 Content Warning: Describes disordered eating habits.
Exactly five years ago, I was deep in the trenches of my last diet ever. For 30 whole days, I obsessed about bagels and croissants. My mental health suffered and it was debilitating to be in social situations, go out to dinner, and attend parties. I know I wasn't fun to be around, too, because all I could think and talk about was my diet. Fast forward to last night. As I was getting ready for bed, the realization dawned on me that I did not eat a single sweet thing all day nor did I think about eating a single sweet thing or crave sweets at all for the first time in my entire life. I was, as the kids say, shook. In her podcast, Food Psych, Christy Harrison explains as restriction and binging as two ends of a pendulum that swings from one extreme to another. The more you restrict, the more you binge. But eventually, with trust in your own body and the intuitive eating process, the pendulum settles into equilibrium. After five years, my pendulum has finally found balance. This is what the process looked like for me:
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 For many people who practice intuitive eating, joyful movement and gentle nutrition are the intuitive eating principles that we have the most difficult time with.
At least for me, exercise has been a sore spot for most of my life. I swam competitively starting at age seven until I was 17 and most of my weekends were spent at swim meets. In high school, I was on the swim and water polo team which meant I was in the water or at the gym from 5:30 am until 7:30 am and again from 2 pm until 5 pm. If we had a game, I didn't get home until 8 pm. I was exhausted and ravenous all the time--I couldn't physically eat enough calories in a day to sustain myself and my teachers forbade me from eating during class. The week before homecoming, I lost so much weight, my strapless dress wouldn't stay on. And I still vividly remember the guilt I felt (from my parents and teammates) when I chose to call in sick from one game during a tournament so I could attend my close friend's birthday party. In senior year of high school, I quit the team because my body and my mind had simply had enough. And since then, I've had a complicated relationship with exercise. For most of college, I didn't "exercise" much at all unless it was a Zumba or Hip Hop Class and walking around the Santa Cruz Mountains for class. After college, I continued to brew in diet culture, using exercise as a form of punishment and means for weight loss. That lasted until I got pregnant with my son and didn't have the energy to move in the first trimester. Fast forward a couple of years, I discovered intuitive eating and the anti-diet, Health at Every Size movement in September 2018. I was able to quickly and easy adapt almost all of the principles immediately, except for the joyful movement bit. Because I had been forced for so long to exercise to the point of exhaustion and use exercise as tool for weight loss, even the slightest sore muscle from working out triggered me. My muscles had PTSD. And that took almost two years to heal. I still feel uneasy when I feel tight glutes or thighs from slightly overexerting myself, even if it is from moving happily. But what has helped me the most with this intuitive eating principle is redefining what exercise and movement mean to me in addition to defining my health and fitness goals that have nothing to do with weight loss. I'm done with the days of running on a treadmill or forcing myself to do push-ups and sit-ups for the sole purpose of burning calories. There are many non-weight loss benefits to exercise, but the one that resonates with me the most is being able to play with my kids for as long as possible, be strong enough to continue to pick them up and have enough endurance to run around with them. With those goals in mind, these are my expressions of joyful movement, the types of physical activities that truly make me happy and don't feel like exercise at all:  Every January, millions of people vow to make weight loss, exercise or health a priority for the upcoming year. Gym membership rates soar, diet talk fills the break room. Until last year, I was one of those people who obsessed over my weight or what new diet I was on. My past New Year’s Resolutions usually involved some sort of weight loss goal.
Since discovered Intuitive Eating and the Health at Every Size movement (and the freedom and joy associated with it), I’ve been able to spend the time and energy previously devoted to losing weight on endeavors that truly fulfill me. For 2019, my goals were to heal my relationship with food and my body, reduce my single-use plastic waste, find a weekly activity to do with my son, only buy clothing from conscious clothing brands or secondhand shops, apply to a master’s program, finish the Marketing Certification on HubSpot Academy and start planning a trip to Machu Picchu. I was able to accomplish all but two of those items plus we added another member to our family and bought a house (one of my 40 Before 40 Goals). To celebrate this amazing year, I wanted to share 10 of my favorite non-weight loss related New Year’s Resolutions. They’re all SMART goals, meaning they’re Specific, Actionable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-Based. Most resolutions fail because they are too vague, too overwhelming or too impersonal. When you set a goal to, for example, plan your dream trip, make sure you decide beforehand what your dream trip is. You should have also saved up enough funds to be able to start booking a flight and hotel rooms. If this isn’t attainable just yet, pick a different resolution! Hopefully this list will inspire you appreciate your body for all it enables you to do rather than trying to change it. When I first embarked on my intuitive eating journey a year ago, I had just decided to end my 20-year relationship with diet culture. I was terrified that when I gave myself unconditional permission to eat whatever I want, I would be overwhelmed by options and not be able to make choices that made me feel good. Because my relationship with food was so fraught since childhood, I had no idea what a normal day of eating and not obsessing about food looked like. In my search, I came across Rachel Hartley's series, "Why I Ate Wednesday" in which she chronicles and examines the intentions behind her eating choices. I found those posts to be incredibly helpful and thought I would share my own in case anyone finds them useful. In the last year, what I eat on a daily basis varies greatly. Some days, all I want are hearty foods. Other days, I just want fruit for dinner. Mostly I have found that eating intuitively has resulted in me to barely even think about the foods that I was obsessed with in my dieting days, like bagels, croissants and donuts because I can and do have them whenever I want.   For over two decades of my life, I spent countless hours and too much energy focused on losing weight. My first diet was at eight or nine years old and my last one was at 29. I tried everything from the Cabbage Soup Diet to weight loss tea to Atkins, Keto, Whole30...And they all worked for a bit until they didn't.
Exactly a year ago, I was in the throes of my last diet, five days away from completing the Whole30 for a second time. I had been trying unsuccessfully to get back to my pre-pregnancy weight for about six months and nothing was working. My body was holding onto the weight like my life and the life of my baby depended on it. After a month of torturing myself and feeling obsessed with food and "clean" eating, I stepped on the scale and had lost a measly 5 pounds. I was devastated. Frustrated with my so-called failure, I began looking for yet another diet, this time in podcast form, when I came across Food Psych. This was the start of my journey to Intuitive Eating, learning about Health at Every Size and healing my relationship with food and my body. I learned that diets and yo-yoing in weight is more harmful to one's health than staying at a larger weight consistently over a lifetime. I learned about the "obesity paradox." I learned to free myself from diet culture and weight stigma. I learned to enjoy eating again, not only to sustain my body, but also for the pure pleasure of it, because food is not only delicious but it brings us closer to the people we love. I learned to embrace and celebrate my body for the amazing things it's able to do. A year after giving birth, I got pregnant again. My starting weight with my second pregnancy was the weight I was the morning I went into labor in my first pregnancy. This was the ultimate lesson in accepting that bodies are meant to change and diets are designed not to work. Instead of obsessing over food and weight loss this past year, this is what I've been able to do: |