Moving away from diets

Cultivating a positive and healthy relationship with food is one of the most important things that you can do for your wellbeing. A healthy relationship with food means that we can embrace flexibility, enjoyment, and respond with respect to our body’s needs. In today’s world, we constantly receive external messages telling us how we should be eating and how we should be moving, all of which focus on shaping our bodies to look a certain, often unrealistic, way. At Enrich, we are consciously choosing to step away from this messaging. Consuming a nutritious diet is beneficial for health, but it should not come at the expense of our mental wellbeing. We want to encourage you to consider how you can build a relationship with food and nutrition that nourishes both your physical body, and your mental health. One of the first steps on this journey of cultivating a more positive relationship with food is to move away from dieting towards a healthy lifestyle that makes room for all foods and body types.

So, what exactly is a diet?

A diet is any way of eating that involves restricting the amount or types of food you eat, with the aim of altering your body. This can include calorie counting, cutting out certain food groups, or joining local weight loss groups. When eating habits are generally guided by external rules (no carbs, no sugar, low fat, etc.) for the pursuit of weight loss, then this is considered a diet.

Why can dieting contribute to an unhealthy relationship with food?

Simply put, diets are not sustainable, and research shows that for most people, they do not result in improved health outcomes over time. It is not a matter of willpower, but rather our bodies adapting. Bodies actively resist weight loss, so while we might lose weight in the short term, our metabolism begins to slow the longer we are in a calorie deficit. In fact, overtime they can lead to overall weight gain, not weight loss, as prolonged restriction can contribute to behaviours such as binging, weight cycling and emotional eating. When we constantly feel that we are failing, it is difficult to treat our body with kindness and respect.

Furthermore, diets label certain types of food as ‘good’ and others as ‘bad’. Eating ‘bad’ foods can bring us to experience feelings of guilt and shame. This demonising of certain foods can contribute to an unhealthy relationship with food, and in some cases lead to disordered eating or eating disorders.

What can we do to start creating a more positive and healthy relationship with food?

Let’s begin with challenging the idea of one ‘correct’ body type. Dieting tells us that to be healthy, our body must be a certain size and shape. This is simply not true. Healthy bodies naturally occur in a range of shapes and sizes, and our size is not the determinant of our overall health.

The concept of Health at Every Size is a weight-neutral approach to health. It promotes healthful behaviours (such as eating more fruits and vegetables, moving your body, or getting enough sleep) for their health benefits, not for their effect on our weight. Changing this perspective can help us to create sustainable habits which can significantly improve our health in the long term, without feeling like we need to achieve a certain bodyweight.

Moving away from the weight-centric view of health (i.e. the only way to be healthy is to be thin) helps us to reduce obsessive behaviours around food and exercise, and move towards a more peaceful and nourishing relationship with food and our bodies.

We can also start to recognise the harm that dieting can cause. Diets are designed to fail, so it is important to show ourselves self-compassion when they do not produce the long-term weight loss or body changes that we want. The diet industry capitalises on this, and there is always another solution for the ‘problem’ of our bodies.

Over time, repeated dieting and using external rules to determine what we eat can disconnect us from our bodies. We stop checking in with our hunger levels, or our likes and dislikes. We can start to experience behaviours such as binge eating, making us feel out of control around food. This can have a detrimental effect on our mental health, creating feelings of anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem.

When we are aware of these things, we can begin to cultivate a lifestyle that nourishes body and mind. Could you pursue healthful behaviours, such as eating more vegetables, managing stress levels or engaging in regular movement, without using weight as a measure of success?

A healthy relationship with food rejects the idea that one food or meal is good or bad. It considers the overall patterns, focusing on the addition of healthful behaviours, rather than restriction. We start to connect with our bodies by making small changes and recognising the benefits, such as improved mood or energy. The motivation moves from ‘looking better’ to feeling better, utilising intrinsic motivation to build long-term healthy habits.

We can also embrace kindness and curiosity in our relationship to our body. There are no rules, so we cannot fail. Instead, we are learning to build habits around food and movement that make us feel peaceful and healthy, not deprived or constrained. We can actively enjoy taking care of our health, knowing that we are cultivating an environment for our bodies to feel nourished, respected and cared for.