Ditch dieting

EVERY JANUARY magazines at the supermarket checkout are plastered with messages telling us to kick off the New Year by eating better: skip breakfast, don’t skip breakfast, eat high fat, eat low fat, avoid carbs, eat only vegetables, avoid gluten, avoid everything. It’s exhausting and confusing.

The newest trend in healthy eating, however, kicks this all to the curb. With “intuitive eating,” you don’t diet at all. Ever again.

“Diet is a four-letter word, and it does not work,” says Deborah Whalen, LCSW, an eating disorder and trauma specialist with her own practice in Santa Fe (zephyrusofsantafe.com). “Losing weight is not a mystery. If you eat less food than you expend, you will lose weight. So dieting in the short term is effective, but it is never sustainable. You can do it, but only for so long.”

Scientific research supports this last point: According to a 2019 meta-analysis of weight-loss studies published by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, more than half of lost weight is regained within two years, and by five years more than 80 percent of lost weight is regained.

So what is the alternative? Simply “giving up dieting” sounds too easy, and indeed there is a bit more to intuitive eating than that. “The primary idea is the reintroduction of the concepts of hunger and fullness,” says Whalen. This sounds basic, “but in disordered eating, the emotional realm takes over and starts to interfere with this. People don’t eat when they are hungry or eat what their body craves. . . . The vast majority of people who show up to do work with me have no idea when they are hungry and only sometimes recognize when they are full. They only know how to operate with a rule-orientated dictator [about foods allowed on a certain diet] in their brains. When you introduce the concept that it doesn’t have to be that way, it’s very confusing at first.”

It can also be frightening. Chronic dieting often leaves people afraid of food and afraid of their body’s signals. It can lead to what’s called orthorexia, a damaging obsession with following a healthy diet, an obsession that takes on moral overtones: to eat right is to be right. Any variation from strict dietary rules means perdition.

“So many times a week I have people tell me they can’t have any sugar because if they have any little bit of sugar, they’ll just eat sugar all day long,” says Whalen. In her experience, this isn’t true. There can be an adjustment period at first, but as people reconnect to their hunger signals, “You won’t eat the whole cake. You will eat a piece of it,” she says.

For Sara of Los Alamos, a mindfulness practice helped with the fear. “I started with daily meditation. That was a real before and after: it shaved a big layer off the top of anxiety for me,” she says. “The second piece of advice I have is: Get real about your priorities. If chronic dieting is doing for you what you want it to do, then there’s no struggle, right? It’s the struggle that tells you what needs to change. So think about this: What are you losing with chronic dieting? Is it time, energy? Are you experiencing constant anguish over food, weight?”

Whalen agrees. “Ask yourself: Do I really understand why I eat the way I do? What is my relationship with food? What are my choices an expression of? Any mindfulness-based practice can help with this,” she says. “It is helpful to bring awareness and attention to eating. People who diet are in need of external validation. The diet industry is aware of that. There is so much shame and self-hatred in people who are chronic dieters. It’s hard to say, ‘Here’s what to do to change it,’ because it’s such a process. People need to get out of their own brains.”

For Sara, the next step, and what she suggests to others, is to face the negative consequences of giving up dieting. “You will probably gain weight. You will probably not look how you want,” she says. But based on her experience, “You won’t stop being afraid of something until you live through it. . . . I was really scared to do a lot of things — gain a few pounds, accept that I’m not going to look how

I want — until I just did it and I realized it’s not as big of a deal as I would have thought. I’m the only one who really cared. So you need to identify your priorities. Do you want more time? More energy dedicated to something other than thinking about food? Do you want to go to a party and not worry about the food? The struggle might point you to intuitive eating.”

Both Whalen and Sara say the right kind of therapy can be helpful for chronic dieters. “When looking for a therapist, really check credentials,” says Whalen. “There are a lot of therapists who have people in their practices with eating disorders, and they don’t know what to do, so they simply don’t deal with it. I can’t tell you how many clients I have to educate. I tell them: You can’t just work on depression or trauma. If you’re not eating, if you’re passing out at night, you need an eating disorder specialist.”

“Even without an eating disorder, intuitive eating can still be useful, especially with a therapist,” says Sara. “Some kinds of treatments may be more helpful than others. For example, cognitive behavioral therapy has a real research basis. So does EMDR [eye movement desensitization and reprocessing] and neuro/biofeedback. Scientific research supports these.”

Another expert who can help wean people off chronic dieting is, not surprisingly, a dietician. “Look for a registered dietician, not just a nutritionist,” says Whalen. Anyone can call themselves a nutritionist, but dietician is a title that requires certification. “Ask: How does this person approach food and do they use the intuitive eating philosophy? The last thing people with disordered eating need to do is count calories. So ask them: How do you help people stop dieting?”

“Some dieticians are trained in intuitive eating, but if you need mental health care you should get that,” says Sara. “I would definitely recommend people not go to a body image coach or food coach who has no specialized training. These people are just people. They are taking money from people who should probably be in therapy.”

Finally, says Sara, “beware of people who tell you there’s only one way to do anything and that if you go outside that one thing, it’s failure. The paths aren’t always straight. They can take a lot of twists and turns. I’m in a good place now, for example, and I still track my macros [macronutrients] to maintain my weight — not to lose. One ‘body coach’ told me this was not OK. But I spend almost no time anymore thinking about what to eat. I never thought that would be possible. Success might look different for everyone. There’s a Buddhist saying: ‘If you wish to see the truth then hold no opinion for or against.’”

For more information

Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works, by Evelyn Tribole, MS, RD, and Elyse Resch, MS, RDN (available in paperback and Kindle editions)