5 Roadblocks to Giving Up Dieting & Accepting Your Body
What gets in the way of learning how to accept your body and give up dieting?
Making the decision to give up dieting is no easy feat. This has likely required coming to terms with the fact that dieting has not worked for you (even though it has been sold to you as the “solution” to all of your problems) which has probably taken a good amount of time and energy to understand and want to move on from.
If we have accepted that dieting does not work, why is it then so difficult to actually give up dieting itself? Shouldn’t it be pretty easy to take the next steps?
Giving up dieting is easier said than done for a myriad of reasons. These of course can differ for each person, but there are some striking realities when it comes to the world of going against diet culture. Taking a look at what some of these reasons are can help you learn how to accept your body and anticipate what some of the roadblocks may be.
A little about my body story
I consider myself a chronic dieter. It was part of how I was raised, and was honestly one of the most consistent parts of my life for about 20 years. Feeling sad? Get on a diet. Unsure of where your life is headed? Oh here, try this brand new diet plan. Worrying that people might judge you about something? Oh yes, dieting is definitely the answer. And on and on it goes.
The first time I found Intuitive Eating (which was the first book I had ever read that actually told me NOT to diet and that it actually might be doing me harm), I gobbled it up and was so excited. “This is it!,” I thought - the answer to what was feeling like a never-ending struggle to change my body which was clearly not working and made me feel worse. So with all those good feels, why was it that I went back to dieting, not to return to that book until about 5 years later?
The problem is that no one told me just how difficult it would be to follow through on going against everything I had ever learned. Against everything I had “worked so hard” for. It felt like it should have been easier and no one around me was talking about trying to make this shift. I had never heard anyone talk about how to accept your body - I thought that the only way to feel “okay” with myself was to change the way that I looked. Let’s dive into some of the things that might get in the way of actually moving past dieting so that you are ready to take on this challenge.
5 Roadblocks to Giving Up Dieting and Accepting Your Body
We interact With Food Multiple Times a Day Every Day
Sometimes there are things in our lives that are not working for us and we need to get some distance from. When it comes to giving up dieting, it is literally impossible to “get some distance from” food. We need to engage with food every day, multiple times a day! When deciding to give up dieting you might be feeling anxious about what this looks like, and we need to do that “figuring out” while also continuing to nourish ourselves appropriately.
So what can we do to figure things out while also needing to continue to eat? My recommendation is to go easy on yourself and accept that this is going to take time. It is also not an inactive process - it might feel like you have been putting in a lot of effort to diet, and that ditching your diet will feel like the “opposite” and will take less energy. Unfortunately, because of all the unlearning that needs to be done, this might not feel like a super fluid process. But - just because something feels hard does not mean it isn’t worth doing! Take things slow - know that you are going to have to challenge some really deeply held beliefs and are going to have some internal pushback to this change.
2. We Have Been Trained Not to Trust Our Bodies
Most of us have been conditioned from when we were tiny little humans that we couldn’t, under any circumstance, trust our own body. So how could it be easy to all of the sudden decide that you CAN trust your body?
Think back to all of the messaging you have received around this - you were likely told that you “weren’t hungry and might be thirsty,” that foods you were interested in or enjoyed were “bad,” and that you “should be full” and “not want more” based on an arbitrary amount of food that was put in front of you for a meal. We were told over and over again that we could not trust internal messages from our body.
Keeping this in mind, how can we expect ourselves to just quickly figure out the “how-to” of listening to our body or connect with how to accept our body when we have been told not to. One good first step is to (without judgment) start listening to the signals you are getting from your body. In the same way you can perceive the feeling of tiredness (and subsequently putting yourself to bed), you can start to feel other internal workings. The key point here is that this is going to take time and effort to notice when your body is telling you that you are hungry, full, stressed out, etc. How would it feel to notice that you are hungry or craving something and to allow yourself to have it? You might not be in a place where you can do this for every feeling that arises, but what if you did it once today? How might it feel to tune in to the parts of you asking for support and show them you are listening?
3. It Can Feel Super Uncomfortable + Body Grief
Ditching dieting and embracing a new way of connecting with your body is not all unicorns and rainbows. It can feel really uncomfortable, especially at first, which can leave some folks feeling like they are doing “the wrong thing.” For many of us, we are sold this idea that the way to tell if something is meaningful to us or not is if it “feels good” or if we “feel happy.” Well I have some news for you - not everything that is meaningful is going to feel great. Now I’m not saying that you aren’t going to potentially feel happiness or joy at some point in this journey, but it likely won’t feel that way immediately and we don’t have much control over the direction our brain goes in.
Unlearning diet culture (which tells us that we must follow certain rules to have a “good” body) will take time, effort, and grit. For many of us, this means truly leaning into some grief and a potential feeling of loss around the body we thought we eventually might have. The lie we are sold is pretty clear - do x, y, and z which will equal health and happiness. When we have to wrap our minds around this not being the truth, it can be a huge disappointment and a place for grief.
When you think about body grief, what does this bring up for you? For me it meant leaning into the idea that my body was the way that it was, and that it was unlikely for it to shrink or be something that it was not. I had to truly grieve this fact, which included grief around the world not being set up for folks in larger bodies. I needed to feel the grief around some things being more difficult for me, and that this, in fact, was not my fault in the way that it was told to me for so long.
4. It Feels Like You Are Swimming Upstream
Deciding not to diet is typically not the “popular” choice. Figuring out how to move forward and accept your body may feel like you are completely swimming upstream from those around you. Picture this - you have made the decision not to diet and move away from diet culture, and then in your office you are all of the sudden thrown into a conversation with your colleagues/friends about the latest diet plan they are on. Perhaps they are talking negatively about their bodies (or the bodies of others), or using all the good/bad language around food and bodies that you are trying to move past. This can be so tough! We don’t decide to ditch dieting in a vacuum - we have to continue to live in a diet culture world that will potentially not understand what exactly we are doing and why.
So what can you do if you find yourself in this situation? First of all, you should anticipate it. Know that you WILL find yourself in situations like these and will need to figure out what your best course of action is. For the example above, you have a few choices. One choice is to decide that you are no longer going to engage in those types of conversations, and to either find a random excuse to leave, or to be upfront and tell people that the conversation they are having is just not for you. Another choice is to educate! If it feels comfortable you can share your story and explain why you are trying something different. What’s most important is that you feel safe and comfortable engaging in these conversations in whichever ways feels best to you. There is no one right answer.
5. Constant Diet Talk All Around Us
In addition to feeling like you might be fighting against the current with the other people in your life, you might also start to notice just how insidious diet culture is in our society. This is a “once you see it you can’t unsee it” type of situation. For example, in the last few days I experienced the following:
A character on a favorite TV show going through cancer treatment and mentioning that he was “skinnier but that’s no tragedy”
Getting a popular diet bar in the mail
Hearing fatphobic slurs in music and on TV
Having a doctor shame my kid for having a certain BMI
Videos on social media about “calories not counting” while on vacation
And this was only over a few days! Imagine how it feels to have this information thrown at you day after day, week after week. It is a LOT. Again - we are not doing this in a vacuum. We have to continue to navigate the real world while also trying to completely go against the grain of our society and culture. This shit is no joke.
We are unlikely change society around us (although the more we speak out the more things can change), but if we go into it with open eyes and understand the reasons why it is everywhere, this can help us navigate situations. In the beginning you may feel angry at people and places that continue to reinforce shitty diet culture ideals, and that is ok. Feel all your feels and keep moving forward. Know that it gets easier with time.
It makes so much sense that it might have felt hard in the past or present to stop dieting and learn how to accept your body. Going into this change knowing what could potentially derail you can be important to know ahead of time and to process. You are doing the hard work of going up against generations of ideas that have told us that dieting is the “right” thing to do, and this has likely been reinforced time and time again. Remember that if you are struggling with your relationship with food or how to accept your body, you do not have to go it alone. Grab my free guide below, follow me on instagram for free content, or connect today for a free consult and to chat about how working with a HAES-aligned, anti-diet, Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor and therapist can help you on your journey.
