Grieving What You Miss From Dieting
Written by Isabel Vasquez RD, LDN
If you’re ready to ditch diets and embrace intuitive eating, you may have some fears. Especially if you’ve been dieting for decades, the thought of no more weight watchers meetings, eagerly stepping on the scale, or group chats about how the diet is going might bring up some mixed feelings. Even if you’re excited to say goodbye to diets for good, you might also have some sadness about letting go.
We’re definitely oversold on the benefits of diets by their deceptive, targeted advertising, but it’s normal to miss some aspects of dieting even when you’re committed not to return.
In this blog, we’ll share how to address some aspects of dieting you might miss: a goal, building confidence, and community.
A sense of purpose or a goal
When you’re on a diet, there’s usually lots of structure and a clear goal. You follow the diet’s rules and you expect a set result.
Diet ads promote x pounds of weight loss in x weeks or that you’ll be cured of some ailment simply by limiting your intake to juice for a week or cutting out carbs or whatever else they say!
That being said, that structure, that black-and-white thinking, and the clear goal or purpose can be enticing. Many of us like thinking black-and-white.
You might have had the idea that if you just do what the diet says, you’ll achieve weight loss. In our society, we’re constantly fed the idea that thinness is the key to being healthy, attractive, confident, etc. so of course it’d be scary to let go of dieting.
Sadly, this isn’t really the case since most diets lead to initial weight loss but then inevitable weight regain within a few years. In other words, the goal they claim to help you achieve is usually not achievable or sustainable.
Those big shifts up and down in weight are called weight cycling, which is linked with harms on cardiovascular and metabolic health, per a few studies, including this one from 2017.
When you ditch diets, you can reconnect with other parts of yourself. As you go on that journey, you may even connect with a greater purpose for yourself or realize that your goals don’t have to be rooted in shrinking your body.
Confidence
With how fatphobic our society is, it makes sense that we’d view thinness as the means to being more confident. We’re constantly sold this narrative in the media and by diet advertisements.
However, it’s pretty difficult to hate our bodies into loving them.
What would it be like to work towards accepting your body as it is without restriction, overexercising, or centering your life around your next diet?
What would it be like to find confidence in who you really are?
Especially for those of us who identify as women, we are socialized to believe our bodies are the most important thing about us. We’re told that how we look determines our value.
Sadly, dieting often leads to disconnection from your body and a growing distrust and hatred for it. Many people who diet don’t actually feel more confident over time. In fact, a 2022 study in Nutrients found that intentional weight loss attempts are linked with body dissatisfaction.
Even as you move through your food freedom journey, your relationship with your body is likely going to be an ever-evolving one with ups and downs just like other relationships in your life.
Even if your body changes, work to find confidence and gratitude in what your body does for you, how it lets you experience life, and about other aspects of yourself besides just what you look like!
Community
Not only can dieting provide a sense of purpose or goal, but it often means there are others working towards the same goal. Especially with Multi-Level Marketing diet companies, it’s easy to feel like there’s a community of others supporting you all on a journey towards something positive.
Although diet culture is still far more prevalent than intuitive eating is, intuitive eating and health at every size communities are growing.
It might help to mute or unfollow diet-centric accounts on social media and start to follow more anti-diet accounts. There are lots of anti-diet dietitians, therapists, or personal trainers who even host groups that you could join, one of those being our Nutrition Library!
It’s important to mention that grief is also a normal part of your intuitive eating journey. There will likely be some “sitting in the suck” and grieving what you miss from dieting. The thing is, you can miss aspects of dieting AND know that you don’t want to return to dieting. Both can be true.
Hold space for yourself to accept both truths and allow yourself to move through the grief.
For education on how to ADD nutrition to your favorite Latine cultural dishes, make peace with food, and focus on your health without dieting, join our nutrition library for just $27/month.
If you liked this post, you may also like:
5 Tips to Accept Intuitive Eating Weight Gain
What is a HAES Dietitian? Plus, What to Expect Working With One.
