Recently I collected a survey with the question What is the ONE thing that frustrates you most about nutritional and wellness industries today? -- Share you're thoughts here too!

The answers?

We're done with dieting.

So I want to talk about;

What to do when your tired of dieting, because no one actually wants to diet and obsess about what they ate!
Why we’re overwhelmed by opinions, what we "should" and "shouldn't" eat.
The guilt, the shame and the complicated way of our nutritional landscape.

Diet culture, the root of a poor relationship with food and body

We have endless amounts of information, conflicting opinions, moral judgments, ego, and belief systems that are attached to eating, health and wellness.

Media tends to favour the thin ideal of skinny girls and muscular guys.

The tools on our quest for thinness get repackaged in the form of calorie counting, macros, meal plans, cleanses, challenges over and over.

I know and recognise this because I’ve grown up thinking I need to look and be a certain way. Since I was 17 I stepped into busying myself with eating plans, quitting foods, superfood splurges, early morning boot camps, all in the quest to be thin.

Later, I unlearned this mentality, developed an annoyance about it and now spend my time coaching women out of dieting mentality and into a more sustainable approach, Intuitive Eating which is simply (except it’s not) listening, trusting and responding to your body again.

What is diet culture?

Diet culture underlines that changing your body is the norm. That weight loss equals health. That health and happiness equals thinness.

Do you think diets still have their place?

Would you not be able to trust yourself without the a meal plan or feel unguided if you just “let it all go”?

If you told yourself you could have anything you want, would you just go-to-town on cake, cookies, pizza and all the "bad" foods?

I can hear you say "YES, 1000%, I would lose control!"

I believe that healthy behaviours are first determined by mindset (beliefs, thoughts, feelings, emotions) that influence doing (behaviours, physical).

If you struggle with emotional and/or behavioural reactions to food then you may be familiar with the counter productive urge to emotionally or binge eat. What the hell!?

Bingeing is a symptom of restriction

Bingeing is our primal response to deprivation and manifests physcally and emotionally;

PhysIcal restraint of food;

"I am not eating that piece of cake"

OR

Emotional restraint of food;

"I’m eating this piece of cake but I’m really feeling guilty and hating myself for doing this right now!"

The highly common, intricate problem at hand is that women can't stop binge eating, despite their 20-20 nutritional knowledge.

By recognising that binges are a symptom of something else going on, we can start to heal the real issue at is core, rather than bandaid-ing those symptoms with stricter food rules or more “discipline.”

Checking in with what you actually want.

The real desire is to feel better about yourself (like have more energy, vitality and good health) doesn’t come from working out harder and restricting calories in.

We think health equals thinness and so we focus on weight loss. But weight isn’t a health behaviour, neither is weight a good indicator of health.

To be clear, I’m talking about health as a complete state of physical, mental and social well being.

I’ve since realised that the root issue in my quest for thinness was my own lack of respect and trust in myself.

I thought "when I am thin enough, then I will be able to snag the guy, fit into my skinny jeans and frolic on the beach without a worry."

Feeling freedom, trust and ease in my body and my food decisions came from valuing and caring about myself enough to want to improve my relationship with food & body. Which is actually the relationship I had with myself.

relationship with food & body = relationship you have with yourself

Mindset is the missing piece of the puzzle

How much work have you done on your mindset to food and your body?

Your mindset includes your thoughts, beliefs, and decisions.

It’s lunchtime and you’re thinking about what you should eat for lunch - you decide on a salad (decision).
Smelling and seeing pizza on your way to the salad shop - “that looks so good” (thought).
Buying it and tasting - “this is so good”(thought-decision).
You become disappointed in yourself, shameful for not eating the salad you planned “I should have had the salad”(thought), leading to an emotion (disappointed).

Worksheet: 5 insightful questions that get you to the root of what you actually want.

I've created a FREE worksheet download to guide you through critical thinking about what you really want. It helps you get to the root of of your real physical, mental, emotional needs over spending another year in the pursuit of loosing weight.