfulness. Doesn’t this non-dieting approach sound wonderful?