It is one of the greatest ironies of my life that once I finally stopped dieting, I looked up and saw that everyone else around me had started, or at least were living like they should be on a diet, which is, frankly, almost as bad.

One of the places I see it the most is on social media. Although I have tailored my feed pretty well via my professional Facebook page to only see body positive/HAES/non-diet goodness, my personal page occasionally feeds me an intermittent drip of body hate/food fear messages by way of unfunny memes, sadly by people I actually know (and who are clearly not reading my blog!).

The most recent cringeworthy fat/food memes I encountered were these:

“Attention: Due to recent setbacks, my summer beach body will be postponed another year. As usual your patience is appreciated…”

“I don’t need a personal trainer as much as I need someone to follow me around and slap unhealthy foods out of my hands.”

Hilarious right?? On further critical thought…not so much.

The first one assumes that there is a particular type of beach body that one needs for the beach in the summer, and that if someone doesn’t have this body – well, sorry, no beach for them. I’m going to assume that the body that this meme would deem acceptable is the body type owned by probably less than 5% of the people in the world. So I guess the unlucky rest of us just need to stay home, miss all the summer fun, and wait it out till the Cultural Ideal Body Fairy comes along and bestows its blessings on us. Aaron and I talked about the “summer beach body” BS in this podcast.

The second one is wrong on so many levels it makes my head want to implode. First of all, the idea of “unhealthy” foods is just sooooo 2015. Have we not figured out yet that there aren’t really any unhealthy foods – that it’s really our relationship to food that makes the true difference to our health? Is a donut really going to decimate the health of someone who has a varied and balanced diet and a good relationship to food? No, right?! Then how can any one food truly be labeled “unhealthy?” On a personal note, I find talking about “healthy” and “unhealthy” foods really poor conversational fodder. When did we all collectively decide to stop enjoying what we eat??

I also hate the assumption that somehow avoiding “unhealthy” foods is the health equivalent to exercising. That’s simply not true on the scientific face of it. Studies have shown that exercise is far better than diet for helping to reduce visceral fat (the fat that collects around organs and tends to be more harmful than subcutaneous fat, the stuff that is much more visible) even when no weight is lost. As a dietitian, I’d love to just tell you to have a healthy eating pattern and be done with it,  but I’ve never been able to deny the health benefits of exercise. To say that eschewing movement and simply avoiding those foods you’ve designated as “bad” is somehow going to fix your health…dude, it’s misleading and it’s not even funny. Kill this meme now.

Perhaps in my dieting days I would have enjoyed this sort of bonding. “Haha, let’s all laugh about how bad we feel about our bodies and the way we eat!” Which is weird, because the reason I dieted and lost weight was to feel better about my body (something I achieved only fleeting with this strategy).

In reality, when we share these types of memes, we send a message: I am not in the right body. Other people are not in the right bodies. I do not deserve the food I enjoy. No one in the wrong body should get to enjoy food. We should feel ashamed.

These messages, while seemingly innocent, simply reinforce the culture of body hate and dieting that is weightist and healthist on the face of it and extends its long, gnarly fingers into sexism, racism, ableism, healthism, all the fucking -isms. Creating a hierarchy of good and bad bodies means that you can do that in any other facet of life: sex, ability, skin color, health levels. So let’s just stop, because a culture of compassion and radical acceptance is just so much better.

There are ways to motivate people to eat better and move more and like their bodies that aren’t shame-based. Shaming never made anyone healthier, certainly not in the long run. Meanwhile, if you feel bad about your body, consider why. Could it be the ever-present specter of a culture that practices hate and calls it humor? Reject it and define health on your own terms. And don’t make the world a worse place with shitty memes.

Dietitians Unplugged – Our This American Life Breakdown

Episode 12 is available now! Aaron and I had fun talking about the Tell me I’m Fat episode of This American Life.

Listen now:
Libsyn
iTunes
Stitcher

Want to feel freedom with food?

Tired of feeling ruled by food? I can help you get free. Learn more here.

Subscribe and get my free guide, Why you overeat …and what to do about it.

Click here if you just want my newsletter!

I’m taking a little blog breather this week to enjoy life, so I’m re-posting one of my favorite post in the past year. I’ll be back soon with new content, but for now…enjoy some vintage Dare To Not Diet.

As a dietitian who believes in non-diet, non-weight focused nutrition, I often find myself explaining my position on intentional weight loss to casual acquaintances who always want to talk to me about weight loss. It usually starts out with someone else bringing up the topic after they have discovered I am a dietitian (there is a reason I don’t volunteer this information easily). They say something like, “Well of course diets don’t work. Permanent lifestyle changes are what lead to lasting weight loss,” or, “Eating less doesn’t work, you have to do interval training in order to lose weight and keep it off,” or, “The only way to maintain long lasting weight loss is to do resistance training.” As though fat people have never tried any of these things ever, and if they just would, they’d have their fatness cured, stat.  *Eye roll*

To which I have to answer: “Actually, no one has figured out a way to create long-term weight loss for more than a tiny fraction of people…and neither have you.” (In reality, I try to be nice about this. But for the purposes of this blog, I get to have a Snark-o-rama, ʼkay?) And then I clarify that I’m talking about basically all the weight loss science that exists out there and how it pretty much shows that long-term weight loss is pretty much a unicorn (as in, it doesn’t exist) for all but a few people. And then, of course, perhaps because I’m a dietitian and why trust someone with an actual degree in nutrition*, or perhaps because I’m a chubby woman who’s clearly just given up on herself*, they don’t believe me.

My favorite person (okay, not really) to argue with on this subject insists that the key to weight loss (even long-term!) is interval training weight weights (despite complete lack of evidence) . When I say that I lift weights and I’m still fat, the answer is invariably, “Well, you’re just not doing it enough.” When I ask how much and how often I should lift weights, the answer is, “More than you’re doing now.” Which is asinine, because he doesn’t know jack about what I’m doing now. When I say that I lifted weights very regularly when I was much thinner and dieting and that I couldn’t build any muscle to save my life AND my weight eventually returned even as I adhered to my regimen, he says it was because I was dieting. When I say I stopped dieting, still lifted weights and gained a lot of weight, it is because I’m not lifting enough. Basically, I’m a fatty who can’t win. Oh, and it’s all my fault.

This seems to be the prevailing attitude among people who all profess to have THE answer to the weight loss “problem.” What it really boils down to is, “Do this thing you might not even like to do, do it a lot, focus your entire life on this, forsake all the other things you might be interested in doing because they won’t produce weight loss, and you’ll be CURED of your fat forever!” Except that, oh yeah, there is zero proof that any of this will work LONG TERM for more than a tiny – like 5% tiny – fraction of people, even if you manage to keep at it.

And by the way, guess who’s tried these “foolproof,” “long-term” weight loss “methods”? (imagine me air quoting vigorously here). Only every fat person that’s ever tried to diet ever. Yeah, that’s right. We’ve tried it. It didn’t work and also, it sucked. If it was something most people could sustain long-term AND they enjoyed it, they’d do it. But we’re not talking about enjoying life here, are we? No, the idea seems to be that we do stuff we don’t like just to chase a body that isn’t really ours. Essentially, we are being punished for our fat. You only get one life on earth, so why don’t you do stuff you don’t enjoy to make sure everyone else is okay with the way you look?*

Let’s take weight lifting, for instance (something I actually happen to enjoy). Even if it did work to induce long-term weight loss for most people, what if someone hates lifting weights? Resistance training isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. But in order to lose weight and maintain the loss, someone is supposed to sacrifice their interests and pretty much all their spare time just to make sure they have time for adequate amounts of weight-loss inducing resistance training (assuming one doesn’t make a living lifting weights, which most of us don’t)? Pfffft, thanks but no thanks.

There is a reason the weight loss industry is hauling in $60 billion a year – it keeps selling the same shoddy product over and over again to the same people (like, all of us) without ever actually working. If there was a way to produce sustainable weight loss that worked for most people, we’d have all figured it out, done it, and eventually the weight loss industry would cease to exist because we’d have all lost weight and kept it off. But we didn’t. And it keeps existing. And this weight-loss mentality is actually doing more harm than good by contributing to body shame, disordered eating and exercising, weight cycling, and even more weight gain for a lot of people.

So then I hear, “Permanent weight loss is hard work and people are just lazy.” First of all, short-term weight loss is no piece of cake either, but most of us who have tried it have lost at least some weight initially. And you know who works hard? Just about everyone. Yep, turns out the world is not full of lazy people. In a world of ever-increasing working hours and people with multiple jobs, we live in a society that is well-acquainted with hard work. Sometimes it’s hard work we don’t even like, but we do it anyway. But somehow we’re just lazy about losing weight permanently even though we’re willing to pay $60 billion a year for it? This is some serious non-logic.

So, no big surprise here, but nope, no one has “cured” fatness yet. Sorrrreeeeee!

The good news is, that doesn’t mean we need to give up on our health. Although they won’t necessarily cause most people to lose weight (yes, they may cause some people to lose weight, just not a statistically significant proportion of people), actual, doable lifestyle changes that support health are much easier to make and sustain compared to what you have to do to induce and sustain weight loss. So why not do the things that are achievable and sustainable, like listening to internal hunger and satiety cues to prevent overeating, adding more fruits or vegetables to our diet to boost our nutrient intake, or finding more ways to move enjoyably?

These things are easy to do in the absence of hunger and deprivation, or misery of doing stuff that you hate that often accompanies weight loss efforts. And while they might not “cure” our fatness (just as nothing has been shown to do), they will make us healthier. And maybe even happier.

*Sarcasm is a sweet, sweet balm.

Dietitians Unplugged Podcast – Listen now:

Libsyn
iTunes
Stitcher

Subscribe and get my free guide:

Why you overeat …and what to do about it

Click here if you just want my newsletter!

A friend of mine sent me this article about Sandra Aamodt’s new book Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession With Weight Loss. Check it out, she said. Lots of shares on social media.

I’m excited to read this book since Sandra Aamodt has been a pretty staunch anti-diet advocate in recent years. She first came to my attention in this Ted talk. The research discussed in the article centers on the human biome of the gut – the trillions of bacteria that live in our GI system, which is something I’ve been interested in for the last 20 years since I first discovered probiotics – and how our gut microbes might affect our weight.

The article talks about the research done on the biomes of mice and how different body sizes are produced when they alter the biome of bacteria-free mice (which are produced in the lab; bacteria-free humans or mice do not occur naturally). It then goes on to talk about the research based on children who had been given antibiotics early in life and their prevalence for overweight/obesity (the article’s words; you know I prefer “fat” as a body descriptor).  The article, however, makes some wild assumptions and conclusions, and I’m wondering how closely it hues to the tenor of the book.

I’m definitely of the mind that antibiotics have been overused and abused for the last 40 or more years and that’s one of the reasons why antibiotic resistant microbes have developed (MRSA, drug resistant TB). On the other hand, antibiotics are one of the reasons humans are living longer – even despite the supposed “obesity panic epidemic.” So I worry about this kind of information getting filtered through the fatphobic lens of our society and being turned into, “OMIGOD I cannot give my child antibiotics or she will turn out to be FAT.” I’m worried, in essence, that this will become the new iteration of the current anti-vaxxer madness. What if a baby needs antibiotics to save his or her life? Will they be withheld to prevent fatness? This might sound extreme, until you look at the increase in pertussis (whooping cough) and measles outbreaks that were most likely due to anti-vaccination hysteria.

The article closes with, “For now, we can take a couple of lessons from this research. Parents should minimize antibiotic use in children, especially in the first year of life, because changes in gut bacteria at that age can have lasting consequences. The average child in the United States receives ten to twenty courses of antibiotics before age 18, increasing the risks of asthma, allergies and inflammatory bowel disease, in addition to obesity and diabetes.” Can we really take these lessons yet? I’m not advocating for the cavalier use of antibiotics in kids with a mere runny nose, but as far as I know, there is simply not enough firm data to jump to all these conclusions (remember that correlation does not equal causation). The science is far from clear, and people still die regularly from simple bacterial infections in countries where they have no access to antibiotics. I’m afraid this kind of simplistic pronouncement is just going to panic parents more than needs to happen.

So let’s use some commonsense here, please. Yes, we shouldn’t abuse antibiotics; no, we probably shouldn’t withhold antibiotics from children if they truly need them just because there is a chance they will end up fat later on in life.

I’m also concerned about the potential for the research on the human biome to be abused by the diet industry in the name of eradicating fat people. How far will we go (read: how far will the diet industry go) in trying to change the biomes of fat people in order to make them into thin people? I’ll tell you this: I for one am not swallowing any poop pills to facilitate a bacterial transplant no matter how thin it might make me (as has already been proposed in recent research. Ew.). I already know what I need to do to be as healthy as I can be at the size I’m at now (knowing that many factors are beyond my control); I don’t need to literally swallow shit on top of everything else I do.

And what if we find out (too late, as always) that one person’s gut microbes aren’t good for someone else? Or that our personal biomes hold certain advantages for us and that changing that environment removes those advantages? Count me out, thanks.

I know that Sandra Aamodt will make the case that diets don’t make us thinner like they purport to do, and probably make us fatter in the long run. I am hoping she has used the research around the human biome to make the case that our weight is not really within our control, and that there are many complex factors that go into determining our body weight that we cannot necessarily influence.  I truly hope she advocates for size diversity and body acceptance. Because what we don’t need is another hare-brained scheme – like dieting to lose weight has proven to be – to make further assaults on the bodies and minds of fat people.

Subscribe and get my free guide:

Why you overeat …and what to do about it

Click here if you just want my newsletter!

Happy Canada Day (today) and U.S. Independence Day (Monday)! Ready to declare your independence from dieting?

One of the things Aaron and I hear people say quite often is that they are just not sure where to start when it comes to learning how to eat according to internal hunger and fullness cues. For this episode, we decided to reveal some of our favorite first steps to moving away from a dieting mentality and toward normal eating. If one thing doesn’t work for you, just try another. And remember, it’s all experimental, there are no hard-and-fast rules here (as there are with dieting), so be gentle and kind with yourself.

Kick back and listen, and then enjoy some yummy barbecue (or your party food of choice) this weekend to celebrate your independence from food rules. Oh, and leave off the side of guilt – it’s been sitting in the sun for hours.

Listen now:

Dietitians Unplugged on Libsyn

On iTunes

On Stitcher

Be Your Own Beloved Update

I had a fantastic time in Vivienne McMaster’s Beloved Beginnings class. She really knows how to get someone to take a great photo, so much so that I’m excited to share a few of mine from the class. If you’re having trouble loving yourself in photos, Vivienne’s classes are the place to be. I’m hooked, so I hope to see you there in a future class!

Subscribe and get my free guide:

Why you overeat …and what to do about it

Click here if you just want my newsletter!

I’ve noticed lately that I’ve been experiencing an emotion that hasn’t been entirely natural for me for most of my life…I’ve been happy. Happy and completely content, both with my life and myself. I’ve felt happiness before, but it often felt tainted with mild-but-persistent anxiety.

It has only been very recently, when I’ve begun to embrace who and how I really am and the gifts I have to share that life started feeling really good. When I shucked off the expectations I thought the world had for me and just went with my own expectations…my life really started to open up.

And yet, I am as fat as I was before I started my first diet. We are frequently told fat people can’t be happy with themselves, so how is this possible? (Sarcasm meter: 10/10)

Looking back before my first diet, I cannot recall truly disliking my body. I knew that society saw my body as “wrong” but I didn’t have problems looking at myself in photos, and I didn’t look in the mirror and think “yuck.” I went out dancing a lot back then and remember feeling pretty awesome when I rocked an outfit I really liked. However, I went on a diet anyway because as much as I liked myself, I became tired of being the butt of society’s joke. I didn’t want to be seen as “wrong” any longer. When I began to lose weight rapidly and relatively easily, it just reinforced the diet mentality for me. When people around me started to congratulate me on my new body, I was hooked.

So in fact it was after I had lost weight that I learned to hate my former fat body.

When you lose weight and everyone tells you how awesome you suddenly look, that is some seriously addictive mojo. Now you know: before, not so good. Now, good. I decided to blame my former fatness for all that was wrong with my life before: the lack of love, the lack of self-esteem, the choice of bad hairstyles, feeling invisible. Since I had been able to “fix” the fat problem, it did not fully occur to me that this was actually a societal problem and not an individual one — that everyone knows the message that fat bodies are worth less and just maybe that negatively impacts our experience in the world.

I got into a relationship that I was pretty sure would not have happened had I remained fat. On the one hand I was relieved that I was no longer fat and could be in relationships, yet on the other hand, I was angry that my romantic life depended on something so trivial as my weight and appearance (little did I know, it didn’t have to). This, I guess, is what is meant by cognitive dissonance. It was hard to get relaxed enough in my life to fully feel happiness or contentment in any meaningful way.

Many years later, when I started to regain my lost weight after giving up dieting, I was disconcerted to say the least. I had somehow convinced myself that this was not possible or likely, and yet there it was – a straight shot back to my starting weight, pre-dieting. I was unhappy but also determined that I would make peace with my body and even try to like it. I was determined I would not let fat bigotry dictate how I felt about myself.

In the past few years, after a LOT of rumination on how fucked up this societal fatphobia bigotry bullshit is, I’ve come closer than ever before to accepting and liking my body, and feeling right and relaxed in it. Knowing that my body didn’t need to be my part- or even full-time job has freed me up to pursue my career (which, ironically, is about food and nutrition – but not about my body or my nutrition) and magic started happening. I finally garnered the confidence to start this blog and a podcast; I’ve been offered guests spots on other podcasts (check them out here, here, and here), I’ve been published in a magazine, I’m getting offered speaking opportunities, and soon I’ll be starting my own business and helping those who need it to find peace with food – essentially my dream job (more info on that to come in future posts) . I discovered that being loved did not depend on the size and shape of my body. On top of that, I’ve met a whole community of amazing people who also don’t buy the fat=bad thin=good BS we are sold on a daily basis.

When I was thin, I thought I should have been happy, but I really wasn’t. When I was thin, I longed for a career that I was excited and serious about, but I was too self-conscious to pursue. When I was thin, I wanted my relationships to feel like they were based on more than how well I approximated the cultural beauty ideal. When I was thin, I wanted to feel relaxed and unworried in my body, but I couldn’t. I got all that, but not when I was thin. That all happened when I got fat again.

I can’t guarantee this outcome for anyone else, and I can only speak to my own experience. My fatness is not someone else’s fatness. But I do think it’s important that we challenge the myths that the diet industry and society sells to us which few of us profit from.

We might not be happy with ourselves when we lose weight; we might not be unhappy if we are fat. As much as we are able, let’s try to determine our own levels of happiness for ourselves, and then, hopefully, also change the world.

Dietitians Unplugged Ep 10 – Be Your Own Beloved with Vivienne McMaster:

Dietitians Unplugged on Libsyn
iTunes
New! Now on Stitcher

The picture I used this week was taken during Vivienne’s Beloved Beginnings class. I hope you’ll join Aaron Flores and I for the Be Your Own Beloved 30 day class starting July 1. I have had so much fun in this class so far. I’ve started to learn to hush my inner critic and see myself with compassion. I can’t recommend it enough – and I don’t even get paid to say that.

Subscribe and get my free guide:

Why you overeat …and what to do about it

Click here if you just want my newsletter!

It’s been a banner month for Intuitive Eating in the press! First, we heard that Cosmopolitan magazine would be featuring an article by Caroline Rothstein about Intuitive Eating in the July issue – WIN! Then NYPost.com featured the article “Intuitive Eating is for People Who Have Given Up” by Brandon Drenon, personal trainer and holder of a nutrition certification from a Cracker Jack Box  Precision Nutrition, which on first read seems asinine in its conclusions…and continues to seem so on the second and third read.  But I’m of the mind lately that for intuitive eating (and all other means of internally regulated, non-diet eating), there is no such thing as bad publicity. Let’s get these ideas into the minds of the people who need them.

That said, this article is in serious need of rebuttal, to be sure. Some of it gets it right – well, at least the parts he quotes or summarizes directly from the book. The incredulous tenor of the article is established right away, however:

“For anyone who has ever struggled with a conventional diet rigid with rules and restrictions on what you can eat and when you can eat it, the Intuitive Eating diet might sound very attractive. The guidelines of this eating philosophy are about as strict as the cool mom who smokes weed with her high school-age children — #bestmomever.”

I’ll forgive the ridiculous comparison to moms who might actually do this (do these moms really exist??). The major problem is the missing context for why some people find intuitive eating so appealing and even necessary. That context is a food-and-body-obsessed world that tells us 1. Whatever we look like now is not okay, and we must look a certain way to gain societal acceptance and optimal health and 2. We can do that by manipulating our diets in such a way that does not honor our instincts (which turns out to be, statistically speaking, a very short-term solution for most people often resulting in even more weight gained as a final result). Prolonged food and/or calorie restriction can really mess with a person’s perceptions of hunger and fullness, and intuitive eating helps them find those cues again.  The very idea of intuitive eating exists simply because of the astounding failure of dietary restriction for body manipulation for the majority of most people.

The next part of the article describes the basic concept of IE, taken pretty much right from the book. A former diet-junkie he interviewed even sings the praises of intuitive eating. So far, so good.

And then this:

“Eat what you want, enjoy every guiltless bite, and be happy with the way your body looks. If that’s all you want, the Intuitive Eating diet works flawlessly, [oh Brandon, please stop your sentence here!] but it stops there [dang]…If you want to look average, then go on an average person’s diet and eat whatever the hell you want. However, if you have concrete weight loss or physique goals, then definitive actions need to be taken that control your appetite and guide your food and exercise selection.”

Well now, here’s something we’ve never heard before! Oh wait, we have heard it. Brandon, you had me at “works flawlessly” because yes, those of us who practice intuitive eating do want to enjoy what we eat and be happy with the way our bodies look. That is exactly at the essence of intuitive eating! But then he goes on to let us know what he thinks of having, god forbid, an “average” body, and I’m reminded again of how hard it can be to like our bodies when we are surrounded by a world full of people who think this way. Haven’t you heard Brandon? Oppressive beauty ideals – like, say, the bikini-ready beach body – are soooooo 2015!

“The message of Intuitive Eating is self-acceptance and self-awareness, but what seems to be lost is self-discipline and self-control.”

Brandon, you have so missed the point. Not to mention, you forgot to read Traci Mann’s definitive and very scientific book on this stuff, Secrets From the Eating Lab: The Science of Weight Loss, The Myth of Willpower, and Why You Should Never Diet Again, which includes actual science on how when it comes to our diets, self-control and willpower are definitely not the most reliable eating strategies (especially for weight loss), and the body’s physiological and psychological processes almost always win out to keep our weight right where it is or was (unless you develop an eating disorder. I do not encourage this.). If they did work, then most diets (or at least some) would be successful and we’d all be thin. But they don’t, and we aren’t. But since you asked, the discipline in intuitive eating comes from truly listening to and honoring your hunger and fullness cues – you know, just the cues we’ve been equipped with to guide our nutrition since cavepeople days.

“What else in life do you leave to the whim of your intuition and expect positive results?”

Oh, just bowel movements, urination, breathing, sleeping and most of my other bodily functions. I heard that eating was also a bodily function, so I’ve decided to trust what my body is telling me on that, too. Turns out leptin and grehlin are wiser than my vanity.

“If we are to get anywhere in life worth going, the rules can’t be ‘Do whatever you want, whenever you want.’”

They can’t? Last time I checked, Brandon, as long as I’m not breaking any laws or hurting people, I can kind of do exactly what I want, when I want. Fun fact: once I decided to do exactly what I wanted with my body and how I fed it, I had so much time to do things other than plan my diet and worry about my weight all day that my life became filled up with awesomeness (like writing this blog, getting published in a magazine and doing a podcast). My life is WAY more fulfilling now than when I followed the body-police rules. Rules which I didn’t make in the first place, and for which I was not awared a ceremonial cookie when I followed them. Don’t get my feminist hackles up, now.

Brandon makes a few other ridiculous assumptions (that we would all blow our money on “Italian luxury items and Michelin-starred restaurants” if it were not for ignoring our intuition. Um, no. My intuitive desires fall more along the lines of self-care such as eating well and getting plenty of relaxation, sorry to disappoint) and sums up with

“If you have specific physique goals, you need to eat with intent and make conscious decisions to bring you closer to those goals. Whether it is counting calories, watching your carbohydrate and sugar intake, or eating Paleo, all of these mechanisms have the framework in place to help guide you toward weight loss.”

So here’s where we just need to go back to the science. Some people will be able to alter their physique significantly through exercise training, this is true. It will probably take up a lot of time and have to become the equivalent of a full-time job, this also seems true. But for many people with weight loss goals who aren’t able to dedicate their lives to the diet and exercise regime of an Olympian athlete (ie, pretty much most of us), the chance of making weight loss stick beyond 5 years even with diet and exercise is a paltry 5%. I wish people would put half the energy they spend on shaping their physiques into shaping themselves into actual interesting or good people, but I guess we’ll leave that for another, future epoch.

Perhaps Brandon’s nutrition certificate precludes the need for scrutiny of all the available science on weight loss (his B.S. from the University of Texas is in cinematography and film/video production, not nutrition). I feel like such a fool for taking all those silly classes like general chemistry, organic chemistry, physiology, anatomy, biochemistry and advanced nutrition (hello, metabolic pathways!) for four years that help me to understand the science I read regularly on this subject. Life would have been so much easier if I’d just gotten the 500 page Precision Nutrition textbook! (PS – My chemistry textbook was like 800 pages alone). What a friggin’ waste of time!

Listen, if people want to work out and manipulate their bodies into whatever they want, that’s cool. My concern is for the legions of people whose diets have failed them, and who then blame themselves for that failure only to get sucked into the whole cycle again. Intuitive eating isn’t about diving into a hill of donuts or a pile of calzones and eating until you are ready to explode (that’s called disordered eating). It’s not about eating junk food all day/every day (because our bodies actually crave diversity naturally in the absence of dietary restraint). These are gross misunderstandings about IE. In reality, many people have found that once they achieve a more intuitive relationship to food, they have improved diet quality. Here’s the latest research on intuitive eating so you can separate fact from fiction.

“Restrictions are necessary for balance. Although Intuitive Eating suggests otherwise, eating calzones until you spontaneously discover the desire to eat salads just seems very unlikely…Are you going to be happier following Intuitive Eating, or would you rather apply some discipline and eat a salad?”

The first part of this is simply incorrect, again, based on the science. High dietary restraint is actually associated with higher weights and poor diet quality. People who eat according to internal signals tend to have lower weights and better diet quality, not to mention they feel better about themselves which also happens to be good for your health (imagine that). The idea that we need to hold our noses to eat a salad is ridiculous. I like vegetables. Lots of people I know like salads. Why would this require any sort of discipline…oh, unless you were so damn hungry or deprived from restricting all the time that you only craved calzones.

Brandon got one thing really right though: intuitive eating is for people who have given up. It’s for people who have given up the futility of following yet another weight loss diet that inevitably fails. Given up feeling bad about themselves because their body doesn’t fit into a particular society-approved mold. Given up on living and breathing their diet every second of the day. Given up on feeling crazy around food. Given up on a bad relationship to eating and their bodies. I gave all that up and my life opened way up. Want to give up with me?

Dietitians Unplugged Ep 10 – Be Your Own Beloved with Vivienne McMaster:

Dietitians Unplugged on Libsyn
iTunes
New! Now on Stitcher

Subscribe and get my free guide:

Why you overeat …and what to do about it

Click here if you just want my newsletter!

“…One of the ways that shifted for me to be more compassionate is, I kind of struggle with feeling perpetually disappointed in people a lot. Like, why aren’t they living up to their expectations, why aren’t they living up to my expectations, why are they making these self-destructive choices?” -Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

It can be hard to live in this diet- and weight-obsessed world on a daily basis when you are no longer participating in the BS. Hearing diet-talk or food-fear driven conversation can be infuriating at best, triggering at worst. When we’ve tasted the freedom of a restriction-free life, we want to grab the world by the lapels and shake it and yell, “WAKE UP AND SMELL THE CREAM-AND-SUGAR INFUSED COFFEE! THIS IS EFFING GREAT! STOP DIETING FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY!” After giving up dieting and a life of chasing fleeting goal weights, we no longer see the world the same way – and so we no longer understand why so many others still seem stuck in the current weight-loss-diet paradigm.

This was me immediately after having given up dieting (and up to pretty recently).  Suddenly I was mystified that everyone was not aiming for non-diet nirvana like I now was, as though I had not spent the prior 16 years in ever-worsening diet-restriction oblivion. It’s easy to want to project our experience as the universal experience; after all, many of us came from the “if I can do it, everyone can do it” diet-mentality world. And it’s also easy to take the diet talk of others personally, and maybe even feel as though we are being judged for our non-diet choices.

Brené Brown explains how she dealt with these kinds of feelings in her book, Daring Greatly:

“One of the things that shifted for me, was this idea that maybe everyone – myself included – maybe everyone’s doing the best they can. But sometimes, that means that I don’t have to engage. …What I’ve learned for me, around boundaries and compassion, is that I don’t know whether people are doing the best they can or not, but my life is better when I work from the assumption that they are. … at the same time, that means that I need to have really clear boundaries. So instead of judging you, and feeling resentful, and feeling like you’re sucking me dry, or you’re taking advantage of me, I need to assume that you’re doing the best you can. And I need to set my boundaries, and not get involved to the degree where I lose control over how I feel about myself and what’s going on in that relationship.”

That’s where I’m trying to get with diet talk right now. I don’t always have to walk away or plug my ears and yell “LALALALALALALA,” but I don’t have to get emotionally involved, either. I can assume the dieter is trying the best she can. I don’t need to be angry or feel personally judged, especially because I feel good about the choices I’ve made around giving up dieting and embracing my body (aka, my boundaries) – and I can talk about that too, if that’s where the conversation is going. I don’t mind planting some non-diet seeds when appropriate, I just don’t need to get my knickers in a knot like I used to about “WHY DON’T THEY UNDERSTAND?”

This has actually come as a big relief. I spend plenty of time being angry at a society and diet industry that tells us we are not good enough as we are; I don’t need to be angry at the victims. I used to be one of them, after all.

Dietitians Unplugged Ep 10 – Be Your Own Beloved with Vivienne McMaster:

Dietitians Unplugged on Libsyn
iTunes
New! Now on Stitcher

Subscribe and get my free guide:

Why you overeat …and what to do about it

Click here if you just want my newsletter!

Greetings Dietitians Unplugged Podcast fans! We’ve got a new episode for you!  Aaron and I let it all out as  we discuss a show that epitomizes our current diet culture, NBC’s “The Biggest Loser.” We discuss the widely-shared article in the New York Times that reviewed the latest research on how contestants’ metabolisms have yet to recover even six years after being on the show.  We also talk about Sarah Aamodt’s great article from the NYT about why you should never diet again.  And we quote one of our favorite HAES® colleagues, Deb Burgard in this great article.  Take a listen to this very important episode — it might be the one you need to hear before you consider going on your next “diet.”

Listen:

Libsyn
iTunes
New! Now on Stitcher

Subscribe and get my free guide:

Why you overeat …and what to do about it

Click here if you just want my newsletter!

After the big news about The Biggest Loser broke recently, some weight loss specialists urged the disappointed masses to take heart, not lose faith, and keep on keepin’ on with their weight loss efforts. Why? Because long-term weight loss is possible! The proof? Aside from the completely anecdotal cases they’ve come across in their offices, they point to the 10,000 people who are part of the National Weight Control Registry (NWCR).

The NWCR has been around since 1994. To be eligible to join a person has to have lost 30 pounds and kept it off for one year. Yep – just one year. Because apparently that is the standard for “long-term” now. But I digress.

As we all know, weight loss is possible. Of course it is! Most of us have done it at least once – many of us several times. And in fact, even long-term weight loss maintenance is possible – I know because I was one of those maintainers for 16 years, and I’ve met a few more too. But saying something is possible is different from saying something is likely. It is possible I’ll win the lottery if I buy a lottery ticket…though it’s not very likely that will actually happen, given the usual odds. Should I go ahead and quit my job anyway since there is always that possibility?

And that’s what we’re talking about when we say long-term weight loss maintenance isn’t sustainable for most people. The best data we have says that most people (95% or so) regain some, all or even more weight within 3-5 years of losing the weight. Some people – around  5% of the population, again, based on all the available data – will maintain their weight loss, usually through an enormous amount of effort and vigilance. These are the people being tracked by the National Weight Control Registry.

This group of people is frequently held up as proof that long-term weight loss maintenance is possible (which we’ve already established), but somehow that gets translated to “also likely.” Here’s where we need to put on our analytical and critical thinking caps and do the math. According to the 1999 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System survey, 78% of women and 64% of men were dieting or trying to maintain weight loss; I expect these numbers are even higher now that we seem to be reaching new heights of fat-phobia and healthism. But let’s say that there was nothing special about 1999 and that this number of dieting people is more or less the norm. In 1998 there were 61 million women (I’m just too lazy to count the men right now) between the ages of 15 and 44 – let’s assume this is our potential-dieters category (we’re missing a lot of older women but counting a few younger ones makes up for it a bit). Seventy-eight percent of this number is roughly 47 million (rounded down) females who are dieting each year. But since 1994, the NCWR could only round up 10,000 one-year-weight-maintainers? This represents 0.02% of the population of women – and not even all of them. In reality, it’s hard to derive any sort of real rate of success from this “study group” since this is not a random, representative sample of the population and there is no control group. It’s sort of like asking all the elite athletes in the country to be in this study, and we see what they do to become elite athletes, and then someone says, see, we can ALL become elite athletes just like this tiny group! Uh, no.

Another way to look at this is to estimate the number of Americans who are “overweight or obese” – approximately 60% of adults, or 147 million – and then figure that an average of 71% (78% and 64% averaged) of them are dieting or trying to maintain weight loss – that’s 104 million – so 10,000 weight-loss-maintainers comes out to about 0.01%.  Either way is of course a very rough but generous estimate. Ragen Chastain of the Dances with Fat blog came up with this even bleaker estimate.

The NWCR has been in the news for ages – it’s not some secret society. It’s so NOT secret that even I found it, bumbling around on the internet one day, in one of my chronic internet searches on “How the fuck do you stay thin when you’re this hungry?” I found it and I joined it; after all, I’d maintained my weight loss for years. Wouldn’t other maintainers find it just as easily as I did?

I answered all sorts of questionnaires on how much I ate, and of what, and what kind of exercise I did, and how did I like being skinny? They used food frequency questionnaires which are notoriously sketchy –it’s hard for even the most vigilant eater/dieter to know accurately how much broccoli she ate in the past 6 months. I had disordered eating habits that kept me thin but that didn’t likely translate well on paper – or perhaps they were just expected. Rest assured, probably like many of the other 10,000 “successes,” I was eating very little. If you want to know how many of this elite group maintains their weight loss, I wrote about that here.

Here’s what I don’t know: when I decided to quit dieting because the mental, emotional, and social qualities of my life were seriously suffering despite continuing to maintain a low weight, I don’t know how the NWCR accounted for me as my weight naturally increased. Did they drop me out of their data, and just add in a new maintainer to keep the 10,000 steady? I can’t find any information on drop-out rates or weight re-gain rates. Out of 10,000 people, there must be some other people who didn’t maintain their weight loss. As I filled out the questionnaires with my increasing weight, I started to get the feeling that my data was no longer needed. Eventually, not wanting to do anymore food counting or weight reporting, even for the sake of science, I just quit sending in my information.

(As a side note, I’ll admit, dieting actually “worked” pretty well for me, at least as far as weight maintenance goes. But it also worked to turn me into someone who had learned body dissatisfaction and distrust, who couldn’t have a good meal without guilt or fear, who grasped for societal approval at the expense of her happiness, and who had a burning, singular interest in food and not much else (in other words, a boring person). I was a “successful” weight loss maintainer, I wasn’t really happy with the life of a weight maintainer, and that’s why I finally quit. That might be a moot point to the people who research this stuff but it’s not to me.)

Studying a small group of very special people, for which there is no control group, and then saying, “Hey, everyone can do this!” is bad science. This is simply not enough proof for me to risk a weight loss attempt that is more than likely to end up in complete weight regain, or an even higher body weight that I started with, with some lasting psychological effects as a bonus. I know I can be healthy without taking that kind of risk. What do you think – is it enough proof for you?

Dietitians Unplugged plug!

Episode 8 – The Beach Body Episode is available now! Listen on iTunes, Libsyn or Stitcher. Like our Facebook page to get all the latest news on our podcast and other non-diet podcasts.

Subscribe and get my free guide:

Why you overeat …and what to do about it

Click here if you just want my newsletter!