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Intuitive Eating is a weight neutral, anti-diet, self-care philosophy.
Intuitive Eating is often perceived as being anti-weight loss. But it’s a little more nuanced than that.
Hear me out!
Unlike most diets, fads or detoxes, the goal of Intuitive Eating isn’t to lose weight. A foundational principle of Intuitive Eating is ditching the diet mentality, which is necessary in healing one's relationship to food and body image. So quite the opposite to weight loss since (weight loss) involves food restriction and preoccupation with one's body.
When you start to witness the harms of diet culture- like I did when clients would end up in tears because they felt so dissatisfied with their bodies- you can’t help but get a wee bit angry.
The societal obsession with thinness leads many women to have a fraught relationship with food and their bodies. They want to be..
Toned and sculpted.
Lean and fit.
They want to have the highly sought after yoga body.
So it’s not that Intuitive Eating is anti weight loss per se, but more like anti all-the-shit that goes along with it.
Losing weight isn’t easy. Keeping it off is even harder because it requires a tremendous amount of effort. One that many people can't sustain.
And an obsession with thinness doesn’t just happen in magazines or on social media, it’s also in our healthcare.
It’s not just in magazines or Instagram, weight loss advice is also at the doctor’s office
When your doctor advises you to lose weight it doesn’t make it any easier. In fact, it may feel even harder because now you have the pressure from a professional. A medical one.
It isn’t about your doctor being right or wrong, but it's important to understand that medical care can be fatphobic. Many health professionals will recommend weight loss no matter what your condition is, or without investigating it, because of their own beliefs and biases.
There was a woman in Canada who wrote this note in her obituary in 2018:
“‘Women of size’ should advocate for their health and not simply accept that ‘fat is the only relevant health issue’”.
After years of feeling unwell, she went from doctor to doctor who dismissed her symptoms and advised her to lose weight. She was finally diagnosed with a degenerative genetic condition and passed away shortly after. You can read the full story here.
Next time your doctor tells you to lose weight, ask them what else you can do besides, or in addition to, losing weight to address whatever it is you’re concerned about.
If you feel like your symptoms require investigation beyond “weight loss”, please insist. Don’t leave that office until you’ve been given other recommendations or referrals.
And even if weight loss is a legitimate recommendation, it can still be problematic.
When people lose weight they feel confident and better about themselves. Not a bad thing, right? Confidence is good.
But this confidence is conditional.
Weight regain makes you feel like a failure
The thing is, when you do lose weight and don’t keep it off you feel like a failure. Like something is wrong with you.
As a client in her forties once said “My body is broken”. She had lost and regained weight many times, until her body had enough. No more weight loss for you! her body protested.
I’ve worked with Latin American women who feel bad, even awful, about their non-thin bodies. And they conclude that it’s because they aren’t trying hard enough.
This is the bullshit that women (and people in general) end up believing because of some flawed, colonial notion of body ideals.
Weight regain is perceived as a “me” problem. It's not. It’s a “you’re trying to change your body into something it doesn’t want to be (for xyz reason)” problem.
So, essentially, your body does what it needs, including gaining weight. You have done nothing wrong.
Weight regain also happens as a result of restrictive eating. It may sound ironic but here are a few explanations:
metabolic disturbances (from yo-yo dieting)
restrict-binge cycle
restrictive eating isn’t sustained because…
willpower runs out
deprivation is intolerable
something scary happens, like it did to me...
When I was 18 I went on a low-fat diet. After several weeks on this diet I suddenly had what felt like a short-circuit in my brain, and got instantly depressed. It lasted for around two years. It was scary as all f**k! Eat fat people, especially you teens!
Intuitive Eating isn’t anti-weight loss
Intuitive Eating teaches you to remove the morality from foods, like labeling them good/bad, healthy/unhealthy, or clean/dirty. These binaries are unhelpful and lack nuance.
So even though it’s my blog, the question “is Intuitive Eating anti weight loss?” isn’t really the right question. It’s a question based in the black and white, something Intuitive Eating teaches us to move away from.
As I’ve explained, the pursuit of weight loss can be highly problematic, but that doesn’t mean it’s inherently “bad”.
If you want to lose weight and you’re reading this, it has nothing to do with you and everything to do with the society steeped in diet culture. It’s all around us. It’s what you and I know.
And Intuitive Eating challenges these norms. For this reason, many people don’t like the Intuitive Eating philosophy.
Pursuing weight loss is a very personal decision. As an Intuitive Eating counselor, I’m here to support you. Not to judge, shame or blame.
I just hope to see less and less women feel bad about their bodies, or pursue weight loss because they believe it’s something they have to do.
Question it.
Challenge it.
Because your body isn't flawed.
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