Mindset Shift: From How To Lose Weight To Intuitive Eating

When you look in the mirror, you turn to the side, and you don’t like what you see. You’ve tried diet after diet. Studies show that dieting fails to provide permanent weight loss, yet you blame yourself for failing at a diet or for overeating. Maybe you are in the middle of food restriction and doing well, but wish you were happier. You’re tired of dieting, and want to make peace with your body, no matter what the scale says. While culture’s idealization of thinness may lead you to think you need to lose weight, here are 4 ways to improve your body image and relationship with food.

1. Intuitive Eating
The paradox is that trying to lose weight is actually keeping you from tuning into the hunger cues that you naturally already have and from loving your body at any size. What may guide you to the peace you want is Intuitive Eating. Intuitive Eating is built on the philosophy of 10 Principles that helps men and women stop the cyclical patterns of diet and weight gain. Instead of promoting weight loss, Intuitive Eating promotes attunement to your own hunger needs through interoceptive awareness with your body. The goal of Intuitive Eating is to accept and make peace with your body at its healthy size, and to develop a relationship with food that allows food to do what it is only supposed to do: nourish your body. More than just mindful eating, Intuitive Eating also includes rejecting the diet mentality, challenging your food critic, coping with your emotions, and movement.

2. Filter your social media accounts
The mind is powerful. What you put in yours can change the way you feel about your own body. We naturally compare ourselves to what we see. I give you permission to unfollow accounts that only show thin models and airbrushed bodies. There are so many different healthy body types to appreciate, yours being one of them.

3. Manage your body conversations
It’s easy to get hooked into critical conversations about bodies with friend groups. Anyone seen Mean Girls? Try to redirect conversations towards what you like about your bodies. You can be impactful by changing the culture of your friend group towards body positivity. You got this.

4. Know where your body came from
After all, it’s genetics. It can be extremely powerful to look at the women from generations before you to gain appreciation for your body type. You may even feel a closer kinship to your family heritage.