I want to talk about something that I think can be a great place to start in our journey to intuitive eating. The first principle of intuitive eating is reject the diet mentality. Essentially this means it’s important for us to truly believe that dieting doesn’t work and reject all those messages we get to the contrary. I want to take a moment to acknowledge that this is incredibly hard in practice. We may momentarily feel that way only to find we are side tracked by someone comment, a diet culture laden social media post etc. and before we know it diet X is sounding very appealing again.

I always say intuitive eating is really a process in patience. As someone who does not have a very patient nature naturally, rejecting the diet mentality completely has probably been the biggest struggle with intuitive eating for me and seems to be a huge struggle for others I work with as well. One thing that I have found helpful is making a pact with ourselves to not diet anymore. I found myself bouncing back and forth between intuitive eating and diet mentality until I specifically made a pact with myself to not diet ever again. I even took it a step further in doing my own work and made a pact for each specific diet I found myself being drawn to saying “I’m never going to do diet X ever again”.

Why is this helpful? I’ve found it really helps to take dieting off the table completely. When I did this for myself, I immediately felt a sense of calm and some peace from the constant back and forth that was going on in my mind. I go through this same process with my clients and they have reported a similar experience. It’s difficult, but it seems to really help propel the process of eating more mindfully in the right direction. This doesn’t mean it’s the end of the line or a cure for those diet thoughts when they come up, but I’ve found it’s a simple but really effective place to start.

Questions about making a diet pact or anything else food and body related? Feel free to get in touch!