Tips to adjust your dieting mindset

As we settle into a new year, we find ourselves making (or renewing) commitments to change our eating habits. Articles on food restriction flood our news feeds, friends flaunt their new diet or fitness program, and some of the biggest carnivores we know suddenly sign up for Veganuary. Amid this flurry, it’s no wonder that guilt and shame tend to be our main drivers for change.

The risk is that, by imposing emotionally-driven food rules in pursuit of a weight management goal, we can undermine our efforts long term, ruin our relationship with food and even impact our mental wellbeing more broadly. We may not even realise we’re headed down this path, as the view that it is normal to approach eating in this way is so entrenched.

Even for those of us who don't identify as ‘emotional eaters’, emotions can still influence our dietary choices in significant ways. Let's take a closer look at how this can happen when dieting.

Understanding the cycle of emotion-driven dieting

“The diet industry makes money off [perpetuating the idea that] we need to look a certain way to be desirable,” says Yive Yang, a Sydney-based accredited practising dietitian specialising in eating disorders. “And if we want to look a certain way [or be ‘healthy’], there is a [correct] way to eat and we'll need someone with the ‘solution’ to tell us how to do that.”

Diet culture says anyone with enough willpower can attain this body size or ‘health’. In reality, no body size is better than others, and eating in this certain way isn’t a guarantee for achieving this ‘body size’ anyway. Yang says, “Approximately 90 percent of people who go on diets return to their original weight within five years, and the more times you diet, the more this happens. So ironically, diets are one of the behaviours that are most likely to lead to weight gain.”

Guilt and shame around eating ‘the wrong things’ tends to lead us into a binge-restrict cycle

— Yive Yang, dietitian and eating disorder specialist

This can set us up to continually feel shame and guilt each time we fail to achieve what we set out to. The diet industry relies on this cycle to keep us striving towards their ideal and trying continually to ‘be better’ and attain a thinner, ‘healthier’ body.

Shame and guilt can be more detrimental than helpful to us forming healthy eating habits. Negative emotions around eating ‘the wrong things’ tends to lead us into a binge-restrict cycle, though not everyone goes through the extremes of bingeing or severe restriction, says Yang.

This is where you overcompensate for that guilt or shame by imposing more restrictive rules around food. The body reads this as deprivation and will “try to protect itself by increasing thoughts around food, hunger signals or even slowing down metabolism,” says Julia Bazan, a Melbourne-based accredited practising dietitian specialising in eating disorders. When you ‘overeat’ in response to this, you are brought back to feeling guilty or ashamed, and the cycle continues.

“Because we’re not just battling against our [waning] willpower, but also against our body’s complex protection system, it’s going to be nearly impossible for us to consistently deny our natural cues of hunger and fullness, which exist to guide our body to get the nutrition it needs,” says Bazan. “Not only that, we are denying ourselves of the psychological and social benefit of having food that brings us joy, meaning or social connection.”

Tips to break and prevent the cycle

How can you start eating to care for your body without being driven by guilt or shame?

The good news is yes, it is possible to topple the guilt and shame and instead be guided by your body to eat in a way that supports all aspects of health – psychological, social and physical. Yang and Bazan recommend the following strategies.

When you feel guilty or ashamed after you’ve eaten foods you deem to be ‘unhealthy’:

• Acknowledge the negative thoughts you feel, without judgment.
  Whether it’s jotting down the thoughts on a notepad or naming them aloud, Bazan recommends holding space for the feelings of guilt, shame or anger. Approach this with curiosity about your brain and body’s reaction to the situation, so that you can extend compassion toward yourself in that moment.
• Identify the positive outcomes of eating the food.
  To help you begin to recognise that food is more than its nutritional value, Bazan and Yang encourage reflecting on what you enjoyed about the food. Move beyond the taste of it and reflect on the circumstances in which you ate it. Was it a dinner with friends or family? Was it a comfort food because you had a bad day at work? Was it pleasurable and brought fun to your mundane day? Was it affordable and satisfied your hunger well?
• Redirect your focus on having your next meal.
  “All bodies like consistency and adequacy when it comes to food,” says Yang. Don’t skip or shrink the size of your next meal because of what you had before, so your body knows it is safe and that the next meal is going to come instead of feeling deprived.

To approach a goal to eat a more nutritious diet while moving away from food rules:

• Acknowledge how much your body already does for you.
  Yang recommends taking note of the amazing things your body does on a daily basis, like breathing, maintaining your heartbeat or calming you down after a stressful scenario. This helps you reduce the fixation on what is wrong with your body and learn to celebrate and appreciate it.
• Curiously examine the intention behind your actions.
  “Question whether what you’re implementing to improve your health and nutrition is coming from a place of wanting to nourish and fuel your body or in response to guilt, shame or some external social pressure,” says Bazan.
• Start to reframe your language and beliefs about food and health.
  Labelling food as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is language that is perpetuated by diet culture, says Yang. “In reality, food is just food unless it’s rotten or stolen. No food is inherently bad or holds moral value.” Bazan also encourages broadening your view of what healthy eating actually means. To Bazan, “it means including a range of different foods, foods that are just for enjoyment and not for nutrition at all and foods that are for nutrition in your diet.”
• Use an addition mindset.
  Consider what you can add to your routine or self-care to reach your goals, not what you can take away, advises both Yang and Bazan. Instead of cutting out junk food, for example, focus on including an extra helping of vegetables with your dinner every night.
• Surround yourself with all body types.
  Because the shame and guilt around food is based around our desire for our body to attain a certain look or picture of health, Yang advises unfollowing social media accounts that make you feel bad about your eating habits, and instead follow people of all body types who better reflect what society looks like and who support your journey to move away from food guilt and shame.
• Remove ‘should’ from your vocabulary around eating.
  “Instead of asking: Should I eat this? Ask yourself: Do I want to eat this? And really listen to your body in that moment because you can trust it to tell you what it needs and wants. Somewhere along the line diet culture taught us to stop trusting our bodies,” says Yang. If you’re apprehensive about your body’s ability to nourish itself, think of this scenario: You go on a holiday where all you had was takeout, and when you return home, you find that you are hankering after some vegetables. “That is the body signal that's telling you that it wants something more fiber heavy or that has more vitamins or minerals in it,” explains Yang. “Similarly, if you deprive yourself of soul-fuelling foods, your body will want to reach for something that satisfies that desire, it may also be signalling that you’re not eating enough!”

A final note from Bazan and Yang: while you can certainly try the strategies above on your own, don’t get discouraged if they do not come easily to you. Sometimes, the rules and guilt and shame are so deeply entrenched in you after many years of exposure to diet culture, and you may need a professional to help you heal this relationship and iron out any mental roadblocks as you relearn how to be attuned to your body.

En Masse offers a 1-hour seminar/webinar, The Right Mix, exploring the connection between healthy lifestyle habits and mental health, with some tips and goal setting aimed at adopting healthy behaviours. Contact us today to discuss a program tailored to your audience.