Book Freak 129: No More Diets
A Pathway to Intuitive Eating and Self-Trust
Book Freak is a newsletter with mental tools you can use to improve the quality of your life and the lives of others. In this issue: four pieces of advice from Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch.
Eat intuitively
“Throw out the diet books and magazine articles that offer you the false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently. Get angry at the lies that have led you to feel as if you were a failure every time a new diet stopped working and you gained back all of the weight. If you allow even one small hope to linger that a new and better diet might be lurking around the corner, it will prevent you from being free to rediscover Intuitive Eating.”
Reject dieting
“Dieting may cause stress or make the dieter more vulnerable to its effects. Independent of body weight itself, dieting is correlated with feelings of failure, lowered self-esteem, and social anxiety.”
Permit yourself to eat unconditionally
“Call a truce, stop the food fight! Give yourself unconditional permission to eat. If you tell yourself that you can’t or shouldn’t have a particular food, it can lead to intense feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings and often, bingeing. When you finally “give in” to your forbidden foods, eating will be experienced with such intensity, it usually results in Last Supper overeating and overwhelming guilt.”
Maintain energy, trust your hunger
“Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates. Otherwise, you can trigger a primal drive to overeat. Once you reach the moment of excessive hunger, all intentions of moderate, conscious eating are fleeting and irrelevant. Learning to honor this first biological signal sets the stage for rebuilding trust with yourself and food.”
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Thanks Mark! havent read the book personally but Im wondering if anywhere in the book it actually recommends going to see a really good nutritionist? Everyones body is different and we all process food in different ways. Psychologically i would agree with trying to release yourself of any emotional guilt associated with eating. But physically I would say you first need to know what your body takes in or rejects. Understand how the things you eat are affecting your mood from hour to hour, day to day. Experiment a lot with different kinds of foods and really observe how your body and mind respond to those foods. And above all do not take any generalized food pyramid approach to eating as those “charts” are all a form of marketing.. they are not health guidelines in the pure sense. The statement about eating carbs to get your energy - for me anyway, is one of those blanket kind of statements backed up by the normal idea that our bodies only derive energy from carbs. Otherwise thank you for doing this newsletter and continuing to open peoples eyes to really good swath of books 📚 🫶🏼