Chocolate and Beyond

1 year on and tips for beginners

Since hitting the month of September, I'm officially one year on from ditching the diet - and wow don't I notice the difference it has made to my life! So I just thought I would share a few tips that I've learned from my own journey so far, that I thought would be helpful to those who are beginning an intuitive eating path.

1. Recognise that giving up the control you think a diet brings to your life can be truly scary - with the main fear being around weight gain and not being able to trust yourself with food.

Acknowledge this fear, but remember that diets do not actually really help you to control your weight in the LONG term (overall, they help you put it on). The only person who can do this is you, not a diet, and the more you let dieting go, the more you are able to learn how you can trust yourself.

A question for you...

I've been occasionally checking in on the blogs of women who are making an effort to lose weight through dieting, 'being careful', or through exercise, and I noticed on one woman's blog, her current weight is the same as it was about 5 months ago, at which time mine was the same as hers.

I now weigh a bit less than her, only by two or three pounds, but my point is really that I've not been dieting, have not spent hideous amounts of time concerned about what is going in my mouth, have thoroughly enjoyed what I've been eating, and have been liberated from the idea that I MUST lose some weight.

And yet, I have still managed to drop a couple of pounds from that time, whereas as this poor woman has fretted and tried for all that time, and is still at the same weight.

Pizza, pasta and porkiness

A holiday in Rome is a very fine thing indeed if you love gorgeous food, but if you completely ignore your "I'm full, stop feeding me" signals then it can also be disastrous! Especially if you generally don't eat many white carbohydrates at home, as I don't (with my keen desire to avoid candida invasion).

I don't know, maybe every 'intuitive eater' has their times like this, but I ate in true 'I'm on holiday, I'm going to try this, and this, and this...' style for pretty much the whole time I was away, and I was extremely conscious I'd made this decision because there were so many things I wanted to taste and enjoy, and if I waited until I was hungry for every occasion, I wouldn't have got to enjoy some of the foods in one week!