Please join me for the Body Love Boost Teleclass this December!

Here’s what you get when you join us!

• Learn how to eat healthfully without dieting.
• Learn how to eat intuitively and connect with your body’s needs.
• Create a peaceful and stress free relationship with food and eating.
• Feel comfortable in your skin, no matter what the situation.
• Gain new confidence in yourself and your choices.
• Be as healthy as you can be, no matter what size you are.
• Be welcomed into a community of people who desire to create similar changes in their lives.
• Recordings of each class so that you can listen in whenever you’d like!
  

Body Love Boost Teleclass Is Starting Soon! originally appeared on Body Love Wellness on November 17, 2009.

I was recently interviewed by Jay Solomon over at More Of Me To Love.  We covered a lot of ground in this interview, from how I got started in Health At Every Size coaching to simple tips for loving your body up, right now.


See it here or read it below!

End Dieting and Experience Radical Body Love in an Interview with Expert, Golda Poretsky (October 21, 2009)

More of Me to Love: It’s so great to have the opportunity to sit down with you and learn a little bit more about what you do. Your weekly tips and blogs on body love are wonderful, but I’m sure that when people read them, they can’t help but think, what is body love? Today, I hope we all get to learn a little bit more about you and what you do. So, what made you want to get into the field of body-love counseling in the first place?

Golda Poretsky, H.H.C. of Body Love Wellness: I love this question, because it makes me feel like body-love counseling is really a field!

I was always interested in holistic health, so in 2005 I decided to take my self-taught self to the next level and go to The Institute For Integrative Nutrition.  As a lifelong dieter, a major part of my reason for attending this school was to finally figure out how not to be fat anymore.  (I’m sure More of Me to Love readers can relate to this reasoning.)  While there, I learned a lot about nutrition, and I was also introduced to the concept of intuitive eating, albeit as a weight loss method.

To make a long story short, I lost a bunch of weight on Weight Watchers while in school there, and then in 2007 began the slow, steady weight gain, while still dieting, which I’m sure many readers can relate to as well.  Somehow, I found fat acceptance and fat acceptance blogs at just the right time.  I was really lucky.
My desire in creating Body Love Wellness was to support my clients in their journey to body acceptance and a healthy relationship with food.  My own journey was one of trial and error, and I didn’t feel like I had much support from anyone other than the blog writers.  I desired to be that support for my clients and to use methods that I developed in order to make that journey easier for others. The work that I do now is a combination of things I learned at The Institute For Integrative Nutrition (healthy eating basics, dealing with health concerns nutritionally) and things I learned through my own body acceptance journey (intuitive eating, body love and acceptance).

MMTL: How long have you been doing your work?

Golda: I’ve been doing this work for about 2-3 years.

MMTL: What are your hobbies outside of body counseling?

Golda:  Oh, gosh.  I used to do musical improv comedy, which I really miss now.  I love to read – lots of new-agey nonfiction and novels.  I love to write.  I also read tarot.

MMTL: How did you come up with the name for your business, Body Love Wellness?

Golda:  As someone who was really inspired by the fat acceptance movement, “acceptance” never felt like a strong enough word to me.  I think there are two parts to fat acceptance: acceptance by society at large and self-acceptance.  To me, self-acceptance just isn’t enough.  I want people to really love themselves.  I had struggled to love myself for years without loving my body, and I realized that it just doesn’t work.  That’s why I put the emphasis of my work on Body Love.  I want people to know, up front, that I’m going to support them in loving their bodies, and it’s not a crazy idea, or something just for thin people.  It’s almost confrontational in a way that I enjoy.

MMTL: What do you think it means to “be healthy?”

Golda: I really think that being healthy is about taking care of yourself physically and emotionally.  That means eating in a way that feels good to your body and moving in a way that feels good to your body.  It also means taking care of your emotional needs, acknowledging your feelings, respecting your boundaries, and noticing when your thoughts are judgments that you’ve internalized and need to release.  You really cannot separate the physical and the emotional.  It’s really difficult to eat healthfully and sanely when you’re beating yourself up emotionally.  That’s why I find that, for many people, when they begin to heal emotionally they find it easier to listen for their internal cues about hunger, fullness, and the foods that feel best to them.

MMTL: What do you think the biggest attitude problem is that people have towards their bodies?

Golda:  I think that very often people look at their bodies as something separate from themselves and something that needs controlling.  They think that once they find the right diet or the right personal trainer, and scream at their bodies enough, their bodies will cooperate and fall into line.  This never works for long because our bodies, literally, rebel.

MMTL: How do you help people overcome their negative attitudes towards their bodies and learn to love themselves?

Golda:  I have a set curriculum that I use with clients, but I often mix it up or revise it for each individual client.  I use a multi-faceted approach, addressing everything from thought-patterns and assumptions about their bodies to more body-based, experiential assignments that they try at home and we talk about in session.  I never make assumptions about clients based upon their weight, and I guide our work together by what they really desire to change, whether it’s their relationship with food, and/or their bodies, and/or a myriad of other things.
MMTL: You live in New York. Are the majority of your clients from New York or do you take clients who live farther away as well?

Golda:  I take clients from all over.  Right now, my farthest client is in Arizona.  I love having clients from different states.  We do our sessions over the phone and correspond mainly via email.  The other day, I wanted to demonstrate a lymph moving technique, so I made my client a little one minute video and emailed it to her.  It worked out great and she loved it.

MMTL: Do you find that people in New York are more obsessive about their bodies than people in other parts of the country?

Golda:  It’s an interesting question.  I work a lot with New Yorkers and Californians who often point out how the beauty standards are so demanding where they live.  I think that wherever you have a high concentration of models and actors and entertainment industry people, the pressure to be thin can be even greater.  The great thing about New York in particular is that where there’s culture there’s also counterculture, so those who want to seek out other body positive people can find it here more and more.  Despite all that, I think that, for the most part, things are the same for clients across the country.  There may be gradations in how thin one feels pressure to be based upon where one lives, economic status, cultural norms etc., but we all live in a country where individuals feel the weight, literally, of the so-called obesity epidemic firmly on their shoulders.  We all watch underweight people on television and are told that they’re the norm; we all feel pushed to count calories or points or carbs or fat grams; we all feel like our bodies are unacceptable.  I wish things were different in different parts of the country, but I don’t think they are overall.

MMTL: Are you generally the first counselor that your clients work with who doesn’t believe in weight loss? Are you the first real body-love counselor your clients work with?
Golda:  Always.  Often clients start off by telling me how they’ve failed – how they’ve been to nutritionists or weight loss gurus who promised to help them and then blamed them for not losing their weight or for gaining it back.  It’s really heartbreaking.  At least initially, clients often feel like I can’t be for real.

MMTL: Could you please share a story with us about a particular client who had a challenging time but who you managed to see through her conflicts with her body to a life of body love?

Golda:  I’d be happy to.  One client came to mind right away.  I’ll call her Ann. Ann was in her mid-40’s and had been on diets since her early 20’s, including many starvation diets.  She also hated exercise in all forms. In the middle of her 6 month program, we got on the phone for her session and she began to tell me that she had started a new diet.  We had done a lot of work on intuitive eating and getting off dieting, but she insisted that this diet wasn’t really a diet and she felt really good about it.  Anyway, my approach is to listen and not make people feel bad about their choices, so I listened to her and let her give me updates on it.  After about 3 weeks, she realized that she had just done yet another diet and told me it was her last one ever.  Over the next few months, we worked more with intuitive eating, and she began to really love listening to her body.  Her relationship with food normalized and she even began to find exercise that she enjoyed.  Last I heard, she was so connected to herself and her needs that she received an instructor certification in a really body positive exercise program, she’s eating intuitively, she’s considering moving to a new city, and she’s getting certified as a life coach.  Her life completely changed when she began listening to what her body really needed.  It was really amazing to see her life change when she started listening to her real needs.  I find that many of my clients make major shifts like that because they become willing to connect with their deepest desires and parts of themselves.

MMTL:  How long do you typically work with clients?

Golda:  Clients usually sign up for a 6 session (3 month) or 12 session (6 month) program, though some clients like to extend beyond that, too.  I also offer a “tune-up” session for clients who have done my programs and just want to work on any new issues.  Additionally, I offer workshops and tele-classes that some clients do instead of a one-to-one program or in addition to it.

MMTL:  Do you ever relapse in your own world of body-love? If so, how do you pick yourself back up?

Golda:  Every once in a while I do.  It’s been happening a little too much ever since I’ve been live tweeting that show More To Love.  But seriously, I go back to the techniques I use with my clients.  Sometimes I literally do the same “homeplay” exercise I just sent to a client.  Sometimes it’s something more physical, like getting more dressed up than usual or taking a walk when I’m feeling pressured to work more, or it’s something more mental/emotional, like fine tuning my affirmations or connecting with why that judgmental voice is coming up in that moment.

MMTL: If you had just one simple piece of advice for people to love their bodies what would it be?

Golda:  Just one?  That is really difficult!  It’s difficult because everyone is different, so the starting point to body love is often different for different people.  But here’s one to try – take a moment, every day, to find things that you’re grateful for about your body.  Start out with a list of 10 things.  They could be things like the way your heart pumps blood, the way your immune system defends you, the way your hair sparkles in the sunlight, or the way the skin on the inside of your arms feels so soft and delicate.  As you list the things you’re grateful for (either on paper, aloud, or in your mind) make sure to notice and feel the sensation of that gratitude in your body.  It may feel very subtle or it may feel like a more obvious change.  Do this daily and you will definitely begin to notice positive changes in your connections with your body.

MMTL: Thank you so much, Golda! It was such a pleasure learning a little more about you, your body-love philosophy and the way you work with your clients.

Go to www.bodylovewellness.com for information on Golda’s one-to-one programs and workshops.

My Interview With Jay Solomon At More Of Me To Love originally appeared on Body Love Wellness on November 4, 2009.

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

We are constantly bombarded with dieting program ad campaigns and magazines that tout the achievements of people who have lost weight. We’re constantly told that if we’re not vigilant, if we don’t keep up the struggle, if we don’t measure and write down everything we eat and pay for packaged, calorie counted food then our bodies will fall apart and we’ll gain 100′s of pounds and no one will ever love us etc. etc. etc.

About a year ago, I developed this list to support my clients in finally getting off the dieting rollercoaster. (I posted it back in May, but I find it so helpful that I’m reposting it today.)

Refer to this list often. Refer to this list whenever your friend calls you up and tells you about another diet that’s working for her. Refer to this list whenever another Weight Watchers mailer arrives in your mailbox and has you believing that this time, it might work for you. Refer to this list if intuitive eating appeals to you but doesn’t quite make sense yet. Forward this list to every unhappy dieter that you know (just be sure to credit me and/or this blog).

16 Reasons Not To Diet

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 properly nourished.

2) Diets have such a high failure rate that they really are a gamble with a low chance of success. Why not just play Keno? If you look at the fine print of most studies on diets, they will tell you that, despite potential immediate success in limited numbers, diets have a 90-99% long-term failure rate. People lose some weight, only to find their weight 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. This is a particular problem given item #2, if most dieters regain the weight they lose, they spend much of their lives feeling bad about themselves.

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. This out of control feeling reinforces low self esteem and makes dieters feel out of control in other areas of their lives.

7) Rather than being about nourishment, food often becomes about reward and punishment for dieters. They let themselves have a “treat” because they’ve been “good” on their diets and deprive themselves when they’ve been “bad.” Food is a necessary part of life. When food is about reward and punishment, we override our internal cues about what our bodies actually need.

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). Who knows how many great ideas, inventions, beautiful relationship etc. the world is missing out on because so many of us are so obsessed with dieting.

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. But really, body and mind are connected, and this false conflict creates a great deal of unhappiness.

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 some new diet is going to make them thin, and they’ll finally be in that tiny successful group. This creates a great deal of disappointment for dieters who are constantly trying to achieve something that is nearly impossible.

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, and in the world.

What would you add to this list?

Attention New Yorkers! Golda and Body Love Wellness is now offering reiki treatments at a special low rate. Click here for more info!

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What’s Wrong With Dieting, Again? originally appeared on Body Love Wellness on November 2, 2009.

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

I was just finishing up my blog for this week, when I received yet another email from a friend about how to lose weight easily by changing your relationship with food. In this email in particular, a very well respected holistic doctor was teaching a class on how changing your thoughts will change your body and cause weight loss.

I’m going to write something here that may garner me a few enemies, but in my ample experience, it’s the truth.

If something promises you weight loss, it’s bullsh*t. In fact, as George Carlin said, “It’s bullsh*t, and it’s bad for ya.”

I’m telling you the truth here. It’s a truth you may not want to hear. If it’s a diet program, you might indeed lose weight initially, but 95-98% of diets fail to cause weight loss that lasts longer than 3 to 5 years. If it’s not a diet program, but a positive thinking/ affirmation based program, it may cause some weight loss for some people, but not all people. If it’s an intuitive eating program, it may cause some weight loss for some people, but not all people. If it’s an exercise program, it may cause some weight loss for some people, but not all people. In other words, you could do all of this stuff, and you could do it all correctly, and it might not cause any weight loss.

In other words, it’s bullsh*t.

Why am I telling you this?

For three reasons:

1) I don’t want you to waste your money on this bullsh*t anymore.

2) I don’t want you to think that you failed at something that doesn’t work for everyone to begin with.

3) I don’t want you to do Health At Every Size type stuff (positive thinking, intuitive eating, body acceptance, healthy body movement) because you think it will make you lose weight. Because if, god forbid, you don’t lose weight, you might stop all of this Health At Every Size type stuff which is really healthy no matter what you weigh and no matter if you lose weight or not.

I know that many of the people that push this non-diet weight loss stuff are well-meaning, but they’re still peddling bullsh*t. Even if their program caused them to lose weight, or caused a couple of their clients to lose weight, that does not mean that you’ll lose weight. And when you try their bullsh*t out and you don’t lose weight and they shift the blame back to you and tell you you must be doing something wrong, don’t say I didn’t warn you. Same goes for if you lose weight and gain it back.

That’s why when I work with clients, even when their primary goal is to lose weight, I teach them what I know about Health At Every Size. And, lo and behold, some of them lose weight and some don’t. But they all learn that their weight is not an indicator of their health, or their beauty, or their self worth. They all start to love themselves a little (or a lot) more, they all feel less stressed out about food, they all even find exercise that they like if they didn’t have that already.

So the next time you see an ad or an email or a flyer from someone who promises weight loss if you do their program, let it raise a red flag. Or, as I would say, sound the bullsh*t alarms.

If you want to share a “Bullsh*t Alarms” experience with me, please do so in the comments.

Starting in two days, I’m teaching a 3 week teleclass to support you in your intuitive eating and body love journey. If you want to try out Health At Every Size for yourself, here is your chance!

And as always, let’s stay connected. Please stop by my Facebook group and become a member of the Body Love Wellness Group! You can also follow me on Twitter.

"It’s Bullsh*t, And It’s Bad For Ya" originally appeared on Body Love Wellness on October 5, 2009.

This morning I put on a dress that I bought at the height of my Weight Watchers induced thinness. It’s an XL from Banana Republic (yes, even at my thinnest, I wore an XL). It’s one of the few dresses that I’ve kept from those days, due to its shocking ability to stretch into a shape that still hits my curves in all the right places.

When I bought that dress, I felt like I was living the dream. I had lost over 40 pounds, and, according to my Weight Watchers leader, there was nowhere to go but thinner, until I reached my goal weight. My goal weight was still higher than the “approved” weights for my height (which seemed overly low for someone with my frame), but I was going to get a note from my chiropractor so that when I lost another 20 pounds or so, I’d be at my goal. I’d be roughly a size 10/12, the thinnest I had ever been.

This time, it was going to work for me. This time, I was sure. This time, I had found the magic bullet, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. This time, I was going to be thin and stay thin and, as a result, have the life I was waiting to have, and love myself the way I wanted to.

How many of you can relate to those thoughts?!

As it happened, of course, I never reached my goal weight. I kept weighing and measuring. I kept calculating points. I kept exercising to get more food points. I did everything I was supposed to do, but the number on the scale kept climbing. I couldn’t raise my hand when my Weight Watchers leader asked who had lost weight this week. I clapped for everyone else but inside I felt like a failure. I felt like I had done something horribly wrong, that there was something horribly wrong with me.

When I sheepishly asked my Weight Watchers leader what I was doing wrong, she asked me if I had been sick. “Cough drops,” she said, “can add lots of hidden points.”

I hadn’t had any cough drops. I was just getting fat. Or, re-getting fat, if you will.

So, when I put this XL dress on this morning, I wasn’t sure if it was going to look good anymore. By now, I’ve gained back all of the weight I had lost on Weight Watchers, plus a little extra for good measure. After all of the work I’ve done with plus sized women, myself included, I knew not to beat myself up if it didn’t look good, but, I felt like wearing it, and in the spirit of research, I decided to try it.

I put it on, and I looked great. The dress still did what it always did. It made me look extra hourglass, accentuating my tush and breasts and de-accentuating everything else. I felt hot in it and powerful.

I realized, in that moment, that I have achieved something amazing. I have an incredible ability to love myself and to love how I look, for richer, for poorer, for thinner, for fatter, and til death do I part from this body. I can look in the mirror and love the woman I see no matter what size she is and no matter what society might think she should look like.

This ability to see myself with love goes beyond dresses and goal weights. I weigh more than I ever have, and I love myself more than I ever have. I’ve stripped away the conditions I previously attached to self-love, and it feels so good that I feel unstoppable.

So, this week, I want you to start on the self-love journey with me. I want you to write out all of the things that you’ve been requiring of yourself before you can love yourself. It may be weight loss, being on time, making more money, or any number of other things. It may be one thing, 5 things or 20 things. Whatever it is, write it all out, then stomp on that piece of paper and throw it out. Or stomp on it and burn it (carefully) in the sink.

If that felt great, tell us about it. Tell us what was on your list, if you like, and how you destroyed that list. How are you feeling about yourself now?

Only ONE MORE DAY to get your sweet ass into Golda’s teleclass! Sign up for her Body Love Wellness 6 Week Intensive Teleclass or the Body Love Book Club today and receive great discounts when you sign up for either or both! This is a special deal for Body Love Wellness Blog readers so make sure to mention this post for a discount!

Also, please stop by Golda’s Facebook group and become a member of the Body Love Wellness Group!

Self Love Is A Many Splendored Thing originally appeared on Body Love Wellness on July 13, 2009.

I know you’re in shock that I’m actually a proponent of a diet, so I’ll give you a moment to recover. Okay. Are you ready?

Introducing . . .

The Media Diet.

It’s the only diet that I would ever encourage my clients to go on.

With the Media Diet you will:

• Lose your self doubt about your appearance
• Reach your goal of liking yourself and the way you look
• Melt away your resistance to feeling good about yourself right now
• Maintain your belief in your own attractiveness

GUARANTEED!

Here’s how you do it:

For the next 2 weeks, as much as possible, limit your exposure to images of:

1) Ultra thin women and men
2) Advertising of diets and diet foods

Both components of the media diet are important. In a study published in 2002, scientists reported that the introduction of television in Fiji completely changed women’s views of their bodies. Prior to the introduction of television, most Fijian women were satisfied with the way they looked no matter what their sizes. Less than a year after television became available, at least 77% of women reported dissatisfaction with their bodies and a desire to lose weight. In fact, there were no reported cases of anorexia or bulimia in Fiji until television was introduced! Other studies have shown that at least 24% of women on television are actually underweight by BMI standards – which means that many are starving themselves to fit the required norm. Television sets us up for body hatred and a desire to achieve body weights that even mainstream doctors deem too thin. Avoid it!

Additionally, Americans spend approximately $40 billion a year on diets and diet products. This is an incredible statistic considering all of the problems with diets including the fact that at least 95% of dieters gain all of the weight they lose back – plus a few extra pounds – within 3 years.

So let’s send a message to television producers and advertisers that we’re not interested in seeing ultra thin actors and ads for diet products. And, more importantly, let’s change what we look at every day so that our eyes are not deceived into thinking that underweight is an ideal.

While on the Media Diet, view the following less:

1) Typical fashion magazines (it’s tempting to peek in the line at the grocery store but distract your attention with something else)
2) Internet fashion sites (except as described below)
3) Soap operas
4) Other daytime television (this is the time when diet ads are most prevalent)
5) Primetime sitcoms
6) Newspaper ads

Now, there is no need to starve for media on the Media Diet. Take this time on the Media Diet to replenish your system with healthy alternatives:

1) Check out some really fun online plus size magazines, like Plus Model Magazine, Venus Diva Magazineand BBW Magazine.
2) Check out plus size fashion groups, like Fatshionista and the livejournal Fatshionista community. Enjoy all the pictures of fabulous fat women of all shapes and sizes dressing up in their favorite clothes. Post your own too. And for more gorgeous photographs, check out Adipositivity.
3) Read great Fat Acceptance blogs like Shapely Prose and The Rotund.
4) Check out this youtube video youtube video showing the process of putting a model’s image on a billboard. You won’t believe all of the airbrushing!
5) Watch shows starring fabulous plus sized women and men, like the “Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency” on HBO, starring Jill Scott.
6) Take a little field trip to Brooklyn (if you’re in the area) and check out stores like Re/Dress NYC 109 Boerum Place, Brooklyn, NY 11201 and Lee Lee’s Valise, 368 Court St Brooklyn, NY 11231. Seek out size positive stores in your area.
7) Spend some time perusing all the great articles and blogs on More Of Me To Love including mine!

I guarantee that after a week spent on the Media Diet, you will look and feel better about yourself! Let us know how it goes!

Want more support on body acceptance and intuitive eating? Sign up for Golda’s Body Love Wellness 6 Week Intensive Teleclass or the Body Love Book Club today! Both are starting very soon, so don’t miss out!

Also, please stop by Golda’s Facebook group and become a member of the Body Love Wellness Group!

The Only Diet I Recommend originally appeared on Body Love Wellness on June 29, 2009.

New clients often say to me that they can be “good” with food all day but get starving at night and find themselves overeating. They look at their nighttime eating habits as bad, as self-sabotage, and as a sign that they’re out of control around food.

They look for a solution to controlling their nighttime eating so that they can finally be “good” 24 hours a day.

But who are you really being good to when you’re going hungry most of the day, only to finally feed your growing hunger at night?

Well, you’re being good to the diet companies and diet book publishers who know that people feeling bad about themselves and binge eating just brings them to spend money on the next diet or diet book.

You’re being good to the voices in our head that say that you’re always going to be out of control around food and can’t trust our inner knowing about how much you need to eat and when.

In essence, being “good around food” all day is really, really bad for you.

Stop to think about what your day is like when you’re being “good” with food. Are you eating what you would like to eat? Are you eating when you’re hungry and stopping when you’re full? Are you spending much of the day thinking about what you can and can’t eat, rather than things you would enjoy thinking about or need to think about?

Rather, when you’re being good with food, are you consumed with what you’re not consuming?

Try this: spend a day being good with you and good to you, rather than being good with food. Pick a day or part of a day when you can clear your schedule as much as possible. Make an appointment for something that brings you pleasure — a bath, a manicure, a massage, dinner with your best friend… whatever sounds pleasurable to you. Focus on the pleasure that day, rather than the food. When you do eat that day, try to savor and enjoy every bit of food. Try being guided by your internal sense of what would nourish you, rather than having a diet dictate your food choices and amounts. Leave a comment about how this felt and how this was for you! And remember, if this is difficult or challenging, that’s perfectly normal.

Being "Good" With Food All Day And Being "Bad" With Food At Night originally appeared on Body Love Wellness on September 27, 2008.

Before we get started on the road to body love, I must break open some of the assumptions that most of us work with but don’t even acknowledge.

Our society is in love with diets. We are diet crazy! Have a big event coming up? Go on a 7 day cabbage diet! Need long term weight loss? Try weight watchers! It’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle, because you don’t have to count calories anymore! You can count points! Wow!

I’ve got news for ya. If it’s a “system” or “plan” that tells you what to eat. IT’S A DIET.

So what’s wrong with diets? A lot. So many things, in fact, that I’ve made a list of 16 reasons why diets are a bad idea. (That’s 16 reasons for size 16, the average size of the American woman.)

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 risk 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. (For more info on this, check out my resources page.)

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) Diet system reinforce 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. So it’s no wonder that dieters often crave forbidden foods even more once they are forbidden, and then hate themselves for eating those foods.

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 and special shakes and diet pills!

13) For some people, diets are like a bandaid on a deep scar. For people who really overeat and eat unconsciously, they often eat to numb their feelings and go unconscious. 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.

I promise that this list is the most dire thing you’ll read in this blog. But I just had to bust open your assumptions so that we could move forward toward the radical self love that I want for every client and reader.

Why Dieting Is A Bad Idea originally appeared on Body Love Wellness on July 17, 2008.