Embracing a non-diet new year - setting body positive resolutions
The relentless treadmill of diet resolutions is about to crank itself up again, at the start of the new year. After all the festive food adverts, Boxing Day onwards will see the focus shift instead to weight loss programmes, diet foods and new ‘healthy eating’ cookbooks, sold to you by slim people. It is a predictable, exhausting cycle, which perpetuates unhealthy ‘all or nothing’ thinking, and punishing and unsustainable restriction.
It’s a potent and seductive message, particularly this year. After the year we’ve all had, we are all so ready for a new start – for potential, for hope, for change and movement. I get it, and I also so desperately hope that we are able to gift ourselves this future, without attaching it to the misery of yet another diet.
The diet industry is heavily invested in bombarding us with the messaging that we can only have the life we want by losing weight. Well, we know from the evidence that simply isn’t the case. Intentional weight loss is almost never sustainable, and research shows that weight cycling (the perpetual weight loss-weight gain cycle of chronic dieting) is more damaging than being stable at a higher weight.
You deserve to live contentedly in your body. You deserve food freedom. You deserve to move your body simply because it feels good to do so. You deserve the experience of collaborating with your body, and trusting yourself to make the right choice for you, your life and your health. You deserve to move towards your goals, your plans and hopes and dreams in the body you have now, not the body diet culture says you should have.
So, as we consider New Year, and the potent opportunity for leaving behind that which is no longer serving us, I hope that you these pointers might help you:
Set your boundaries
Whilst non-diet understanding is rapidly growing, diet culture is still going to surge in January. Family, friends and colleagues will all casually mention their weight loss intentions, and share diet plans and diet resolutions. It can be difficult to sustain your own counter-cultural decision to leave dieting behind, if every other conversation is focused on restriction.
Have a think about how you would like to boundary others, to avoid incessant diet talk. A stock response can be useful; something like, ‘Actually, this year, I’m focusing on body acceptance and food freedom, rather than dieting. Let’s talk about something else!’.
Remember, you don’t have to justify your choice to others. Confidence will develop over time, and you will soon be able to share a little more of the reasons for your decision, if you choose to.
Develop a bubble
I’m a real believer, especially at the beginning of your body acceptance and food freedom journey, of developing an affirmative bubble for yourself. Have a think about all the influences you have in your life that will affirm this radical decision for yourself – where will your support come from? An understanding friend or partner, a colleague who is also reaching disillusion point with diets, a therapist? Reach out to those who will encourage and uplift you.
Support can also be more abstract and impersonal too – listening to non-diet memoirs, familiarising yourself with Intuitive Eating and Health At Every Size through helpful online and print resources, and affirming your body type by following non-diet accounts that normalise and celebrate the way you look – this all counts... A LOT!
Challenge yourself to live abundantly
This is not easy. Diet culture tells us that if we don’t keep ourselves regulated, we will surge into binge and over-eating. In short, diet culture tells us we can’t trust ourselves and the wisdom of our bodies. But it is, in fact, diet culture that creates this pendulum swing. When we hold our body in restriction, our body gets scared that nourishment will not come, and will then hoard food stores through eating past the point of fullness. Your body doesn’t know that this restriction is intentional; your body just registers the feeling of not enough. This is your body fulfilling its promise to you – to keep you safe, to sustain you, to see you through.
Your body is a wise and knowing system and, when uninterrupted by scarcity and the attendant need to hoard, the body finds its balance. It can take time to develop this trust, and re-set the pendulum, but it can and will happen. Your body can be your friend, and you can work in partnership for a satisfying and abundant life.
Embrace the middle ground
An all and nothing mentality is deeply engrained in diet culture – holding ourselves intensely in restriction, or free-falling scarily into ‘fuck it’. Keep watch for the ‘absolutes’ eg ‘I’m ALWAYS going to respect my body’ or ‘I’m NEVER going to let myself have another diet thought again’, or ‘I’m going to the gym EVERY day’ or ‘I’m ONLY eating xyz’. As Evelyn Tribole says, one of the most important phrases to embrace in your Intuitive Eating journey is, ‘for the most part’. All of those sentences above are changed in intention when we remove the absolutes and allow some middle ground and room for manoeuvre. The middle ground is a safeguarding – by removing the absolutes, we remove the pressure of perfectionism, and perfectionism is the benchmark of diet culture.
Perfection, perfection, perfection. It’s the central tenet of every harmful and oppressive structure that marginalises and divides us. But... it’s a myth. The only ones who gain from pedalling perfection are the big businesses who want you to feel bad about yourself, so they can sell you stuff.
You do not need to be perfect. No one is perfect. We are flawed and messy and a wonderful work in progress, and in 2021 I hope you allow yourself to be human.