this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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Practicing intuitive eating repaired my relationship with food after 8 years of (maybe disordered) keto dieting. Then, I had to challenge body image issues—ongoing—but I feel so much better in my body and my relationship to food and movement than when I strictly dieted and exercised.
Wait do you did keto for 8 years? I can't even fathom the willpower that must have taken. I've tried intuitive eating in the past and I don't tend to have a great time with mindfulness and impulse control but I really should incorporate at least some aspects of it because I definitely have had my moments where I sat there asking myself why I was eating when I wasn't hungry... then took another bite.
Yep. I was a keto "success" story, felt like I could maintain lazy keto forever.
Then it hit me that I was literally scared of pasta.
I have friends that eat when they are hungry and aren't guilty after having a milkshake. They never diet. They don't stress about food or think about calories or macronutrients. They seem fine and often are athletic!
I wanted to get more of that. It cost me my flat stomach, but honestly just being able to enjoy good food without binging + binge regret is worth it alone. There are other benefits, too, but going anti-diet does require a different king of mental hardiness and effectively makes you counter culture.
It's not easy telling people that I don't want to lose weight or that I'm not watching what I eat. I try to avoid it. If they press it, I end up having to defend the idea that people can do what they want? I dunno. It's a whole paradigm shift.
Anyway, I have mostly become one of the aforementioned people. I eat to my heart's content and some might think I moderate when watching from afar, but IE is truly "no food rules". When you don't restrict, food becomes more neutral and thus regulation can become internal instead of a mental game of willpower and calorie/carb math.
I truly think it's the best thing I've done for myself in years but I am always reluctant to spread the word because everyone's journey with their body is hyper personal. Being anti-diet doesn't mean you persecute people who do diet...that would be mean. Everyone is just doing their best.
My partner has had similar issues - being scared of pasta definitely rings true. When you start to think about it and notice it, the amount of mental energy and emotion people expend worrying about food is pretty awful. The diet industry's advertising is extraordinarily pervasive too.
I'm glad you feel like you can talk about it here. Online spaces are so often aggressive to the idea that food shouldn't be constantly top of mind.
I just sorta stumbled into intuitive eating years ago, and i agree with it being one of the best things i've ever done for myself.
It's so wild now to hear people worry about what they eat and i'm just, like.. i start feeling sick of snacks after a fifth of a bag of chips, what i crave is a bucket full of nice balanced pasta salad!
There are so many things like this where people think you just have to suffer and push through with willpower, when in fact we have had perfect solutions since forever and modern society has just made people forget this, and purely coincidentally this has allowed companies to sell products and services.