Part 3: Eat Like You
Let’s say you’re ready to take a leap of faith; a leap into the unknown world of interoception within your body. You’ve decided to step off the endless hamster wheel that is diet cult-ure in America. You want to trust yourself, you want to take control of your dietary choices and reclaim autonomy of your own wellness. Where do you start? What is the first step you can take into the unknown? Let’s start moving forward with a bit of a look back to unpack some of the common diet cult-ure beliefs you may have stepped off the hamster wheel with.
Diet cult-ure tells you what to eat, when to eat, how much you can eat, and how you should feel about what you eat. It removes every human aspect of eating and reduces your human experience to something that feels robotic and joyless. Eating is naturally an utterly enrapturing experience, engaging all of your senses, and is a truly sacred component of the human experience. Diet cult-ure also perpetuates the false reality of a “perfect body”, in which you meet all of society's standards of beauty at that moment in time. It is an ever-evolving, ever changing standard that is truly unattainable, as the “perfect body” is something that comes and goes in trends. Honest questions: Can you change the structure of your body? Can you change the shape of your face, your bone structure, your height, or your genetics? If not, how are you ever supposed to achieve and maintain the “perfect body”?
Let’s say you somehow achieve a variation of the perfect body. You put in all of the work required to do so (years and years of hard work and dedication), and you have the “perfect body”. What happens three or six months later when an entirely new body type becomes the trend? You’re not good enough, and you’ve arrived right back where the diet industry wants you: consumer despair. When you feel consumer despair, you want to spend money to get yourself out of it, because that is the narrative that you’ve been sold. Literally. Every diet out there profits off of your consumer despair because they’ve convinced you that you aren’t good enough, that you are lacking something that everyone else isn’t because you don’t have what they have, you don’t look like them, and you think you feel worse than them. You are utterly minimized and reduced to a state of lack, which can only be resolved through consumption.
I have a proposition: You are enough. You are good enough, exactly as you are right now, and you have always been good enough. Objective measures of health are obviously important: blood pressure, total cholesterol, cardiovascular health, hormone health, etc. We can talk about the mechanisms of food once it enters the body, but your body doesn’t have a value judgement on the food that enters it. It simply reacts to and processes whatever you put inside of it.
With that in mind, objective metrics of health are only one factor in the overall picture of wellness. All too often, we get lost in the optimization of these objective measures without addressing the subjective elements of our health and wellness, often to the point that the stress of optimizing these objective measures takes away from our overall wellness. What is of utmost importance are these subjective elements coupled with the objective measures. We are talking about your own unique experience of personal health, vitality, and overall wellness, which can only be truly felt and actualized through interoception; through your own unique feelings inside of your own unique body, your unique experience of wellness.
Nobody has ever been or will ever be just like you, and nobody has the same genetics, microbiome, and biology, and anyone who tries to convince you otherwise is lying to you, most likely so they can try to sell something to you to fill the imaginary void inside of you that they have created. This is the essence of the diet industry. This is why we are obsessed with losing weight, of being a specific weight, of being a specific body type, a specific body fat percentage, or having a specific physique. These are not metrics of true health, because true health is a state of being that can only be actualized when mind, body, and spiritual wellness are all optimized. With that in mind, let’s talk about Intuitive Eating.
Intuitive Eating is an increasingly popular program that is changing the way people think and feel about the diet industry. While I don’t particularly recommend it for everybody, I do recommend people at least consider what they have to say, as it can be a remarkably helpful tool for helping people with their initial breakup with diet cult-ure. At least one of the principles can be a useful tool for you to further unpack the diet industry narratives that are in your head. Intuitive Eating is, “a personal and dynamic process, which includes 10 principles”
These 10 principles are:
Reject the Diet Mentality
Honor Your Hunger
Make Peace with Food
Challenge the Food Police
Respect Your Fullness
Discover the Satisfaction Factor
Honor Your Feelings without Using Food
Respect Your Body
Exercise- Feel the Difference
Honor Your Health With Gentle Nutrition
My own personal addition comes in the form of an ultimate suggestion: Eat Like You. It is arrogant and insincere for somebody else to tell you how or what to eat. Your body knows what it needs, but it takes quieting the noise of the diet industry and listening to your body to understand this in its entirety.
That being said, Intuitive Eating is a remarkable place to begin taking your first steps in your process of undoing the diet cult-ure that has been programmed into you, and they have a tremendous amount of resources everywhere. While I’m not a certified practitioner of Intuitive Eating, I find that almost everyone I coach on nutrition derives some value from at least one of the principles, depending on where they are in their unique wellness journey.
In conclusion of this series, I would like to go back to the beginning of where this all began: diet cult-ure is trying to make you an ideologue. They are trying to make you believe that food and nutrition needs rules, values, judgements, food police, counting, etc., when in reality you are the expert on you. You are your own best nutritionist. You know what works best for you, what feels best for you, and your own unique physiological and psychological needs are just that: yours and yours alone. If we can break free from diet cult-ure, we can create the space to develop wellness that goes beyond just physical measures. We can find a more complete state of wellness that also includes our mental, emotional, and spiritual health. My hope is that through this series you have found something useful, a tool that you can take with you as you begin to unpack the programming that diet cult-ure has done to you so you may in some way break free from the endless cycles of fear, guilt, shame, and frustration, and instead find your own perfect diet and EAT LIKE YOU!
Sending you all the love and all the power!
