Reject the diet mentality is the first principle of intuitive eating. I had a huge light bulb moment when I first learnt about this, that my thoughts weren’t actually physical sensations in my body that I had to respond to, it had also never occurred to me that I could change them.
A powerful way to move away from the diet mentality and towards intuitive eating, is to get yourself a pen and paper and start writing down your diet mentality thoughts. So for example, I used to have thoughts like ‘biscuits are full of sugar and fat and I should never eat them’. I also had thoughts that I always had to track my calories, my carbohydrate and fat intake to control my weight.
Once you have a list of these kind of thoughts written down, its then time to reframe them. For example, with my biscuit thought, whenever that thought came up about them being high in fat and sugar and I should never eat them. I would write down things like ‘I love biscuits, they give me energy and satisfaction, I enjoy having a biscuit with my cup of tea and I can enjoy a biscuit just like anyone else’.
When you take the restriction away, and bring forbidden foods down from a pedestal, you can then enjoy eating to the point of satisfaction, because you’re now allowing yourself to eat forbidden foods whenever you fancy them, and that drive to overeat on these foods will eventually go away.
So give it a try and see what dieting thoughts you have and remember to reach out to me if you need help reframing them, because I spent a whole lot of time doing this when I was working through the first principle of intuitive eating.
Áine x
I have included a few examples below of how a diet mentality thoughts can be reframed to become more intuitive …
