How Do I Non-Diet? 7 Key Factors That Will Change Your Life For The Better

1. Acceptance of your past

Accepting dieting does not work.

Accepting you can be healthy in your body.

Accepting you have an innate ability to care for yourself, which does not involve following some generic ‘weight loss’ diet.

Accepting your personal worth is not associated with the numbers on the scales. Weighing is an unhelpful practise that fuels the dieting way of life – Throw the scales away!!

2. Acceptance of your future

Accepting the non-dieting approach requires a mindset change, and this takes time.

Understand you will not be counting calories, weighing yourself, engaging in diet/fat/good or bad food talk.

Your behaviours, emotions and thoughts around nutrition may feel scary at first and even simple. At the same time, you may even feel overwhelmed. Just know you will approach food and nutrition in a very different way to what you have been used to.

3. Apologising to body

For the years of not trusting it.

For the abuse that occurred…

• Verbally – E.g. “I am not good enough the way I am.” “I must change my body.”
• Physically – Depriving yourself of essential nutrients and pleasure by restricting and controlling food intake…Feeling very hungry and lacking energy and concentration.

Apologising for not doing the things you have always wanted to do. And thinking you could not or should not do certain things based on your appearance.

4. Acknowledging emotions

Understanding that by adopting a non-dieting philosophy, your emotions may become intense initially, as you have been used to dieting which is a means of not dealing with your actual problem. Shifting the blame to food and your body, and thinking you have a weight and/or eating problem can be convenient.

5. Making peace

With your body.

With the fact that not all people will see eye to eye with you, and this is OK. We don’t agree with what all people say outside of nutrition. There are no right or wrong ways in life, just better ways based on strong scientific evidence. Everyone is different, with different priorities, so people may not be ready to do all the things you do.

6. Creating abundance of food

Ensuring a variety of nutritious (‘every day’) and less nutritious (‘sometimes’) foods are available in your house and wherever you go. This strategy, once fully committed to, leads to less deprivation and therefore less bingeing.

Eg. Have you ever eaten at a buffet repeatedly or been on a cruise where there is delicious food available all the time? Can you think back to how you felt at the start of being exposed to this ‘endless’ supply of food? What about 5 days later?

What tends to happen is that the glamour around all the food fades, and the desire to eat huge quantities of food declines. After this time, you will find yourself eating in response to stomach hunger (because of appetite/feeling hungry), rather than eye or mouth hunger (non-hungry eating/feeling tempted).

If you know you can have any food whenever you like, you are less likely to overeat.

7. Increase knowledge of non-dieting philosophy

The following resources will help you to non-diet:

Blog posts

• How to build a positive relationship with food
• Why I don’t focus on weight: Celebrating #AHHW
• Normal eating checklist: What does it mean to eat normally?
• The What, Why, When, How and Where of ‘Nutrition Intuition’ explained
• Is The Australian Guide to Healthy Eating just another diet?
• Have You Met My Friend….Food?

New e-book

The Essential Guide to Never Dieting Again will help you to break the dieting cycle and reconnect you with your food and body. Start living your life now, not when you lose weight!

The e-book features many questions and an activity to help bring awareness to your eating and lifestyle behaviours around food.

You will likely start reading the e-book with the dieting mentality, and finish with accepting that dieting does not work and health can be achieved at any body shape or size. You will understand the problem of dieting and today’s society, the non-dieting approach, my nutrition philosophy, and the solution of how to reconnect with your internal body cues.

Reclaim your health and happiness. Free yourself of guilt and shame you feel around food and your body. Start trusting yourself, enjoy your food and end the vicious dieting cycle.

I look forward to helping you out further through this new resource.

To purchase the ebook click here.

Please now share this exciting opportunity with your friends and family.

Natalie.