Choose Peace with Food
This New Year, you deserve to call a truce with diet culture
Written by Erin Nelson, RD
It’s that time of year again. For many of us, the end of the year often signals the time to reflect on the past year. To see what went well and what maybe didn’t go the way we wanted. It is a time for us to imagine the new year before us and start thinking about the building blocks we can put in place to help that vision along. This is a time for plans and resolutions.
Maybe your resolutions involve working towards getting that promotion or finally making the career change you just know will be more fulfilling. Maybe you plan to have a better work life balance this year or take that trip you haven’t yet gotten to. Maybe your goals for this year include feeling better in your body so you can feel more confident to do the things you’ve been putting off until this happens. Just one last diet should do the trick, and this is the year you will finally lose the weight and keep it off. This voice is diet culture talking.
If you have been on the diet train before, this will probably sound familiar: you start a diet where you have a specific plan to cut back on calories, fat, carbs or the hours of the day you are allowed to eat. You start out by weighing yourself or taking a before picture. The act of doing this doesn’t make you feel that great but hey! You have a plan, and this is why you are doing the diet in the first place. At first, the plan is easy to follow, and your motivation is high. You are feeling hungry often in between meals but you completed your first weigh-in and the scale is down so the plan is working! As your hunger increases, your cravings also become more intense, and you are finding you have less energy, especially in the afternoon, and are more irritable than is typical for you. Again, the scale is down this week. Food is now on your mind most of your waking hours and feelings of being out of control around the foods you are limiting have left you feeling like you have no willpower, feeling alone, isolated, and like you are the only one who can not quite stick to a diet plan. You stop following the diet and the feeling that you have failed lingers far longer than you anticipated.
What if there is another way? What if you could work towards your dream job or go on that trip or feel better in your body without the part where you go on a diet and end up feeling worse than when you started? The truth is diets don’t work and they were never meant to. And the diet industry is counting on the voice of diet culture being as loud as ever in the new year so they can continue to profit off our not feeling enough. What if there was another way?
This year, you deserve to call a truce with diet culture and find peace with food. Finding food freedom not only looks different than any diet you’ve tried before, but it also looks different for every person. It looks different because it is different. Opting out of diet culture involves getting back in touch with your own intuitive signals about the foods we eat. We were all born with the ability to know which foods make us feel our best day to day and somewhere along the way, we were told those signals are not to be trusted.
Finding peace with food may look different to each person, but there are a few foundational pieces that are common with this journey:
Taking a weight-inclusive approach. This means working towards the idea that weight is not a behaviour or a good indicator of a person’s health status.
Strengthening your self-compassion muscle. Diet culture has many people being judgemental and unkind to themselves daily. You deserve the same compassion and understanding as you would offer a loved one.
Body neutrality. You deserve to take care of your body, even if you don’t love your body.
Food neutrality. There is no such thing as good foods and bad foods. Foods have no moral value other than what we place on them.
A few more things that I feel are important to highlight as we move into a new year without diet culture:
You can still have the desire to lose weight AND want to try something new (this is actually very common)
There is no right or wrong way to move into this journey
The journey to finding peace with food often looks more like a tangled ball of yarn than a straight line (this is ok and of course it would!).
We are here to support you in whatever capacity feels the best for you. In addition to this workshop, we continue to offer individual nutrition support to clients here and you can explore the latest workshops and events we are offering here.
