The weight game: why the non-diet diet works (for me at least)

You're not the boss of me chunky monkey dessert at Pubbelly. 

Every once in a while I read something that perfectly encapsulates my own experience. Most recently it was a New York Magazine article by Melissa Dahl called, "A Non-Diet Diet: The Case for Eating Whatever You Want."

The gist of the piece is that evidence is increasingly showing that elimination based diets yield only short term results, and that eating what you want when you want it is the key to reaching your ideal weight. The official term for this approach is intuitive eating, and it's rooted in the notion that our body inherently knows what it needs. The trick is knowing how to listen to it. 

This means the following: 1) eating slowly and taking time to evaluate how full you feel. 2) Avoiding eating for any reason other than physical hunger, i.e., sadness, stress, boredom, happiness etc.  And my favorite, 3) allowing yourself to eat anything you desire.

Peoples' initial response to such an approach is fear they'll end up eating junk food all the time, but the reality is quite the opposite. The idea behind intuitive eating is that because you're paying attention to how food makes you feel, you simply won't want to eat crap all the time. Furthermore, since there's no such thing as forbidden food, you won't be drawn to it in the same way.

If you recall, in late 2012 I wrote about how for the first time in my life I had taken to emotional eating (boredom at work mostly), and no matter what I tried I couldn't lose the weight and fit into my pants. The post was my way of admitting my behaviour to myself and resolving to be more conscious.

The problem was that despite getting better at eating only when I was hungry,  I had taken to cutting out a lot of foods from my diet. Suddenly, all I could think about was dessert and pasta. It followed that every time I let myself indulge in such "treats," I never felt satisfied and kept wanting to have more. Dahl's article cites research that shows when parents implement very strict eating rules, their kids eat more of off-limit snacks when they're able to get ahold of them.

In any case, my weight didn't go down and I hated thinking about what I was and wasn't eating so much.  Then came my second post on the subject, where I declared I was just going to accept my body as it is and I was no longer going to think about losing the weight. It's a tough concept to fully grasp, but what we think and tell ourselves becomes our reality.

It followed that right around this time I met my now boyfriend, and I was so happy and preoccupied with other thoughts that not thinking about my weight was surprisingly simple. We were also dining out ALL the time, and hell no was I going to turn down a little dessert!

And then just like that -- without thinking about it -- I lost the weight. And I haven't put it back on. I also workout less. It's fascinating to me that by not denying myself of dessert and the like, I actually want it less, and I'm satisfied after just a few bites. Weird as it might sound, intuitive eating worked (and works) for me, and who would've thought it could be so easy.

Disclosure: I'm not by any means an expert on this subject matter, I'm simply discussing an article that resonated with me and my own experience. By sharing this with you my only hope is that it might be helpful in some way.

xoxo

Val