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by Golda Poretsky, H.H.C.
www.bodylovewellness.com

I’m a non-dieting repost in honor of No Diet Day!

Hello, my dear dieters. This blog entry is especially for you. If you’ve been reading my posts, you’ll notice a theme: that experimentation is good; that much of life is research, and if you treat it this way, you can experience your life without judgment. As a researcher, it is your job to look at your life and decide what you like – and keep researching what you might like even more.

In the spirit of research, I ask you to join me in celebrating National No Diet Day on May 6th. Take the day off from counting calories and weighing your food. Take the day off from eating what you don’t want to and exercising in ways that don’t feel good. Take the day off from worrying about messing up or staying on your diet.

As a health counselor, I don’t like to take anything away, but instead, add in great things. So today, I want you to check in with yourself and eat what you want. I want you to eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’re full. I want you to move your body only in the most delicious ways that feel good.

This process may not be easy for you. The more you’ve dieted and made yourself worry about your body, the harder this may be, but all I ask is that you try. You are a researcher of your own happiness. Today you are researching how it feels not to be on a diet. Just see how it feels.

To support you in this journey, I am reprinting my 16 Reasons Not To Diet. Why 16? Because that’s the average dress size of American women!

1) Many diets support the use of non-nutritional, highly chemicalized foods like fake fats and fake sugars. These chemicalized foods negatively affect body chemistry, cause low-level undernourishment, and often encourage overeating when the dieter gets the signal that s/he is not getting nourishment.

2) Diets have such a high failure rate that they are really a gamble with a low chance of success. If you look at the fine print of most studies on diets, they will tell you that diets have a 90-99% long-term failure rate. People lose some weight, only to find it creep back up, often surpassing their initial, pre-diet weight. Even the “successful” dieters often don’t keep all of their weight off.

3) Dieting gives dieters the message that they cannot trust their internal sense of what nourishes them. This distrust of internal signals affects other aspects of a dieter’s life, where they seek external approval and control of their non-food related actions.

4) The diet industry has a deep interest in the failure of dieters—if everyone got skinny, they’d go out of business.

5) Dieters’ self esteem is often tied to their weight—they feel good about themselves when they’re losing weight and bad about themselves when they’re gaining weight.

6) The diet system reinforces low self esteem in dieters by making them feel like they have no “willpower” when they have diet lapses. In actuality, diets encourage people to ignore their internal will in exchange for the perceived will of the diet industry.

7) Rather than being about nourishment, food often becomes about reward and punishment for dieters.

8) Diets cause dieters (who are often women) to revolve their lives around food rather than other things that may really matter to them (relationships, careers, social issues).

9) Diets cause a lot of body hatred, particularly when the dieter isn’t losing weight. Dieters tend to see their bodies as wrong and problematic when they’re not seeing the “results” they want.

10) Diets often categorize foods as good/okay vs. bad/forbidden. Just like our culture’s genesis story revolves around a woman eating a forbidden food (the apple), it’s human nature to want what’s forbidden. Thus, it’s no wonder that dieters often crave forbidden foods even more once they are forbidden, and then hate themselves for eating those foods (maybe because they’re made to feel as though they’ve caused all of humanity to become sinners).

11) Diets encourage what I like to call “lottery thinking”—most dieters know that diets haven’t really worked for them nor most of the people they know, yet they think that this new diet is going to make them thin, and they’ll finally be in that tiny successful group.

12) Most diet programs are expensive. I cringe when I think about the money that I and my friends and family have spent over the years on Weight Watchers, special shakes and diet pills!

13) For some people, diets are like Band-aids on deep scars. For people who really overeat and eat unconsciously, they often eat to numb their feelings and consciousness. Their issue is not really “portion control.” In fact, they often are too controlling of themselves and their emotions.

14) Diets assume that all fat people eat too much. They don’t account for the fact that people come in all shapes and sizes, and that a person’s weight is not an indicator of overall health.

15) The weight loss/gain cycle created by dieting is more stressful on the body than just being plain, old fat.

16) Diets work on a scarcity principle. Diets make dieters focus on lack, tell them they can only have “this much and no more” and that to want more is a bad thing. Because dieting is so all-encompassing, this scarcity principle often filters into other aspects of dieters’ lives. They begin to see lack and scarcity in their relationships, in their jobs, in the world.

So enjoy this day of no dieting, and notice your thoughts, feelings and food choices!

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