Are You Stuck in a Diet Mentality?

What is a diet mentality, you may ask? A diet mentality decides your food choices for you, without taking hunger, fullness, cravings, circumstances, or personal food preferences into account. It removes you from all the useful cues your body gives you about how to make food decisions that honor your true needs. We've been trained to think we need external rules to lose weight or improve our health. When we adopt the diet mentality, we are saying "I don't trust myself," and we willingly hand over our autonomy to the billion-dollar diet industry. Since this is an untenable state of existence, we eventually "fail" in our diet and blame ourselves for it. We get caught in a dangerous cycle of restriction, cravings, loss of control, and relapse. Because of this, dieting is actually one of the primary predictors of weight gain. Have you ever though about that? It's not hard to believe, and some of us may have experienced that first hand.

The truth is that we cannot make meaningful and sustainable changes to our eating without confronting and shutting down the diet mentality. But it's not uncommon to be stuck in a diet mentality without even realizing it. To help you recognize it, here are some examples:

Diet talk sounds like this:

Do I deserve it?

Eating that is going to make me feel guilty.

That food is bad for me.

That food is good for me.

I’m eating clean.

In comparison, non-diet talk sounds like this:

Am I hungry?

Do I want to eat that? Am I in the mood for it?

Will I be deprived if I don’t have?

Will it taste good?

I deserve to enjoy eating food without feeling any guilt.

If you're thinking you could use some help in ditching the diet mentality, here are some simple ideas to get you started (of course you can also call on your favorite EatWell Dietitians to help you with this process!)

• Do something now that you’ve been wanting to do. Don’t wait to do it until you lose weight or change your body shape or size.

• Think about your favorite foods and repeat the phrase “there are no good or bad foods”. Eat at least one of those favorite foods at a meal or snack this week.

• Stop weighing yourself for a time. Consider ditching other diet tools such as measuring cups, food scales, and food tracking apps.

• Unfollow anyone on social media that perpetuates the "diet culture" and idealizes specific body shapes and sizes.

• Realize that you are much more than your weight or your body shape or size. Make a list of traits you value about yourself. Remember, you are just as deserving of happiness and health as anyone else.