Blog - Love What You Eat

Why recommending weight loss, even when a person’s BMI is high, is often unhelpful and misguided

on May 15, 2020

I was tagged in a post showing the image of a fat body and how being this size is damaging to their health (particularly organs and joints) and why weight loss through a change in diet and activity level is necessary.

I am going to to attempt to break this down as simply as possible to explain why such attitudes are misguided and damaging to a person’s health. This is a very complex topic going well beyond health science and I hope those with a deeper understanding of social justice matters will forgive me for only mentioning them as a factor without going into depth.

Let’s say this person, I will call her Marie, does have issues with organs and joints, let’s say she has diabetes and knee pain. The mainstream assumption is losing weight will help. If Marie does intentionally lose weight, she will intentionally change something in order for this to happen. If her blood sugar and knee pain reduce, how do we know if these changes are due to the weight loss or whatever it was she changed; perhaps it was due the changes in diet and activity level, perhaps aided with some mindfulness/meditation work which then influenced stress levels and her relationships with others? Unless a person has liposuction, intentional weight loss occurs along side a change in behaviours, the weight loss is a side-effect as opposed to a behaviour change; i.e. weight is not a behaviour.

Essentially there is no one singular change that we can pin the medal on in terms of reduced blood sugar and knee pain, the human body is very complex and humans rarely ever change just one behaviour without this influencing other health factors.

EYE OPENER – just because Marie’e blood glucose and knee pain is reduced doesn’t mean she is experiencing better health. Many people would assume this, but chances are Marie has put herself into calorie deficit to achieve the weight loss, which results in a range of physiological and psychological disturbances. These disturbances are key drivers in the weight regain that happens to almost everyone, and why so many people find themselves obsessed with food and thoughts about food to the point of distress and anxiety – you can read more about this here. Not to mention the shame people feel around their body, their health issues and their perceived “failure” to manage things – shame is a powerful emotion experienced by most, if not all, who try to lose weight and a powerful factor that has been shown to directly impact metabolic health.

This brings us to vital and often overlooked factors that affect a person’s health and which may explain why Marie is in a bigger body. While these factors may influence current eating and/or exercise habits, they can affect health independent of diet and exercise.

To assume diet and exercise are the key factors to address when helping someone manage their health is misguided and in most cases, plain insufficient. I want to pause for a moment here and acknowledge that this is more or less what I was trained to do and what I did for the first part of my career. I’m not saying that I ignored, or that other practitioners who still work this way ignore a person’s psychology or life circumstances, I certainly didn’t, but I did not address them adequately, particularly with regard to body image, weight stigma, weight bias and shame, and I did not understand the implications of continuing to place focus on body weight.

Some of the reasons people end up with a higher body weight

Concern about weight from a young age, be that underweight or “overweight” as per growth charts. There is evidence that parents who worry about their kids weight, end up with bigger children.
Natural human size diversity – their genetic blueprint for size is a bigger body
Medication
Hormonal disturbances
Mental health issues with or without medication
Economic and social circumstances
Adverse childhood events, including trauma
….
.
and the most common reason I see with my clients…
.
Through the pursuit of weight loss – a large number of my clients have dieted themselves to a heavier weight, research shows that up to 2/3 of people end up heavier through dieting in an attempt to lose weight.

Regardless of the reasons, placing the focus on weight and encouraging people to pursue weight loss is more likely to lead to the following, than it is to improve a person’s health long-term…

Weight loss followed by regain (weight cycling/yoyo dieting), often to a higher weight.
Engaging in diet behaviours that are generally not sustainable and may lead to a poor relationship with food over-time, disordered eating behaviours such as restricting and bingeing.
Engaging in exercise behaviours that are generally not sustainable and may lead to a poor relationship with exercise over-time, injury or a general dislike of exercise.
An increased sense of shame over body size and perceived “failure” to control their weight, eating behaviours and maintain a certain level of exercise. Shame has been identified as an independent risk factor for health.
Perpetuating our cultures weight bias (that thinner people are more worthy, healthy, attractive etc) and the social stigma that accompanies this.

To state Marie is unhealthy because of a high body weight or to keep this as the focus for her health issues, is at best misguided and very simplistic, and at worst, serves to further damage Marie’s health through the continued pursuit of weight loss, weight cycling and weight stigma. Those of us who work in the Health At Every Size paradigm work to take the focus off body weight and instead focus on addressing health behaviours (and the many factors that influence these), body image, weight stigma and the shame that usually comes in bucketloads.

Note: HAES and the non-diet approach are not anti-weight loss, just anti-pursuit of weight loss. Some people may lose weight through changing health behaviours, we just can’t predict for whom this will happen and therefore can’t promise or expect it will happen.

Do you have a healthy relationship with food? – take our free quiz to find out
.

Want to undertand how to nourish your body without dieting or restricting food?
Get a taste of what’s involved with with our ebook Nourish.

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Why recommending weight loss, even when a person’s BMI is high, is often unhelpful and misguided.

on May 14, 2020

Let’s say this person, we’ll call her Marie – described as “obese” by the medical model and our current culture – does have issues with organs and joints, let’s say she has diabetes and knee pain. And let’s agree for the moment that Marie’s high body weight is exacerbating these conditions.

The mainstream assumption is losing weight will help. If Marie does intentionally lose weight, she will intentionally change something in order for this to happen. If her blood sugar and knee pain reduce, how do we know if these changes are due to the weight loss or whatever it was she changed; perhaps it was due the changes in diet and activity level, perhaps aided with some mindfulness/meditation work which then influenced stress levels and her relationships with others? Unless a person has liposuction, intentional weight loss occurs along side a change in behaviours, the weight loss is a side-effect as opposed to a behaviour change; i.e. weight is not a behaviour.

EYE OPENER – just because Marie’e blood glucose and knee pain is reduced doesn’t mean she is experiencing better health. Many people would assume this, but chances are Marie has put herself into calorie deficit to achieve the weight loss, which results in a range of physiological and psychological disturbances. These disturbances are key drivers in the weight regain that happens to almost everyone, and why so many people find themselves obsessed with food and thoughts about food to the point of distress and anxiety. Not to mention the shame people feel around their body, their health issues and their perceived “failure” to manage things – shame is a powerful emotion experienced by most, if not all, who try to lose weight and a powerful factor that has been shown to directly impact metabolic health.

Some of the reasons people end up with a higher body weight

Concern about weight from a young age, be that underweight or “overweight” as per growth charts. There is evidence that parents who worry about their kids weight, end up with bigger children.
Natural human size diversity – their genetic blueprint for size is a bigger body
Medication
Hormonal disturbances
Mental health issues with or without medication
Economic and social circumstances
Adverse childhood events, including trauma
….
.
and the most common reason I see with my clients…
.
Through the pursuit of weight loss – a large number of my clients have dieted themselves to a heavier weight, research shows that up to 2/3 of people end up heavier through dieting in an attempt to lose weight.

Regardless of the reasons, placing the focus on weight and encouraging people to pursue weight loss is more likely to lead to the following, than it is to improve a person’s health long-term…

Weight loss followed by regain (weight cycling/yoyo dieting), often to a higher weight.
Engaging in diet behaviours that are generally not sustainable and may lead to a poor relationship with food over-time, disordered eating behaviours such as restricting and bingeing.
Engaging in exercise behaviours that are generally not sustainable and may lead to a poor relationship with exercise over-time, injury or a general dislike of exercise.
An increased sense of shame over body size and perceived “failure” to control their weight, eating behaviours and maintain a certain level of exercise. Shame has been identified as an independent risk factor for health.
Perpetuating our cultures weight bias (that thinner people are more worthy, healthy, attractive etc) and the social stigma that accompanies this.

Do you have a healthy relationship with food? – take our free quiz to find out
.

Want to undertand how to nourish your body without dieting or restricting food?
Get a taste of what’s involved with with our ebook Nourish.

Click the banner to grab your copy today!

Stuck at home and comfort eating…

on April 1, 2020

What if I told you the issue is less with the eating or food and more with the concept that “comfort eating” is something you should try and avoid.

There are a number of layers to this and I’ll do my best to break things down by looking at how this “comfort eating” may look and feel depending on your relationship with food and body.

But first, I want to make it clear that eating for reasons other than hunger, can be a perfectly normal and healthy part of the human experience. Eating for social interaction, entertainment, tiredness, mood changes, practicality (one may need to eat before hunger strikes with the knowledge they may not be able to eat for a certain period), or for the simple pleasure of food itself can all be part of normal healthy eating experience.

When food is eaten with awareness of the food and the reason behind choosing to eat, then it does not need to be a problem. For the person with clear appetite awareness, eating outside of physical hunger can reduce the amount of food eaten at (or delay) the next point of hunger, avoiding excess energy intake. A key point here, is the capacity to feel physical hunger as a clear sensation and to differentiate between other non-physical hunger cues. If you struggle with this, learning how to get back in tune with physical hunger and become aware of non-hungry tiggers is a vital part of developing a healthy relationship with food.

Let’s explore three differing relationships with food

The person with a complicated or troubled relationship with food

If you’re unsure where your relationship with food stands, do our quick free quiz

The key points here surround –
Not eating enough (deliberate and unintentional calorie restriction)
Food restriction
Being “too healthy”

When comfort eating is experienced as problematic, usually the two key areas driving the eating are heightened emotions (or unmet needs) and food restriction. For many people, dealing with the food restriction first, attenuates the eating in response to emotions/unmet needs and alleviates the level of guilt or sense it is an issue.

Food restriction can take the form of physical or mental restriction of certain food, or simply not eating enough food to meet energy requirements (for example, when pursuing weight loss or following someone else’s advice on what, when and how much to eat). Physical restriction is not allowing yourself to eat food you want to eat, mental restriction is eating the food but thinking you shouldn’t be eating it, or that you need to compensate in some way. Of course people can chose not to eat a food and be perfectly comfortable with that decision, what I am referring to here, is when people are experiencing an active struggle with restriction that then leads to distress or shame when the food is eaten or over-eaten.

It is human psychology to desire more, what you can’t have; it’s a case of “deprivation drives desire” and “the forbidden fruit effect”. All of us have, at some point in our life, experienced wanting something with much greater intensity when we thought it was off limits or not readily available.

The human brain is hard wired to seek out food; eating is one of our most basic human needs, like the need to breathe and need to sleep. When energy intake is insufficient – as with most diets or plans designed to achieve weight loss – the brain releases a chemical that triggers our drive to eat, this chemical actively makes us think about food and makes food smell, look and taste more appealing. If you aren’t eating enough, and you’re not clear about your appetite cues, you might mistake your body’s actual need for food as a form of comfort eating or eating more than you should. For example, if you’re running low on food energy but you don’t actually recognise you’re hungry (probably as your appetite awareness has been blunted), the decision to eat one or two biscuits or squares of chocolate can easily turn into several more because your body actually needs the food energy.

Even if you are eating enough, thinking you shouldn’t be eating certain food can heighten your desire for this food as previously mentioned. Whichever the scenario – just needing to eat more, thinking you shouldn’t be eating something or a combination of the two – the outcome usually leads to sense of failure and the very common diet mentality: “I’ve blown it now, may as write off the rest of the day and be good tomorrow” or “I’ll just finish this packet so it’s not in the house and then never buy it again.”

One other common factor is trying to be too healthy – what do I mean by this?

The misguided belief that you’re better off choosing the salad over the toasted sandwich. I’ll give you an example from one of my clients, let’s call her Sue. For many years Sue was enjoying a toasted cheese sandwich for lunch, then one day her young adult son decided to go on a “health kick” and suggested his mum join him. Toasted sandwiches were out and salads were in. Sue really enjoyed the salads, they had chicken, cheese, avocado etc and were very tasty. But soon Sue found herself craving sugar in the afternoons and eating cake or a pastry most days, something she’d never done regularly in the past. When we explored this, Sue learned that her body needed some carbohydrate with lunch, something the toasted sandwich gave her but the salad didn’t. When she went back to having the sandwich, the sugar cravings disappeared. Some reading this may be thinking, “but the toasted sandwich lacks vegetables!” – well it doesn’t have to, and as it turned out, Sue often put various veggies in the sandwich, she also had always eaten a large serve with dinner and so her vegetable intake was not lacking.

The person with a fairly sound relationship with food and sound appetite awareness, but who has the typical diet mentality of our culture

You have no, or very little, preoccupation with food or eating, you may think of food as good or bad depending on nutritional content, and although you may sense some guilt, you don’t get overly upset with yourself around food. You can enjoy food freely without feeling terrible about yourself or your body.

At the risk of repeating everything I’ve just said about the person with the more complicated relationship with food, the exact same advice applies. The difference for these people, is they may not feel the high level of guilt/shame or anxiety around eating, be that for comfort or just because they feel like it.

The issue here is more that the typical diet mentality of our diet culture may lead to not quite eating enough (the decision to eat less is nearly always validated in our society as “being good”), being “too healthy” or the forbidden fruit effect which can all influence the way we eat as outlined above. Learning how to recognise and reject diet mentality – a central principle of intuitive eating – may be all that is required, along with ensuring you are eating enough and to a level of satisfaction (another core principal of intuitive eating).

Without the diet mentality, you might still choose to eat when you’re not hungry – remember this is normal – but without emotion attached to the food or eating, you just enjoy the food and get on with your day. As mentioned previously, eating with awareness of the food and the reason behind choosing to eat, can delay or reduce the amount of food eaten at the next point of hunger and prevent excess energy intake.

The person with a healthy relationship with food and not (overly) influenced by diet culture

Let me use a client example again to explain, this time we’ll call them Alex. Alex has noticed she is snacking more since working from home, on one particular day during the first week at home she snacks on a variety of foods over the day, she is very aware she is not hungry much of the time, but gives herself permission to enjoy the food without any sense of doing the “wrong thing”. When dinner time comes, Alex realises she has no appetite at all and so decides not to eat, a little later that evening Alex starts to feel hungry and makes herself some toast which satisfies her.

After several days like this during her first couple of weeks working from home, Alex finds herself craving a “decent/square” meal. Several days of snack type foods and not many veggies or protein rich foods, and Alex has become tired of the crackers and dip, biscuits, muesli bars, chocolate etc and returns to her usual pattern of eating. From time to time, she still finds herself standing at the cupboard looking at the biscuits or chocolate, but she acknowledges whether or not she’s actually hungry and if hungry, prepares food she knows will be more satisfying. When she’s not hungry, but just feels like something sweet, she breaks off a few squares of chocolate or grabs a couple of sweet biscuits and sits down with a cup of tea to enjoy them.

I know there will be people reading this who find this idea of being around food almost fanciful, but this is how learning to eat intuitively can change your relationship with food. For some people, the process of intuitive eating may be straightforward and for others it will be complex and can take a long time, but with the right help, you can get there. You can be Alex!

Do you have a healthy relationship with food? – take our free quiz to find out
.

Want to learn how to nourish your body without dieting or restricting food?
Learn about intuitive eating with our ebook Nourish.

Click the banner to grab your copy today!

“Scarcity makes us anxious, abundance allows us to feel calm”

on March 5, 2020

I came across this quote in a book that unfortunately I can’t remember the name of. It is a quote I use often with my clients when explaining why the brain does what it does sometimes with food.

Many people are experiencing this with toilet paper right now, but this fact can have a profound effect on our relationship to some food.

When you tell yourself that you have to stop eating a particular food, let’s go with sweet food, it’s normal human psychology for your brain to become anxious and want you to have as much of that sweet food as you can when it is available.

Not everybody experiences this, but if you know you’re likely to eat the whole block of chocolate when it’s in the house, then part of what is driving that, is your brain’s anxiety about scarcity. Paradoxically, many people don’t keep chocolate in the house because they’re worried they’ll eat it all, but it can be this behaviour that leads to eating all the chocolate when it is available.

Through the intuitive eating process and with learning to how to let go of the need to restrict, time and time again I have clients tell me they bought some chocolate and its now been siting the cupboard for weeks! They know it’s there, they’re just no longer anxious about not having it and they know they can get more whenever they feel like it.

If you feel your relationship with food could use some help, or if you would also like to enjoy your food free of guilt, give us a call, or find a non-diet/intuitive eating dietitian near you (just make sure they are HAES®️ aligned).

Do you have a healthy relationship with food? – take our free quiz to find out
.

Want to learn how to nourish your body without dieting or restricting food?
Learn about intuitive eating with our ebook Nourish.

Click the banner to grab your copy today!

“Every food has value”

on February 14, 2020

In talking about how her relationship with food has changed, a client described her decision to order some hot chips. She was hungry, she likes hot chips and they were one of the only gluten free options (she has Coeliac disease). In the past these chips would have come with a massive serve of guilt and shame, or she would have let herself go hungry, and getting over-hungry usually led to eating way past comfortable fullness that evening.

This time, my client was not only able to enjoy the chips free of shame, the lack of self judgement meant she was able to tune into her bodies appetite cues and she ate to the point of satisfaction rather than demolishing the whole lot just because they were there.

As we discussed all the benefits of rejecting common diet mentality around food, that is; chips are bad, chips are unhealthy, chips are fattening, you won’t lose weight eating chips etc etc, my client expressed a new understanding that “every food has value”. I thought this was a brilliant way to look at food.

In this case, the value lay in the freedom to enjoy food without mental distress or shame and honouring hunger which prevented over-eating and the mental and physical discomfort that comes with that. The fact that chips are also a nourishing food was more a bonus in this instance.

For so many people, not only does eating chips result in shame and mental distress over food, but the judgement about “being bad” or eating “wrong or unhealthy food” usually prevents people from tuning into their bodies needs. This often results in eating past satisfaction, to a point of feeling over-full with the thought that “I’ll be good tomorrow” or “It’s the last time I’ll have them.”

Do you have a healthy relationship with food? – take our free quiz to find out
.

Want to learn how to nourish your body without dieting or restricting food?
Learn about intuitive eating with our ebook Nourish.

Click the banner to grab your copy today!

Intuitive eating – where does nutrition fit in and 6 questions to ask yourself to see if you’re ready

on January 29, 2020

One misconception with intuitive eating is that the idea is to eat whatever you want without a thought for nutrition or health. That said, you will most likely find that when you start the process, allowing yourself to eat freely without worrying about nutrition is actually a key step in healing your relationship with food. This includes the ability to rewire your brain and change your thinking around food to soften (and eventually rid) any anxiety, emotional distress or shame you have with food.

Once you’ve reached a point* where you feel much calmer around food, the food battle in your head has ceased and you think about food and/or nutrition a hell of a lot less, you may be ready to start paying more attention to nutrition. A key point here though, is how much attention do you actually need to pay to your nutrition? If you have a medical or health condition that is affected by food choices, then yes you may benefit from some gentle focus on nutrition. If you’re free a specific medical or health condition and generally you feel well and energised with your current pattern of eating, perhaps more focus is unnecessary. Either way, a non-diet dietitian can guide you with how much focus you may or may not need.

While nutrition is important to all humans, it has been massively overplayed. We are inundated with nutrition knowledge, self help books, recipe books, online recipes, the internet in general, ready to eat meals, food packaging, menu boards, social media, TV, gyms, a variety of health professionals, health coaches, fitness trainers and more – but where has all this knowledge taken us?

If we consider that calories as we know them today didn’t come into common thinking until the 20th century, nor did we know what a vitamin was until last century and macronutrients were only discovered in the 1800s, how did humans manage prior to this? That is to say, humans have managed to feed themselves well enough for 1000s of years without this nutrition knowledge.

Rather than helping the majority of people have a better understanding of how to nourish themselves well, it would appear that we humans are more confused than ever! Rates of disordered eating and eating disorders are on the rise globally, especially in Asian countries. An over-focus on nutrition, especially tracking calories and/or macronutrients is commonly part of what leads people into disordered eating or an eating disorder.

Even if tracking calories and macronutrients doesn’t mess with a person’s psychology around food or result in mental health issues, it takes us away from listening our own internal cues of hunger, fullness and satisfaction, it takes us away from trusting our own bodies with what, when or how much to eat, something humans would have done naturally before we were introduced to the science of nutrition. A key part of the intuitive eating process is to redirect our thinking away from external cues (largely driven by nutrition science) on how to eat and instead reconnect to our bodies natural wisdom with eating.

Of course there are some circumstances where it may be useful to focus more on nutrition and even to monitor or track calories and/or macros. Some athletes, some pregnancies and some medical conditions may benefit from the nutrition knowledge we know have, but this isn’t always necessary. If you happen to have a medical or health condition that could benefit from modern nutrition knowledge, then by no means am I against using this knowledge, but we need to really careful with how we balance this against a person’s life circumstances and current relationship with food and body.

If you’ve had a complicated relationship with food but are on the mend, or fully healed and you’d like to focus on an aspect of nutrition, ask yourself these 6 question to see if you’re ready…

If for whatever reason it does’t happen, you’re completely ok with that and you don’t get mad at yourself
You enjoy eating that way, perhaps finding it even more pleasurable
The dietary change doesn’t increase how much you think about food when you don’t need to be
If you’re out of usual routine, ie on holidays and it’s not practical or is more difficult to follow the dietary change, it doesn’t phase you at all and you’re happy to go with the flow and wait until you’re back in usual routine
There is no guilt, shame or mental distress attached to whether or not you do what you intended
You don’t feel compelled to tell others what you’re doing, or advise that they would benefit from doing it too

Gentle nutrition is one the 10 principles of the intuitive eating process developed by dietitians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. You can read about the 10 principles here

* This can take anywhere from a few months to a few years

Do you have a healthy relationship with food? – take our free quiz to find out
.

Want to learn how to nourish your body without dieting or restricting food?
Learn about intuitive eating with our ebook Nourish.

Click the banner to grab your copy today!