Rejecting diet mentality is not just about behaving in a different way, it's very much about thinking differently. It is in fact about a fundamental paradigm shift. During my initial trials with intuitive eating, I think I've fallen into a trap of trying to change the way I behaved while still seeing the world through the diet mentality paradigm.

In his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, author Steven Covey talked about paradigm shifts. A paradigm is a frame of reference, a model, a pair of “glasses” we use to make sense of the world. Diet mentality is a paradigm. A paradigm shift is a break with a paradigm – with old way of thinking and seeing the world.

For example, I couldn't wait to start practicing the principle "feel your fullness" (it’s all about stopping when you are full). It gave me something to do that will result in weight loss. Although I learned a lot and it felt very empowering, it was still very much diet thinking. I was still using the old paradigm. I started judging my meals as “good” or “bad” depending on whether I stopped in the middle of it. No wonder I started to resent this after a while.

On the other hand, I realize I was using intuitive eating as an excuse to exercise "foolish freedom", a term coined by the Changing for Good book. Intuitive eating teaches us to honor our hunger, and make peace with food. What this basically means is that you need to let go of “forbidden foods” and to eat whenever you feel hunger. It’s all about listening to your body’s natural signals. This does not mean that you should just go on a feast of heavy foods whenever you feel like.

On the other side of the spectrum of foolish freedom is responsible freedom – "when you choose to change for the best of reasons, regardless of what you were conditioned to do, what you feel compelled to do, or what is most immediately gratifying to do". Intuitive eating is exactly about that – learning how to exercise responsible freedom. Freedom to eat whenever we are hungry, freedom to eat what we feel like, but also the freedom from obsession with food, from misusing food to cope with our feelings and to make healthy and responsible food choices. 

I now realize that I didn’t o through a paradigm shift. I didn’t reject the diet mentality.