4 Ways to be Anti-Diet, but not Anti Weight Loss, while Living your Best Life

There is finally a current movement going on that’s against going on diets and living a life obsessed with losing weight. No more counting calories, no more measuring or weighing every morsel of food going into your mouth. No more weighing yourself and allowing the numbers on the scale to dictate your mood for the whole rest of the day. 

Awesome, we’re finally free from that raggedy, racist sexist diet culture! But what if you still really would like it if you lost some of that extra weight you’re carrying around? Do you have to just give up on it? Because some professionals will have you believe that you have absolutely no control over your weight whatsoever. None! So if you are lugging yourself around sad and lethargic, with joint pains and just feeling a mess you should just suck it up and live with all of that? All you have to do is change your mindset, they say. And things won’t seem so bad. Oh no, your weight has nothing at all to do with your knee pain. You look great wearing a muumuu because you feel like a stuffed sausage in jeans. And they’ll have you thinking you’re fat phobic because this mindset honestly doesn’t work for you, no matter how hard you try.

The problems are actually the way diet culture negatively influences how we feel about our bodies, not how we really feel. It gives us these distorted ideas of bodies, generally. Like, there are bodies that are acceptable and there are bodies that are unacceptable or disgusting. And these ideas are not real, they’re very much externally contrived. But it can be extremely difficult to distinguish these made-up ideas from actual feelings. It’s probably quite rare for someone to be repulsed by her own body without external influences to blame.

Just because you’re anti diet doesn’t mean you have to pretend like you don’t care at all how you look. I mean, be honest, you get your hair and nails done, butter up your skin so you won’t be ashy. Why should you feel like it’s wrong to want to have your body look a way that makes you happy? What is so wrong with that? Keep in mind though, that you absolutely do not have total control over the size and shape of your body. You do, however, have some influence.

You see, nobody, not medical pros, not dieticians, not me or anybody else has any more right to tell you how you should feel about your body any more than those silly fashion mags, the latest Instagram guru, or celebrity does. Only you can decide what is best for you. But the reality is that shrinking your body isn’t automatically going to change your life for the better. Just ask someone who lost a ton of weight. Is that going to get you a partner or a better job? Is your self esteem suddenly going to soar to the stars in the sky and all of your problems vanish into thin air? 

So what can you do? I’ll tell you. But first, understand that I’m not a dietician. I’m an anti-diet, anti diet culture food and lifestyle coach and a hard core foodie. I don’t tell people what to eat and what not to eat. I prioritize living the good life and sharing gourmet experiences. That means forgetting about what everybody else thinks and following your heart towards a life you love. You prioritize actions that actually will make you genuinely happy. It takes a lot of effort to identify and clear your mind of all the diet culture influences and come at your decisions from a place of peace, freedom and authenticity.

1. Consider the role of diet culture and challenge your decisions around diet and weight loss. Are you buying into the lies of all the good fortune that shall be bestowed upon you if you shrink your body to a certain smaller size? While it is true that thin privilege does exist, losing a bunch of weight usually does not result in improved body image or a better life. You will still be the same old you, with the same problems. In reality, those things need to be addressed more directly to make a positive difference.
2. Instead of thinking of restrictive ways of eating, consider raising the quality and increasing the pleasure you get from food. Go gourmet! We’ve been taught that it’s wrong to get pleasure from food but that’s a whole crock. Exploring more with fresh single ingredients will allow you to adjust food more precisely to your liking and also diversify your diet for more complete nutrition overall. Mindful eating will allow you to savor food and actually maximize the pleasure you can enjoy from the whole eating experience, as opposed to just chewing food and swallowing it.
3. Customize your eating habits with intention to fit your actual or desired lifestyle instead of someone else’s. One size does not fit all so you’ll need to experiment to see what works for you. Now, you’ll have to resist the traps of silly little diet culture tricks and tips like the ones you see in fashion mags, while at the same time understanding that every single modification of your eating habits does not equate to a diet, just because you also want to lose weight. How can this be? By considering pleasure and lifestyle before worrying about weight you can make your choices sustainable because they’re enjoyable.  The key is intention without restriction. This is a highly subjective thing, what’s restrictive for one person may not be restrictive to another.

For example, 

If you normally eat until you are so full you’re busting at the seams and you then decide to eat until you’re about 80% full (most of the time), and satisfied is that a diet?

Is restricting all of your eating within certain hours of the day a diet? Is intentionally spacing your regular everyday meals so that you’re never famished at inconvenient times a diet?

What about prioritizing drinking water over soda without restricting soda, because water makes you feel hydrated faster and it cleans your palate for something delicious? A diet?

4. Health and happiness first! And I mean real health, not bullshit diet culture illusion of what health is. Skinny does not mean healthy, nor does eating for weight loss. And, there’s no monitoring your weight or worrying about “plateaus” inducing mood swings and anxiety. You would not be forcing your body to do something that is unnatural, you would be just allowing your body to return to its own healthiest state by reducing its stress load.  There are no rules, only intentions. The idea is to make your life better, not worse in the present. Throughout this process you should feel liberated, light and happy. 

Hopefully, you get the idea. You can lose weight without restrictive eating or dieting but you don’t have to completely surrender all your desires for a shape or size more comfortable to you. It’s a delicate balance and there’s always a risk of sliding back into diet culture crazy, but with coaching you can be gently guided back to your intentions of living the good life holistically. Don’t you deserve to live your best life starting right now?