Takeaway: If you’re caught in the diet cycle, it might feel impossible to break free. But it can be done–we’ve seen it firsthand with the hundreds of women we’ve helped in our NYC nutrition practice. Here, we share our top tips for getting out of the diet cycle once and for all. 100-200 words.
Do you know how many diets you’ve been on? I don’t just mean the typical diet you see ads for like WW or Jenny Craig, I mean those more individual weight loss attempts also. Those periods where you use restrictive eating, impose strict diet rules on yourself, engage in excessive exercise and/or cut out total food groups all in an attempt to lose weight. Chances are breaking your restrictive diet is followed by feelings of guilt, shame and blaming yourself for lacking the self control you feel you’re supposed to have.
If this pattern sounds familiar and you’re struggling to count how many times you’ve done this, you’re stuck in the diet cycle. I’m here to tell you you aren’t stuck there permanently, there is a way out of the vicious diet cycle. Learn how to stop the diet cycle before the next cycle begins.
Understanding the diet cycle
What is the diet cycle? It’s one of those things that’s hard to recognize while you’re in it. Let’s walk through a diet cycle and see if any of this sounds familiar to you. If at any point this sounds like behaviors you’ve engaged in, keep reading to learn how to escape the chronic diet cycle.
The diet cycle begins with a feeling your body isn’t meeting a certain standard and that weight loss will solve your problems (both appearance related and not appearance related). So, you start to follow a diet plan. The rules of this diet usually involve overall food restriction, eliminating certain foods, exercising to the point of exhaustion or other methods that you believe will transform your body.
Eventually, following these rules that aren’t designed to meet your needs will become overwhelming. First through feelings of chronic deprivation, then through life demands making it impossible to stick to these rigid plans.
This disengagement from the diet may be through binge eating, skipping workouts, or chaotic eating without following the plan you were so strict about before. This phase of the diet cycle also involves feelings of anxiety, guilt, hopelessness, depression and a lack of self compassion. You tell yourself it is your lack willpower to blame, not the diet.
Sooner or later, the belief that your body isn’t good enough as it is makes you want to start a diet again, and the next diet cycle begins. As this cycle becomes repetitive, it becomes yo yo dieting. Yo yo dieting will go through phases where the behaviors look different and your body may appear different. What never seems to leave is the obsession with losing weight and feelings of deprivation.
Intuitive eating: embracing a non-diet approach
If you’re in a dieting cycle, or simply living in a world dominated by diet culture, then you likely believe the opposite of chronic dieting is binge eating without any regard for your health. It isn’t. The opposite of dieting is intuitive eating.
Intuitive eating is an eating pattern based on listening to your body and giving yourself permission to eat. When you feel hunger, you eat. Your food choices are driven by nourishment and enjoyment, not fear and calorie counting. The only foods off-limits are the foods you don’t like or are allergic to.
There’s also no assigned portion size. Instead, you stop eating when you feel satiated. You let the hunger and fullness signals you’ve previously ignored guide your intake. There are even tools you can use, both independently and with the help of a dietitian, to become more aware of these feelings.
Following your intuition may sound scary. Scary to follow your hunger. Scary to enjoy foods you previously deemed “unhealthy”. What may be even more scary is working towards seeing your body weight as just another number rather than a metric of your worth.
This is not an overnight transition, it takes time. Time to rebuild trust with yourself. Time to unlearn all of the toxic food rules imposed on you. Time to change how you see yourself. But allowing yourself to follow the intuitive eating principles with the support of a registered dietitian will help heal your relationship with food and your body.
Benefits of shifting toward a non-dieting framework
Why is intuitive eating considered a better alternative to the diet cycle? That will vary based on your personal experience with dieting, but here’s a few examples of the common changes people notice:
Increased Energy:
If you’ve been in the diet cycle for a long time, you may not even notice that you have low energy. It may express itself as coffee dependence, having trouble getting out of bed in the morning, sugar cravings in the office at 3pm, or other attempts by your body to obtain or conserve energy. I cannot tell you how many clients start telling me how much more mental energy they have when they start nourishing themselves throughout the day.
Improved Emotional Health:
Part of chronic under-nourishment is feelings of exhaustion, especially mentally and emotionally. The biological and psychological effects of constantly telling yourself you have to change are immense. Releasing yourself from these feelings takes time, but the impact on you emotional state and overall mood are immeasurable. What if instead of beating yourself up constantly for simply eating food, you worked towards living a life you can eat food and speak kindly to yourself?
Weight Stability:
Weight cycling and fluctuations are a common side effect of yo-yo dieting. If you have a closet full of clothes in different sizes that represent different points in your past weight cycles than you know what I’m talking about. A certain amount of changes in weight as we go through life is normal and healthy, but constantly gaining and loosing weight is not. It has been demonstrated to significantly damage our metabolic rate and mental health. When you break free from obsessing over your weight and food, you’ll often find your weight will stay around the same number.
Example for Your Loved Ones:
If you are consistently following food rules, chances are you mention some of them to the people around you. Even if you keep some diet behaviors a secret that doesn’t mean that the people who care about you don’t notice. Especially those who see you as an influence, such as your child or mother or sister or partner, may be unintentionally or intentionally absorbing some of your diet beliefs. They might see you not allowing yourself to eat bread, and internalizing that bread is bad. Or they may hear you frequently critiquing your own body, and internalize that as a critique of the parts of their body that are the same as yours. If this person in your life is young, dieting can be especially dangerous for them. When you model a healthy relationship with food and your body, the people around you often follow suit.
Reduced Risk of Nutrient Deficiencies
Have you received a targeted ad for hair gummies lately? Or been told you should take pre-natal vitamins to make your nails healthier? What if I told you that the things these supplements are “curing” such as subtle hair loss, brittle nails, dry skin, low energy, poor immune function etc. are often early signs of nutrient deficiencies.Limiting your food intake or cutting out whole food groups makes it challenging to get the micronutrients your body needs to function. When you break free from restrictive food rules and eat a variety of foods, you increase the diversity of micronutrients in your diet, making you less vulnerable to micronutrient deficiencies without having to buy a Kardashian hair gummy.
5 tips to start breaking free from the diet cycle
If this has been hitting home and you’re ready to ditch the diet cycle for good you may be asking yourself where to start. Here are a few tips to help you move away from the diet cycle and towards intuitive eating.
Identify Your Food Rules
Some of these may be obvious, some of them may be so ingrained in you’re unaware you follow it. This can include not eating after 8pm, avoiding carbohydrates, etc.. Once you identify your food rules you can start to notice when they are guiding your food choices rather than you. Conversations with a dietitian can help point out where many of your food decisions really come from.
Use an Intuitive Eating Hunger Scale
The hunger scale helps you identify how different points of hunger and satiety feel in your body. The hunger scale is a scale from 1-10. Ideally you want to mostly exist around a 5, totally neutral. When you feel like a 3, hungry but not struggling or in pain, that’s a sign you should have a meal. You should eat this meal consciously, enjoying each bite until you hit a 7, or satiated without being uncomfortably full.
Work With a Dietitian
Dietitians are licensed and trained nutrition professionals. We can help you unravel the mixed messages diet culture has sent you and find the eating pattern that works specifically for you in a non-judgmental space.
Avoid the Scale
If when you step on the scale you feel the same way you did when you got a grade in school, that’s a sign you may have a toxic relationship with your weight. Not knowing your weight may be jarring, but as long as it is used to measure your self worth the scale will keep you trapped in the diet cycle.
Set Boundaries with Diet Culture Language
The language we chose reflects what we believe. If we use words like “disgusting” or “gross” to describe the nutrient contents of food or our appearance, it reinforces the diet cycle. Being conscious of the words we use, both in our thoughts and with others, we can chip away that the limiting beliefs that fuel the diet cycle.
