Dietitian Lucy Carey explains how healing your relationship with food may be the ultimate weight loss hack.
Imagine a time when food was simply a part of life. What you ate said nothing about you as a person. It was not a moral choice. Eating was simply guided by hunger and availability. Guilt wasn’t an ingredient in any of the dishes.
Fast forward to the early 20th century and everything changed. Alongside the rise of ultra-processed foods, we also saw the rise of calorie counting, thin body image ideals, and aggressive marketing of ‘slimming’ products. In the 90s, every TV show or movie you watched made fun of the ‘fat’ character, and the pretty girls were always ‘watching their weight’. It was your fault if you ate too much junk food. You needed more willpower, more self-control.
Dieting became the norm, especially for women, and with it, we began to see a rise not just in weight gain, but the whole way we approach food. Always trying to ‘cut down’ on junk food, yet feeling more and more out of control around it as a result.
The question is: can we reverse the trend?
The role of diet culture in distorting hunger cues
I think one of the most damaging aspects of diet culture is how it forces people to override their natural hunger and fullness cues. Instead of listening to your body, you follow rigid rules that don’t take into account the fact that your hunger may change day to day.
You might try to prolong your fast by cutting out breakfast, or you might try to drop a dress size by cutting out carbs, or you may try to lose weight by sticking to a daily calorie limit… These rules ultimately disrupt the body’s ability to regulate itself. The rise of diet culture – fueled by the booming weight loss industry – convinced people that they couldn’t trust their bodies. I believe this distrust of our own natural instincts is a major contributor to the obesity epidemic, the alarmingly high rates of eating disorders we are seeing, and the dramatic decline of mental health.
As health professionals, too often we reinforce the same diet culture that is keeping our clients trapped. We weigh our patients and encourage them to pursue weight loss – often not realizing that the way they know how to lose weight is through dieting, and it comes at the expense of their relationship with food and their body, and actually causes weight gain in the long-term.
Instead of focusing on weight loss, we need to help our clients reestablish trust with their body. We need to teach them to let go of diet culture, create an abundance mindset around junk food so they don’t feel out of control around it, and learn how to listen to their bodies again.
How the restrict-binge cycle causes weight gain
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: dieting triggers a restrict-binge cycle that drives weight gain in the long-term. When you feel deprived of food (or certain foods), you create a scarcity mindset that the body responds to by increasing your cravings. This is the perfect breeding ground for binge eating. The more you restrict a certain type of food, the more out-of-control you will feel around that food. And when you inevitably cannot stick to the diet, any weight you’ve lost gets put back on, plus a little bit more. This is a natural response. A survival mechanism. This is the body preparing for another stressful time where it may not get enough to eat.
But instead of realising that the diet wasn’t sustainable and didn’t work, our patients think to themselves, “It’s my fault for not sticking to the diet. I just need more self-control. I’ll be better next time.” And they do another unsustainable diet. The cycle traps them and over time they become much heavier than when they started, yet all they’ve done is try to lose weight. It’s a soul-crushing experience.
To pull them out of that cycle should be our goal!
Emotional eating
Food has become a coping mechanism for many people. Rather than allowing food to be part of life’s celebrations and comforts, our clients are trying to cut down and restrict it. Then many begin to guiltily and shamefully use food as a tool to manage stress and negative emotions.
They’re not addicted to food. They just need more tools to cope with their emotions that don’t rely on food, and a whole mindset shift in how they view food. As health professionals, our goal should be to guide clients back to intuitive eating, where food isn’t the villain, and teach more ways to regulate emotions.
Weight loss goals vs. healing relationships with food
For too long, health professionals have been trained to focus on weight loss as the ultimate marker of success. However, this narrow focus overlooks the importance of healing a client’s relationship with food. Weight loss, when it happens naturally, is often a byproduct of addressing underlying behaviors, emotions, and thought patterns.
For most of my clients, they are in such a highly stressed state from dieting, the constant guilt over everything they eat, and the lack of consistent meals – what they need to do to lose weight is actually to reduce that stress. They do this through regular mindful eating, sleeping well, etc. Shifting the focus to helping clients establish sustainable habits – without the pressure of numbers on a scale – fosters long-term wellness. The true transformation happens when clients learn to reject diet culture, embrace intuitive eating, and trust that their bodies will find balance in their own time.
When my clients have healed their relationship with food and stopped focusing on weight loss, this is (somewhat ironically) when they start to lose weight. Slowly. Sustainably. Easily.
Like this? You’ll love my free Disordered Eating Masterclass!
The shift from intuitive eating to dieting has not only fueled the obesity epidemic, but it has also damaged our collective relationship with food. As health professionals, we have the opportunity to help clients heal by guiding them back to a place of trust and balance. If you’re ready to help your clients break free from the cycle of yo-yo dieting and disordered eating, come along to my Disordered Eating Masterclass tomorrow!
In this masterclass, I’ll be teaching my unique S.T.R.I.C.T. Nutrition Method – a framework I’ve developed over the last decade to help clients restore their natural relationship with food, reject diet culture, and cultivate lifelong health. Don’t miss this opportunity to transform the way you support your clients in healing their relationship with food – I’ll see you there!