Like any self-respecting Jewish girl, I gained weight on my Birthright trip the summer after my freshman year of college. Buuut, I carried the habits I developed in Israel for far too long after the trip was over. When I say habits, I mean overeating. And when I say overeating, I mean eating approximately one thousand snacks before dinner and then not being hungry once dinner finally came. But then after dinner, I’d feel sad that I didn’t get to eat so then I’d binge on one thousand more snacks, and probably eat those standing up because if I sat down that would make it too legit and I wouldn’t be able to convince myself that I wasn’t eating an actual meal. You know, those little habits.
I knew that my problems with food were beginning to hold me back from “reaching my full potential” or just like, not being a total bitch because I was so miz. That’s what I found when my sister (who I may or may not have been taking my anger out on) threatened me into seeing a dietician. Ugh.
First Impressions
A dietician? This felt like a total failure. Plus, I know what to do—I’m a vegetarian after all. I just didn’t have the self-control to follow through with any of it, and I was embarrassed by that.
However, after Googling “dieticians near me” and scheduling my first visit with Ashley Cronin, Registered Dietician at From The Heart Nutrition (and formerly MetroWest Nutrition in Massachusetts, where I saw her), I learned that seeing a dietician (like her, at least) was actually the polar opposite of all of the shameful horror stories I’d dreamt up, like getting kale thrown at me after stepping on the scale to check my BMI (still don’t even know what a BMI is, btw).
She told me that she wanted me to be able to eat whatever I want. This was honestly scary to hear—I wanted her to give me a solid plan and structure to follow. WTF was this crunchy granola BS of not hating myself and the food I put in my body?? I needed to be punished!!!
But my dietician helped me realize this way of thinking and shaming oneself is not uncommon, and in order to be healthy and happy, I needed to totally change my mindset. “People think, ‘I should know better,’” Ashley Cronin RD, who focuses on intuitive eating, says. “But the truth is, once we start creating rules or following a diet, we swing way too far to one side, which is too restrictive. A normal response to that for any human or animal is to swing all the way to the other side of it .” She calls this “The Diet Pendulum.” And yikes, was I on it.
Ashley went on to explain, “We feel like we need a diet because we don’t trust ourselves. So we keep buying into the diet, but every time we buy into it, we fall off since it’s too restrictive.” This was totally me. Not that I was on any kind of specific diet, but I’d literally limit myself to like, one piece of avocado toast for lunch, two veggie burgers for dinner—which is not enough food, especially for someone who works out a good amount (#humblebrag). No wonder I turned into Regina George on those Kalteen bars anytime I was around food. I felt like I had to eat everything right then and there, because, in my mind, I was like, “never again for the rest of my entire life will I allow myself to eat chips because of how ‘bad’ I was last night!!!” Hahahah.
Learning Like, A Lot
Hearing all of this from a professional really, really helped. It made me feel like all of my eating behaviors and thoughts weren’t so crazy after all. “We know that diets don’t work,” asserts Cronin. “It’s not the fault of the person—the research supports that it won’t be successful. But people love the idea of a plan.”
There is RESEARCH that supports my (many) failed yo-yo dieting attempts??? WOW. (Sidenote: maybe the next time I’m uninterested in like, cleaning or cooking I should just say “the research supports that it won’t be successful.” Just a thought).
“It’s about healing your relationship with food and your body and starting to find self-care practices that work for a lifetime versus fad diets,” Cronin explains. “If eating healthy doesn’t feel like self-care, there’s no reason to do it and it’s not attainable.” Freaking. Duh.
Feelin’ Normal(ish)
I’m definitely not, like, the Mrs. Intuitive Eating Kween that wants to make it seem like, “oh em gee, if you just listen to your body and intuitively eat you can be perfect like me!!”. It still takes patience and thoughtfulness to mentally get to where you want to be. However, I will say that since seeing Ashley, my relationship with food has totally changed. By allowing myself to eat more, I no longer turn into a psychotic monster at the end of the night who’s basically ready to crawl inside my own refrigerator just to see if there’s anything left for dessert.
I eat dessert guilt-free, I eat more food, more often, and I’m not scared of eating out. I definitely still fall off track sometimes—mostly if I’m hungover or traveling or just if it’s Sunday (or all of the above…)—but it simply does not get me down like it used to because I no longer feel like I need to punish myself for it the next day. I’m a free betch!
Finding A Dietician
If you live in Massachusetts or Rhode Island, you can work with Ashley yourself! Contact her here or at [email protected]. If you live outside of those two states, you can find a dietician who shares her philosophy through the Intuitive Eating Counselor Directory here. You can also check out the Health At Every Size website for more resources that follow a weight-neutral approach.
Images: Ali Inay / Unsplash; Giphy
We’re back! In this installment of F*ck Your Diet, I am going to explain how I actually stopped dieting. But if you’re new here, read the first two installments to get some context. My first installment is about how I’d been binging on food since I was a child, and the second installment is about my experience dieting for 10 years to try and control my “addiction,” which only made my “addiction” to food worse.
When I set out to heal my eating, I had already spent a handful of years (before my final stint on the paleo diet) thinking I was “listening to my body” and “eating intuitively.” But I wasn’t really. What I was actually doing was constantly trying to eat the smallest amount possible. I assumed that the more intuitive I was, and the more precisely I listened to my hunger, the less I would eat. I soaked up the belief that leaving the table slightly hungry was healthier than leaving the table slightly full. I believed, truly, that thinner was always healthier, and that if I could just get my act together and be permanently skinny, that all of my health problems, including my PCOS, would go away. (And all of my other problems too.)
I also spent a good bit of this time thinking I was being balanced and responsible and chic by eating “like a French woman.” Seriously. My eating was straight out of the book French Women Don’t Get Fat, and I thought I had found the answer: Frenchness. This wasn’t a diet! This was culture! This was aspirational food snobbery! I (thought I) was eating whatever I wanted, just in small quantities! I also ate everything really slowly. I felt bad if I ever wanted to eat a whole brownie, because a French person would probably only eat half of a brownie, if they even ate brownies at all. Which, ugh, they probably don’t even eat brownies. I should be having a fruit clafoutis!!!!
Beyond brownie panic, I thought that because I wasn’t formally on a diet, I was healed from my “food addiction”. But I wasn’t. I was still over-worried about amounts of food, my goal was still always thinness, and I still thought about food. A lot.
It took 10 years for me to realize that micromanaging food and carbs, and trying to force myself to lose the 10-15 pounds that I’d lost and just gained back, had been really bad for me. It definitely wasn’t good for me mentally, but it also wasn’t healthy physically. The toughest thing to wrap my head around was that diets were not helpful, because what I had been doing with diets and weight loss was culturally normal and encouraged. Everyone’s doing it! Everyone’s talking about it and complaining about it and trying to lose the same 10-15 pounds I am. It really didn’t seem like I was undereating at all. I was just focused on healthy food and wellness! I mean, honestly, according to the calorie allotments in fitness apps, I was overeating every day. Plus, I binged for God’s sake. PLUS! I didn’t look emaciated, or like I had a problem with food. I actually gained weight really easily. My problem, ever since I was a child, had been eating too much. So, the idea that I had a problem with dieting was a hard pill to swallow.
But here I was, still obsessed with food after 10 years of dieting, and I finally started learning that our bodies are wired to push us off our diets. And instead of fighting back against our bodies, we need to just… stop it. This is something I go into even more in detail in the second installment (so go there and read it!) But, TL;DR: I started learning about the inevitable metabolic backlash with diets—that we are wired to fixate on food, binge, and gain weight when we try and force weight loss, all to save us from ourselves. Apparently, our bodies insist we put weight back on so they feels safe. And to ensure that happens, your body either slows down metabolically, and/or it fixates you on food, so food tastes better, you feel even hungrier, and actually keeps your brain thinking more about food than it otherwise would (source). Our bodies are literally pushing us off our diets. On purpose.
I’d spent ten years fighting this cycle. I would put my body on a diet, then my body would fight back and push me off, and instead of being like, “Ooh, sorry body, I’ll take care of you in a gentle way,” I would put it back on another diet, and the cycle continued. All the while, I started feeling more and more out of control around food, and blamed it on my gluttony, and what had to be a food addiction.
But if forcing your body back onto a diet is part of staying in the diet cycle, then the logical and terrifying answer to get out of the cycle was to…stop. Stop constantly trying to suppress both my eating and my weight. Which, plainly, meant that I had to eat whatever my body needed. And I had to let myself gain whatever weight my body needed to gain.
And let me be clear: I was terrified. But I was so tired of fighting my body and hating myself for not being a tiny little fairy person. I was run-down physically and emotionally by a decade of dieting and hating myself.
So I started eating. A lot. And doing my very best to actually allow it all and work through my panic and guilt. This is the part people are fascinated by: Ok but what did you eat? How much did you eat? How much weight did you gain? How did you actually push through fear of eating certain things or certain amounts? So, I am going to try and remember the specifics as well as I can, even though this was almost eight years ago, and at this point, it’s all a blur of meals. (With the caveat that anyone who embarks on this sort of uncharted intuitive food healing journey will have a different set of experiences, and a different set of specific fears to work through, and I definitely recommend a non-diet dietitian even though I didn’t work with one, because I didn’t really understand that this was a thing.)
I had been coming off of the paleo diet, so I was still afraid of bread and gluten and grains. I was also extremely afraid of “industrial seed-oils.” To be perfectly clear, just in case you think that I’m claiming that McDonald’s is a health food (I’m not): I still don’t think weird oils that come from a cotton seed are health foods, but neither is vodka, and vodka is still allowed on the keto diet, so let’s just put everything in perspective please. Also, having small emotional breakdowns in restaurants, just because they probably (definitely) use less-than-perfect cooking oils, is far, far worse for us than just eating some f*cking corn oil and moving on with our lives. I had no desire to continue my life being afraid of nachos, so I pushed through my fear of strange oils so I could stop lying in bed, ruminating about the worldwide olive oil scam.
At the same time, the paleo diet is generally calorie-positive and encouraging of “healthy fats” (they have their own rules about what healthy fats are). So, when I started my “F*ck It Diet” (which is what I named my new “diet”, and my website, and years later, my book) I wasn’t afraid of calories. But I was afraid of carbs. And some fruit. And grains. I was a little afraid of dairy. And any oil that wasn’t coconut or olive oil. And I was afraid, of course, of gaining weight. But I knew that the way to get over all of those fears was to face them.
So the first thing I did was up my carbs and start to eat a lot of butter and dairy. I started eating lots of potatoes and ice cream. In my head, I was trying to “eat myself” to a place where my body wasn’t starved for carbs and calories, and where my mind wasn’t starved, denied, or petrified of certain foods. I believed (correctly) that if I could get out of that metabolic and mental cycle by actually eating a lot of food, consistently, for a long time, that my appetite would eventually normalize. And it did.
But first, I had to keep eating. I eventually added in bread (I did not die from the gluten! In fact, I felt very normal. Because I do not, in fact, have a gluten sensitivity). I also turned what used to be my late-night binges into deliberate and allowed feasts. I would sit down and bring out everything I wanted to eat, and I would lay it all out on the table and let myself eat whatever I wanted in a relatively calm way. I would often still eat a lot, but because it was allowed, it wasn’t a binge anymore. It was just eating a big snack. And then I went to bed.
And yes, I did gain weight. Which I expected to, and knew had to be part of the process for me. I went up a few clothing sizes. But it wasn’t the exponential weight gain that everyone fears will happen when you stop dieting. The truth is that everyone’s body does something different when they stop dieting, depending on lots of factors. Some people need to gain a lot of weight, some people a little, some people stay the same, and some people lose weight without gaining weight first (I’d say that one is the rarest). Before, I thought that I had to be one of the people who lost weight. But in order to heal, I actually had to gain weight.
It took a good solid six months (and even longer to work through lots of cultural conditioning), but the more I ate and allowed foods, the more normal around food I became. The foods I thought I would never ever be able to “control myself” around stopped having power over me. I could take them or leave them. I stopped fixating on food. I stopped daydreaming about food. I stopped planning my life around meals. Meals happened. I ate what I wanted—and moved on. I stopped losing control while I was eating. I just…ate. I started getting bored of my food mid-meal once I got full. That never used to happen. I used to charge on past fullness and finish that whole bowl and then move onto the bag of chips and the full pantry of snacks.
The longer I proved to my body (and mind) that there would always be whatever food I wanted and needed, and that I would always let myself eat as amply as I wanted, the more normal my relationship to food became. And as my panic fell away, my binging also fell away and also became just…eating. The “food addiction” that I had experienced my entire life was gone. My binging, compulsive eating, and obsession with food, had actually pre-dated my dieting. I thought I had been born that way, but my binging on friend’s snacks was actually the result of feeling restricted, which is pretty eye-opening to how much our mental relationship with food can control our physical appetite.
Not only do restriction and dieting set us up to feel out of control around food, but so does diet culture. Being surrounded by weight loss ads, having constant guilt about what we are eating and what we look like, affects our relationship with food, whether we are fully aware of it or not.
When I talk about this (and I talk about it a lot, and wrote a book on it), it actually really pisses some people off. People either have a revelatory experience about their own relationship with food, dieting, and weight, or they immediately hate me. It turns out, dieting, weight loss, and the concept of “food addiction” is a very polarizing and charged subject! It’s especially charged for people who have felt food-addicted their whole lives, or for people who have always used food to soothe themselves. Hearing me say that food addiction isn’t actually food addiction, or that they don’t actually need to spend their entire lives micromanaging their food and weight, immediately puts people on guard. I know it might feel annoying to hear me say that food addiction isn’t actually food addiction, so I want to take the time to unpack it a little bit more.
The experience of food addiction and compulsion is very real. And, the truth is, humans can develop an emotional dependence on literally anything: gambling, bad relationships, Instagram likes, and even cookies. So, yes, anyone can become “addicted” to food the same way they get addicted to praise or gambling, but it still doesn’t make dieting the cure.
Food is inherently different from other addictions. It’s different from both physical addictions, like a drug addiction, and different from mental addictions, like video games and gambling, because we need food, multiple times a day, to survive. And despite lots of fear mongering over how addictive food is, food and sugar itself is not addictive like cocaine. But, at the same time, we are wired to feel and act addicted to food when there’s any form of food scarcity. This is for our survival. We have evolved this way. Demonizing our enjoyment of food is actually not helpful at all. When there is any food scarcity, a hormone in our body actually wire us to feel hungrier, to make food taste better to us, and to fixate us on food. And food scarcity can take the form of actual food scarcity because of poverty or famine, or self-imposed (or culture-imposed) scarcity, like a diet. Or! Even just the threat of another diet. (“I’ve been so bad today I need to diet tomorrow!”) So, dieting can actually make the experience of food addiction (and emotional eating) worse.
Ok, have I done enough to piss everyone off yet in this article? My next and final installment will be filling in some of the gaps. I’m going to talk more about emotions and emotional eating, I’m going to talk about cultural beliefs and mental resistance that I see popping up for people who try to go on a similar eating journey, I’m going to talk about exercise, and about pervasive cultural weight stigma that keeps people stuck, and perpetuates our dysfunction with food in the first place. And I’m going to talk more about what my eating (and life) is like now, eight years after embarking on this F*ck It Diet journey. But until then, I will be eating cheese, because I am not, in fact, lactose intolerant like I convinced myself I was for 15 years.
Images: thefuckitdiet (3) / Instagram
