Good Life Cuisine

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.

After this week’s reflection, I gained two insights I’d like to share with you. A first one is my belief that if I don't diet, I will gain more weight. I think I am right to believe that – if I don't change anything about my eating behavior. I’ve been losing weight until summer last year. During my long summer vacation, I gained a couple of pounds. It was around the time I was back I started practicing intuitive eating. I did it in an ad-hoc way, without a real plan, and without going through all of the principles. Since then I gained another 3-4 pounds.

The first week of the 10 week intuitive eating challenge is nearing its end. The principle of the week was: “reject diet mentality”. How did it feel? Please share your insights. At the beginning of the week, I posted about 3 things I will do to try and adopt the principle. I am so glad I had this mini-roadmap. It brought a lot of important insights to surface. Let me share with you the insights about the first two questions I asked myself at the beginning of the week (I will take on the third question in a separate post).

The Intuitive Eating book teaches us that the first step in learning how to eat intuitively is to reject the diet mentality. What is the diet mentality? I didn't find a definition in the book. To me it seems that the diet mentality is a belief, or a set of beliefs:

Any of these apply to you?

• Maybe you wish to shed a couple of extra pounds but what ever you try seems to blow back into your face
• Or maybe you sometimes eat beyond your comfort levels
• Or feel out of control around some foods or in some eating situations
• Or use food to cope with difficult emotions and other difficulties in life...

How about a 10 weeks Intuitive Eating Challenge?

It's so easy to get caught up in day to day management of our behaviour, that I find it important to go back to fundamentals, re-examine our beliefs and see how we can be consistent with them. I see three basic ways to look at a drinking problem:

There was some discussion on the list about what moderation is. Is it drinking to BTB¹ limits? Is it drinking less than before? Is it being able to have just 1 drink and be satisfied? My goal is not to define moderation in a scientific way; but I believe that taking a step back and thinking about what moderation actually is, or what it means for you - is a useful exercise. Here are my thoughts.

BTB, or By The Book moderation refers to the book Responsible Drinking and means drinking no more than 3 drinks a day and 9 a week for women, or 4 a day and 14 a week for men, with at least 3 or 4 non-drinking days a week.

I remember the first time reading about this guideline. It seemed so unbelievably little! What - *only* four drinks (that's small beers, not pints!)? 14 for a week? You got to be kidding me. I remember ordering two pints at once just as a start.

Planning is a great tool. Writing a plan, including motivations, strategies for countering triggers, is a great help. It sets our minds in the right direction. You can read more about it in this great post on Zen Habits blog: http://zenhabits.net/2009/09/the-habit-change-cheatsheet-29-ways-to-successfully-ingrain-a-behavior/. Today, I would like to talk about different levels of planning. I call it: the planning onion. This is how I do it.