If You’re Done Piecing Everything Together and Want It All to Finally CLICK With Intuitive Eating… Here’s What to Do Next

You’ve read the intuitive eating books. You’ve done the workbook. You’ve been listening to the podcasts and following all the coaches on social media. And yet, you still feel stuck. If you mostly “get it” but keep struggling to be consistent with intuitive eating, Episode 251 of Rebuilding Trust With Your Body was made for you. Katy digs into what’s actually getting in the way of everything clicking, and exactly what to focus on right now to make intuitive eating work for you. Plus, this week’s Wellness Woo takes a look at Bryan Johnson and his quest to never die.

We Discuss:

• Why consuming more books, podcasts, and social media content isn’t the thing that makes intuitive eating click
• The Million Dollar Question you need to be asking yourself, and how to get clear answers on it
• 3 signs you’re making solid progress and are closer than you think, even when it doesn’t feel like it
• The specific actions that will make it click faster for you, starting now
• Wellness Woo: Katy’s take on Bryan Johnson and the extreme longevity trend

Resources:

• Grab your last minute spot inside the masterclass: https://nondietacademy.com/mistakes
• Join Non-Dieter’s Club: https://katyharvey.net/club
• Join the Intuitive Eating Made Easy Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/306396290454800
• Work with Katy: https://katyharvey.net/services
• Join Katy’s weekly email newsletter: http://nondietacademy.com/newsletter
• Free Guide: Stop the Constant Food Obsession: https://www.nondietacademy.com/food

Let’s have some real talk today. You already know that dieting does not work. You have years, maybe decades, of evidence that dieting does not work long-term.

You’ve lost weight, you’ve regained it, you’ve yo-yo’d, you’ve been miserable, you’ve obsessed about food. You’ve canceled social plans because of your body and said no to things because you didn’t want to be seen. You’ve promised yourself over and over that you would never do it again.

And yet, all it takes is one bad body image day, or a doctor’s appointment, or a vacation photo that feels unflattering, or a pair of tight jeans. Suddenly you’re considering getting back together with your toxic ex-boyfriend, which is basically what dieting is.

This conversation isn’t meant to shame you. It’s meant to wake you up and help you get genuinely curious about why you keep repeating a pattern that so clearly is not serving you.

Wellness Woo: The “Doctor Formulated” GLP-1 Booster

Before we get into it, we’ve got some Wellness Woo to talk about. Wellness Woo is the stuff diet and wellness culture tells us we should do in the name of health, but it’s really based on pseudoscience, exaggerated claims, or just nonsense.

Today’s Wellness Woo is a website selling a “Doctor Formulated GLP-1 Booster.” The doctor in question is a pharmacist, a doctor of pharmacy. And while pharmacists absolutely earn their doctor title, the general public sees “doctor formulated” and assumes medical doctor. That assumption gets leveraged for profit.

The booster itself is a supplement made of things like lemon bioflavonoid extract, green tea extract, turmeric, and resveratrol. Two problems: there’s not strong evidence these are effective, and there’s real risk of harm. Green tea extract has been linked to widespread liver damage, and too much turmeric can put you into organ failure.

For $25 a month, people are being led to believe this is a good alternative if you can’t afford an actual GLP-1 medication. To be clear, GLP-1s can be great medications for the right person when used correctly. The issue is diet and wellness culture piggybacking on them to make a profit with supplements that won’t work the same way.

Here’s your takeaway: if a person is selling you supplements, that person is personally profiting off the supplements. They’re invested in convincing you that you need the supplement, not in what’s actually right for your body. Anytime you see a health care provider peddling supplements, huge red flag.

Why You Keep Going Back

You already know dieting doesn’t work. Your problem is not a lack of information.

You’re well aware that diets don’t work long-term, even when they look like they’re working temporarily. You know restriction leads to overeating. You know weight loss from dieting is not permanently sustainable for the vast majority of people who attempt it.

Yet knowing all of that logically, you still toy with the idea of dieting again.

Why? That’s the million dollar question. And the answer isn’t logical, because if you were being logical, you wouldn’t keep wanting to do it. The reason dieting still feels so tempting is emotional.

Deep down, you still don’t trust yourself. Diet culture has created an illusion of control, making you think dieting puts you in more control over food and your body, when it’s actually setting you up to be out of control. You’ve outsourced your control to the dieting and the restricting.

Dieting Is a Toxic Ex-Boyfriend

Think about the traits of a toxic boyfriend. He lies to you. He makes promises and breaks them. He damages your self-esteem. He keeps you stuck. He convinces you that he’s changed and it’s going to be better this time.

Sound familiar? Dieting. This time will be different. This plan is healthier. This coach knows the secret. This isn’t a diet, it’s a lifestyle.

Every failed diet gets blamed on you, because diet culture doesn’t take accountability. And you keep remembering the honeymoon phase while conveniently forgetting the suffering that came later.

Here’s the mind warp, and it might not make sense the first time you hear it: you’re not actually craving the weight loss itself, just like it was never the boyfriend himself you wanted.

What you want is what you think the weight loss would give you. Your brain assumes weight loss will make you feel worthy, attractive, safe, accepted, in control, healthy, confident, and less ashamed. The real fantasy is the byproduct: you’ll stop avoiding photos, stop judging yourself, stop picking yourself apart in the mirror. You’ll wear the swimsuit. You’ll start living.

The thing you want is the byproduct of what you believe weight loss will give you. That’s what you’re yearning for deep down.

Embrace Life Now

Here’s the reality: you could choose to do a lot of these things right now, in your here and now body.

You could choose to stop picking yourself apart in the mirror, to get in the pool, to wear the swimsuit, to start living your life more fully. It might feel a little fake-it-till-you-make-it at first. But when you start doing the things that align with your values, you start feeling naturally more confident as a byproduct, because you’re living according to your values instead of sitting on the sidelines of your own life.

If you live in a larger body, there might be certain things that are harder in your here and now body, and that is genuinely hard. But it doesn’t mean you’re unworthy of living life to the fullest capacity, or of asking for accommodations you might need. Go look up All Bodies on Bikes, fat runners, fat yoga, people of all body types doing all sorts of things you might categorically think can’t be done.

Flip the switch from “I can’t” to “what can I do with what I’ve got?” Because when you’re living in the I can’t, your life gets a lot smaller. It’s the concept of living in the gain instead of the gap (there’s a whole book called The Gap and the Gain about this).

Try this: make a list of everything you’ve told yourself you’ll do or feel when you lose weight. Then go down that list and ask, could I do those things now? Could I spend one entire day acting as if I already felt confident and worthy? Notice how it changes your energy, the way you interact with people, the way you carry yourself.

Dieting Is a Distraction From the Harder Work

Here’s the subconscious part that doesn’t get talked about enough: you’re using dieting to avoid doing the harder work.

Dieting often feels easier than grieving the body you thought you’d have, or accepting the uncertainty of where your body will land with intuitive eating. It’s easier than challenging your own internalized fatphobia and pushing back against weight stigma. It’s easier than building health habits without weight loss as the motivation.

Dieting gives you a project that feels like self-care and feels productive. Intuitive eating asks you to build a relationship with yourself, your body, and food. And relationships take work.

The harder work might mean facing issues in your marriage, or the reality that you hate your job, or that your identity is wrapped up in being the healthy eater and you don’t know who you are outside of that. Dieting became the obsession, the distraction, the scapegoat for all your problems, and your body became the scapegoat.

When you stop dieting, those other problems come to the surface, and it can feel like a volcano erupting in your life. Your task is to address those things head on. It’s hard. But when you do, you feel so much more fulfilled, because you’re dealing directly with the hard stuff while also experiencing the joy and wonder and awe of life.

Find Another Way

If dieting worked, it would have already worked. You would be done.

Here’s a sobering exercise from inside Non-Dieters Club: list out every diet you’ve ever done. Put it on paper in front of your eyes. How many Mondays have you started over in your life? Do you really think it’s going to be different next Monday?

Now here’s the question to actually sit with and journal about. Write this down:

What am I hoping dieting will give me that I need to learn how to give myself another way?

If you’re hoping dieting will give you better health, we need to give you better health another way. If you’re hoping it will make you more confident, we need to make you more confident another way. If you’re hoping it will make you physically more comfortable in your body, we need to give you physical comfort another way.

There’s always another way. And the other way is usually the better way, because it’s more permanent and more effective long-term.

A lot of people will choose a comfortable hell over an uncomfortable heaven. That’s what dieting is: the comfortable hell. It feels familiar and productive on the surface, but that doesn’t make it actually helpful or healthy. That’s just the lie we’ve been sold over and over again.

You absolutely get to be healthier, if that’s one of your goals. And you get to do it without hating yourself along the way.

And in case nobody has told you today: you are enough already.

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