Before we get started today, if you’re ready to make peace with food, improve your nutrition, stop letting your weight control your self esteem, and to figure out how to actually apply the entire intuitive eating framework in your everyday life, then I invite you to join us inside my upcoming cohort of my signature course and group coaching program, Non Diet Academy.

Doors are currently open, which is a big deal because I only open enrollment two times per year. So if you want in run, don’t walk to grab your spot. We kick off March 3rd for all the details and enrollment info. Head on over to nondietacademy. com forward slash enroll. If you’re listening to this in the future and you’re interested in joining our next cohort, just shoot me a DM and I’ll get you added to the wait list.

NDA is where I teach all of my signature frameworks and I walk you through the exact process that I have used to help hundreds of my individual clients go from stressing and obsessing about food and hating their bodies to having freedom with food. Better health, kindness towards their body, andnever feeling the need to diet again.

This type of deep inner peace and confidence with eating doesn’t just happen magically. It happens when you have the right strategies and guidance to implement not just the intuitive eating skills, But also all of the non diet strategies to support your health while listening to your body. NDA is the program where my clients are creating the habits and mindset shifts that are allowing them to experience long lasting change in their relationship with food and sustainable habits that allow them to honor their health without having to be rigid or all or none with it.

So if you’re ready to fully make peace with food, your body, exercise, and your health, then NDA is exactly where you need to be this spring. For Head on over to nondietacademy. com forward slash enroll and check out all of the details and choose which level you want to enroll at the VIP level gets you one on one coaching with me in addition to the group coaching.

And I know for some people that individualized element is really important. But it’s also okay if that’s not for you. So go check out all the details as well as over 500 of juicy bonuses that I am offering right now and get inside before doors close soon. We kick things off on March 3rd.

Hey, I’m Katie Harvey, a non diet dietician. If you’ve spent years battling food in your body, I’m here to show you the path to healing here on the rebuilding trust with your body podcast, I teach you how to find your own freedom with food through tools, strategies, mindset shifts, and heartfelt discussions around what it means to make peace with food and your body while still existing in diet culture.

I believe that all bodies deserve respect. And that health is so much more than a number on the scale. It’s about connecting with our true selves and learning that our relationship with food is more important than the food itself. So if you’re ready to discover the freedom of rebuilding trust with your body, grab a seat and maybe a snack and let’s do this.

Welcome back to rebuilding trust with your body. It’s Katie here. This is going to be such a powerful episode because we are going to not only talk directly about your weight gain fears. But we’re also going to go deeper on what’s really holding you back from trusting yourself with food, from having peace with food, and from feeling comfortable in your body and accepting of your body.

Let me ask you this. What if I told you that your fear of weight gain isn’t really about weight? You’re probably thinking of course, it’s about my weight Katie I want to lose weight not gain weight And if I do gain weight or gain more weight than I already have then I’m gonna keep feeling worse I’m gonna feel worse and worse about my body.

My health is gonna get worse. I’m gonna be more physically uncomfortable Of course, this is about my weight. I get it and I am not negating these fears What I want to do is go deeper and look at the actual fears about your health, aboutyour ability to be physically comfortable in your life and in the world, and your fear of what others are thinking of you and their judgments about you.

If they think you’ve let yourself go or that you’re lazy or you have no willpower or that you don’t care about your health. Your weight also ties into how you feel about yourself, your confidence, your self esteem, your sense of worthiness. These fears are why you worry so much about your weight. It’s not about the number on the scale, it’s about what it represents to you and these things beneath it that we are going to tease apart today.

You might be intellectually on board with how diets don’t work long term and on board with the idea of intuitive eating. But deep down, you might be emotionally resistant to this and you’re hesitant to really go all in with figuring out intuitive eating and healing your relationship with food because your weight gain fears are so strong and there’s this hesitation and inner conflict with what you feel about your weight.

We’re going to get into all of this today, but before we go any further. You know what time it is. We’ve got some wellness woo to talk about. Wellness woo is the stuff that 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 cucumbers dipped in stevia as a replacement for watermelon. This is one of those trends that was going around on TikTok, and I’m like, this is just so strange and absurd on so many levels, so let’s break this down. The idea is that you would dip your cucumbers in stevia, and that it allegedly tastes like watermelon, because somehow this is healthier than just eating watermelon.

And really this is driven by our fear of carbs. And the notion that watermelon and fruit in general have too much sugar, too many carbs. Ed, this is just ridiculous. Fruit is loaded with wonderful nutrients for us. Yes, it has some carbohydrates in it, but it’s not this excessive thing that is unhealthy for our bodies that we need to be avoiding.

Yes, if you have diabetes and blood sugar concerns, we might want to pair those with some protein. But you don’t need to avoid fruit categorically. Fruit is not unhealthy. In fact, when we look at the public health dietary guidelines, it is recommended that we aim for five to nine servings of fruits and vegetables per day, and they’re combining fruits and vegetables in that category because they’re kind of interchangeable.

Like swapping a fruit for a veggie, it’s really not this drastic swap. It’s kind of like a swap within the same category. It’s like swapping an English muffin for a bagel. I mean, it’s kind of the same thing. It’s still a bread product, right? Exchanging your watermelon and switching it for cucumber, you’re not really changing that much.

And the thing is, cucumbers, they have great nutrients. Watermelon also has great nutrients. We don’t need to be mad at either one of them, and you don’t need to be avoiding watermelon or any other fruit for that matter. Even bananas, gasp. You know, clutch your pearls at the idea of banana. It’s fine. Those foods are wonderful.

And if you like them, enjoy them. There’s a lot of benefits to eating them. You don’t need to be afraid of the carbs in fruit or in any type of vegetable. And I will say this, be skeptical of any social media trend that’s basically about avoiding calories. Because the underlying assumption here is that Calories are bad, sugar is bad, and all of this boils down to the diet mentality.

So, do you need to be dipping your cucumbers in Stevia? No. I mean, if you genuinely like that, it’s fine, whatever, I guess. But, If you want watermelon, just eat watermelon. So there you have it. Cucumbers dipped in stevia is absolutely wellness woo. If you have an example of wellness woo that you want to share, send it my way.

I always love your ideas. You can DM me or send me an email at rebuilding trust with your body at Gmail. All right, that’s enough of that. Moving on to today’s main topic, dealing with weight gain fears with letting go of dieting and exploring what’s really holding you back. So we are going to dig into the subconscious fears that tend to drive people’s resistance towards fully letting go of dieting and leaning all the way into intuitive eating.

And these fears tend to fall into four buckets. So the first bucket is weight gain. This fear of the social and relational consequences. And here’s what I mean by that. A lot of times we worry that if we gain weight, it’s going to change the social dynamics. That people will think about us differently and treat us differently.

And the trouble is, there is research that says this is true. Weight stigma and anti fat bias are very real things in our culture. And so people do get treated differently when they are in larger bodies, and then they get treated better when they lose weight. That is often the case. And then there’s also this kind of, like, exaggeration and magnification of this that often happens in our mind, where we also will perceive or project that people are thinking these things about us, and we’re doing this mind reading, and it may or may not be true.

And so there’s both these very real ways that are documented scientifically and then this increased perception that we have that really is this chokehold over us with the fear of weight gain and what other people are going to think. And when we see the world through our own lens of shame and put that magnifying glass on it, we then carry ourselves differently because we’re in shame and we assume that everybody’s thinking so terribly about us.

And we operate our lives differently because of that, because shame makes us want to hide. There’s this book called The Dance of Connection. It was written by Harriet Lerner. I’ll link to it in the show notes. And the premise of this book is basically that When we show up differently in a social dynamic, it forces a change in the social dynamic itself.

When you show up with less confidence and feeling really insecure about yourself and you’re kind of hunched over, you’re going to have a different type of interaction with people around you. Then if you show up and you are feeling confident and you are feeling worthy of taking up space and you are feeling deserving and excited to be there, you’re going to show up energetically differently, and that’s going to impact the social dynamics.

And so that’s part of what makes this challenging too, is it has this compounding effect when we’re in shame about our bodies. And so that dance of connection book helps you understand how you can choose to show up in a very intentional way, even if it’s a little bit of a fake it till you make it with the body image thing, that you can give yourself that pep talk before you go into a social situation that you deserve to be there just as much as everybody else.

That you do not have to hide your body or shrink your body for the approval of others and that you can go in there. And what would happen if you held your head high and carried yourself as if you felt like you deserved to be there? That would be so different than if you walk in feeling like, gosh, everybody’s looking at me.

They think I’m just so gross. They think I’ve let myself go. So play around with that. I know it feels very unnatural to fake it till you make it, but it can actually change in some ways the way you feel about your body because you’re showing up differently. One of my previous non diet academy clients, she recently decided that she was going to start doing All of the things that she had been holding herself back from in her current body.

And she messaged me the other day with this really cool photo of her outdoing an activity that she only ever imagined doing when she was thinner. And she said it was scary, but she did it anyway. She had a great time. And this was a moment of connection with her friends that she was doing it with that she otherwise would have missed out on while they were out doing it and she was sitting at home.

So therefore she was more connected to her friends. She’s experiencing life more fully because she made that decision to do it in her here and now body. And here’s another challenging thing with social dynamics that I often will hear about. If you’ve built an identity around being perceived in your social circles as the fit one, or the one who’s in control with food, or the one who always gets the salad, or, or who is always on a diet, then it kind of becomes, well, like, who am I without that?

If I’m not the fit one or the one who’s, who’s always being good and eating healthy, then who are you when you’re not displaying and portraying that persona anymore? And what I can assure you is this, there is more to you than that. There is more depth to you than that. And people in your life like you and are drawn to you for more reasons than that.

And so, as much as it might feel like you’re losing part of who you are when you let go of that, I would also challenge that you’re coming more into your authentic self. By peeling away these diet layers that have been sitting on top of your true self that have been masking this whole time. And you might think about if you’ve done that thing that so many women in particular do, that we have bonded.

With our female friends and acquaintances or with our sister with our mom We’ve bonded over dieting and body hatred when we get together. That’s the conversation We have who’s doing what diet who feels terrible about their body? Who is just disgusted with how much weight they’ve gained who needs to lose weight for their upcoming?

Wedding or vacation or reunion or whatever. We can do better than that, ladies. We can find more meaningful things to talk about. But that might even feel socially awkward to you if you don’t have that talking point. Or if they’re all talking about it and you’re not. So, sometimes these changes, it’s the social dynamics that’s part of what we’re afraid of with letting go of dieting and with gaining weight.

That fear of gaining weight and another challenging aspect socially is that sometimes our family and our friends or our doctors will reinforce the fears we had. They will say something that indicates, yeah, they are judging you. Yeah, they do think that you have gained too much weight. Yeah, they do think you’re less healthy.

Yeah, they do think that you’re letting yourself go because the truth is sometimes people do think those things or say those things to to us. And it sucks, and frankly, it says more about them than it does you. I know that doesn’t necessarily make it better, but it’s good to remind yourself of that. And it’s not your job to live your life in a way that pleases other people.

So, simmer on that. You might write that down. That would be a good mantra. I will also share with you this strategy that you may have heard about. It’s called the Let Them Theory. And Mel Robbins, who is a motivational speaker, she just wrote a book on it, and if we apply it in this situation, what we would say is, you know what, if your family or your friends or your doctor are going to say things to you about your weight, or if they’re going to judge you about your weight, let them, because the thing is, you can’t control what they’re thinking, you can try to control what they’re thinking by your Being on a diet and shrinking yourself and trying as hard as you can to keep your weight as low as possible, you can try to do that, but at the end of the day, they’re still going to think what they’re going to think.

And if you tell yourself, let them, let them have their thoughts, let them have their opinions. But then the second part of it is let me set the boundary that I’m not going to have that conversation with them. Let me set the boundary that I’m not going to tolerate them shaming me for it. Let me find a new doctor that understands and can be compassionate towards me and is not going to harp about weight at every visit.

Let me tell my mom that I’m not going to have food and weight conversations with her anymore and that we can bond over Anything else all the other things in the world Let me set those boundaries to protect myself and my peace and let me do what’s right for me in my own Relationship with food even if and when they don’t get it.

I want to share another story here with you I had a client this pertains to dating So for this client, she felt like she couldn’t start dating until she lost weight and she had been holding herself back. She wanted a partner. She wanted to be dating someone. She wanted to get married someday and start a family.

But the story she was telling herself was that she couldn’t do that, that nobody was ever going to want to date her unless she lost weight. And during our work together, she ended up deciding, you know what? I’m going to stop putting this off. I’m just going to start putting myself out there. We are going to see what happens.

So she ended up pursuing dating at her higher weight and guess what? She found and is now married to her current husband. In fact, I could tell you a story of a whole bunch of different clients who this has happened to. But the thing is, I want you to take this away that she spent years not dating because of this story she was telling herself that turned out to not be true.

She found love in her larger body. She had gained some weight and she still got married. So it was not this truth and this universal certainty that she could only find love in a smaller body, but that’s how she was operating. And it was when she started to live her life fully and opened herself up to dating and being accepted in her body as it was, that she was able to find someone who loved and accepted her without it being contingent upon shrinking her body.

And this really challenged her old and tightly held belief that she was only going to find love if she lost weight. It’s been a big part of her learning. We talk about this a lot. This has been a big part of her healing. To be able to be more accepting of her body because she challenged this narrative.

And so I want you to ponder for yourself, where are you holding yourself back from doing things in your life out of body shame, or where you’re telling yourself that you’ll go do X, Y, Z, you’ll go get a new job, start dating, audition for the community theater, you’ll start your own YouTube channel, whatever it might be, after you lose weight.

And I want you to think about, and maybe even just, Do a thought experiment or a journal about it. Like, what if you started doing those things now rather than waiting? Sure, it might be uncomfortable. But what if? And what if things work out? What if it goes better than you imagined and you realize, oh my gosh, I didn’t need to be holding myself back.

It opens up the possibilities for you to live life in a way that is much more fulfilling to you rather than sitting around waiting for Your weight to be whatever this magical number is that you then feel like you’ve now earned your badge of worthiness to go out into the world. And I also want to acknowledge here that I know that I say all of this with a ton of thin privilege.

So, you know, if you know me and you’ve seen me, like, yeah. I am a very straight sized white woman, right? I’ve got all the thin privilege in the world. And I get that. And I will also say that these lessons I’m sharing come from not just the work I’ve done with clients in all body types, and in particular in larger bodies, But also from the training and the learning and the mentorship that I have received from people in larger bodies.

And so, I’m sharing that here with you through that lens with the acknowledgement of my own privilege. I totally get that. I really, really do. And if this is something you’re like, I can’t hear it from you because it just That I can’t just, you know, because of that, I get it. I am not mad at you. If you need to skip this episode, I totally hear you, but if you’re open to continue listening, let’s move on to the second bucket that these weight gain fears tend to fall into.

So there’s the social stuff and what’s everybody else thinking of me, right? That’s the first one. The second one is this fear of losing a sense of control. So we have been conditioned repeatedly throughout our lives to believe that thinness means discipline, it means morality, it means self worth, it means success, and that weight gain or fatness is therefore failure, lack of discipline.

It’s bad. It’s wrong. Even if logically we’re like, okay, that clearly that’s not true. Like, that’s how we feel. It’s how we’ve been taught to feel. And when people think about, okay, I’m going to let go of dieting, I’m going to do this whole intuitive eating thing, I’m going to make peace with food, and initially that sounds great, but then they have to reckon with, oh my gosh, but what’s going to happen to my weight?

And what’s going to happen here? It’s not just that fear that I’m going to be out of control with my eating, but it’s also just that fear of like, even if I’m not out of control with my eating, what is my weight going to do? Like if I’m just eating normally and intuitively, what if my weight goes up and up and up because of that?

That feels really scary and out of control. And part of it’s that fear of the unknown and that fear of, you know, not having control over our bodies, that uncertainty with it. Even that fear of our bodies changing as we age, and as we go through different phases of life. And there’s so much of that in our world right now, so much of the messaging not just around needing to control our weight, but also needing to try to maintain this, like, fountain of youth situation, whether it be hiding your gray hairs or Botox for the wrinkles and fillers and special skincare routines and red lights and all the things.

It’s like we’re trying to control every aspect of our body and our appearance versus letting our body be in its natural state and letting our body change and age the way that it’s meant to. And dieting and trying to control that number on the scale, it gives us this illusion of control over our bodies and over our lives.

And with intuitive eating, it requires us to trust, it requires a leap of faith, it requires us to be vulnerable, and it does require us to wait and see where your weight wants to land. The thing is, Normal eating and intuitive eating is going to put your body at a normal weight for your body in this phase of life.

And that weight might not be what you want it to be. In fact, it probably would be higher than you would choose because we’ve been programmed to want to be a very low weight and to be thin. But what if that is also what buys you the peace and the freedom? And the joy in your life that you’ve been looking for that you’ve assumed would only come when you’re at that lower number on the scale, because we sit around and we fear and worry so much about this loss of control over our bodies and the weight that we might gain and the fear of, you know, what if this is a disaster?

What if it doesn’t work out? But we also forget to entertain the possibility What if it does work out? What if I do this? What if I make peace with food? What if I let my body settle in the place it wants to be with my weight? And what if I’m okay? What if I’m not only okay, but what if I’m happier than I’ve ever been?

What if I am healthier? What if this all feels easy? What if I am able to live life more fully in so many ways, whether it be the social connections, or life experiences, or going on vacations, or even just being able to experience the mundane beauty of the world? What if it all does work out? And you’ve been stressing about the size of your pants and the number on the scale for so long.

Because the thing is, you can, and I’ve seen it happen, spend your entire life obsessing about calories and about your weight, and it making you miserable and stressed out and anxious and grumpy and irritable and missing out on things and not being fully present at things. You could spend your whole life doing that.

And do you really want to be, you know, 95 years old at your great grandchild’s birthday party saying no thank you to the cake because the frosting has too much sugar? Or do you want to be the person who is present and participates in the life experiences and who inhabits your body? And my colleague, Anna Sweeney, she calls it your earth suit, you know, who allows your earth suit to carry you through this life, but without it being your obsession and without treating yourself like you’re some type of fixer upper project.

So that’s the second bucket is this fear of losing control over our bodies and that discomfort with that. The third bucket is about health. And the fear that we’re going to stop dieting, we’re going to gain a bunch of weight, we’re going to become unhealthy, our health is going to get worse, we’re going to damage our bodies, and everything’s going to just be an absolute disaster.

It’s so easy to catastrophize about that. Here’s the thing. There’s a lot that we have to consider when it comes to health, and I care deeply about health. I care deeply about helping my clients look at their health, honor their health, within the context of intuitive eating, because intuitive eating is an evidence based framework that supports health.

And something that I cannot reiterate enough, that I want, I will keep hammering this home until it’s like burned in your brain, is that the research on dieting And weight cycling, the yo yoing up and down of your weight, clearly demonstrates that it is damaging to your health, to your metabolism, to your mental self esteem, to your mental health.

It’s not good for you. It’s very hard on your body to constantly be going up and down with your weight. It’s a stressor on your body. And it’s kind of like pouring gasoline on the fire of whatever health conditions you’re genetically predisposed to. And so, what happens is it’s kind of this gaslighting thing where a person’s health might look better when they’re in the weight loss phase of the dieting cycle.

Where maybe their blood pressure is lower, their A1c is lower, their cholesterol is lower. Maybe they have less aches and pains. And then when the inevitable backlash happens and they regain the weight, then all those numbers get worse, they feel worse. And so the story that gets reiterated in your brain is, I am healthier when my weight is lower, I am less healthy when my weight is higher.

But the problem is, the lower weight scenario is temporary. And so it’s not sustainable. And it’s what’s causing and leading to the backlash scenario where things are getting worse. And so it’s, in the grand scheme of things, that cycle is harming your health, not improving it. But for a hot minute, it looks like it’s improving it, which makes you think that if you could just have more willpower to sustain it, you would be happy and healthy.

The problem is, the vast majority of people Cannot sustain that and dieting itself. It’s the number one cause of a slowed metabolism It’s the number one predictor of weight gain not weight loss And it correlates with heart disease as well as early death. Like, that’s the dark side of dieting that does not get talked about enough because it gets marketed to us as a healthy thing to do.

So, if we say, okay, I’m afraid of not dieting and what that means for my health, simply not dieting is a health promoting behavior. But we can also do better than that, because by not being on a diet, that doesn’t mean that you are intuitively eating. And so, there are many ways, without dieting, that we can absolutely honor your health.

And, frankly, Your weight itself is not a very good measure of your health. All your weight is telling us is your gravitational pull. That’s it. It doesn’t mean anything without context, without more information, without understanding more data about your body, and where your weight has been in the past, and what’s going on with your eating, and what’s going on with your blood work, and your vital signs, and to understand.

A much more nuanced picture that gives us some actual data about how your internal organs are functioning. That’s going to tell us so much more about your health than the number on the scale or the godforsaken BMI. So, as a dietician, of course I care about your health. And when I’m looking at someone’s health, I want to hear about their blood pressure, their lab work.

I want to hear about their eating behaviors. I want to hear about what’s going on with exercise, about sleep, about stress. I want to understand all of those things to get curious about what’s your body telling us. And when we can look at what your body is specifically telling us about its health, we can address those things directly.

But we are taught to cling to weight loss as the only solution. Your blood pressure’s high, lose weight. Your cholesterol’s high, lose weight. Your blood sugar’s high, lose weight. But. With that being such a temporary solution that backfires and usually makes things worse, let’s get a little bit more creative and a little bit more strategic than that.

Your blood pressure is high. Great. There are a lot of things we can do about that. We could look at some gentle boundaries around sodium. We could look at adding in more potassium. We could look at movement. We could look at stress management. All of these things are going to help support a sustainable pattern of health behaviors that are not about dieting and fixating on that number on the scale.

If your A1c and your blood sugar are high. Instead of chasing a lower number on the scale and restricting and depriving yourself to the point that late at night or on the weekends, you end up binge eating on chips and crackers and ice cream and bread and all the things that you weren’t allowed to have during the week.

That’s not good for your blood sugar. What if instead we practice pairing your carbs with protein and fat and fiber? What if we improve your insulin sensitivity by doing a little movement after a meal? What if we include some gentle boundaries with the dose of carbohydrates and spread them out more evenly throughout the day because that’s going to give your pancreas a chance to keep up with it?

What if we work on sleep because when you’re not getting enough sleep or if it’s not good quality sleep, you’re going to have higher cortisol levels and more insulin resistance? What if we come at it from a whole bunch of different angles? That’s going to be more meaningful and more sustainable for your health.

So you can see when we look at health, we’ve got to zoom out and get outside of the tunnel vision of weight loss being the only solution. And there are so many things that you can do to improve and support your health. And it starts with nourishing your body. Well, not depriving yourself and eating as few calories as possible.

Cause let’s be honest. There are a lot of things that we have all done to try and lose weight that if we are being deeply truthful with ourselves, those were not healthy behaviors, and I’m not going to go off and list them all here because I don’t want to be triggering, but there are things you have done that were not healthy behaviors because you wanted to lose weight, and in your mind, that’s healthy because it produces weight loss, but if we really question was that healthy, probably not.

And this is a lot of the work that I do inside non diet academy is really setting up the fundamental structure and making it flexible. Of course, we’re not rigid with it, but setting people up to be able to implement the intuitive eating framework in their life in a way that really genuinely supports health in an all encompassing manner.

And I show them how we can take that focus off the scale and look at so many other things and have meaningful improvements in your health, in how you feel in your body and about your body. And we can stop giving that gosh darn scale, that chunk of metal, so much power over our lives. So that’s the third bucket is the fear of health.

And then the fourth one that relates to our weight gain fears. is often that fear of losing a goal or a sense of purpose. So if ever since you were a kid or a young adult, weight loss has always been your project that you’re working on, and this thing that makes you feel like you’re striving for something, what happens when that project is gone?

Because in some ways, dieting and being on a weight loss journey feels like self improvement and self care for us. And it doesn’t help that we get all the accolades for it if we share about it with our friends or online, we get everybody’s cheering us on and asking us what we’re doing and saying how awesome that is.

And so if you don’t have that project, or if you say, I’m not doing that anymore, it’s like, okay, so now what? And is everybody, I think I’ve just given up. I’m just letting myself go. I would argue that you’re not giving up. You’re, you’re not letting yourself go. You’re coming home to yourself. You’re letting go of Patterns that are not serving you, you’re healing from within, but I get it and, you know, maybe this becomes a new way of looking at it as a project and becoming a student of the process.

Maybe you go back and listen to some of these previous podcast episodes that were really impactful for you, but you’re like, okay, I didn’t actually implement it. I just loved the episode, but I didn’t actually do anything with it. Or maybe you go back through and listen to episodes that you didn’t listen to before.

Or maybe you get a copy of the new intuitive eating workbook and you go through that page by page. Maybe you read the book Anti Diet by Christy Harrison. Or Self Compassion by Kristen Neff. And this becomes your self improvement project. And then maybe you find another hobby that has nothing to do with all of this to expand your life beyond food and your weight and your body.

Go find a new hobby. Take a class at your local library or community college. Learn Expand your mind beyond the obsession with food and weight and exercise that we have in our culture. There may also be some hidden grief for giving up on weight loss as your goal. When you say, I’m not explicitly chasing a number on the scale anymore.

And I’m not suggesting that like, oh, you’ll never lose weight or you can’t lose weight or it’s bad or wrong to lose weight. I’m not suggesting any of that. Like if your body wants to lose weight, if that’s what your body decides that it needs to do, that’s fine. It’s very different though when like that’s just your fixation all day every day.

There can be some grief letting go of that, especially if you’ve devoted so much time and energy and money to being on diets, to tracking your weight, to weighing your food, to measuring your food and tracking your points and going to Weight Watchers meetings and doing the workouts and feeling like a failure when you fall off the bandwagon and getting back on, you know, there may be grief when you’re like, that was such a waste of my time and energy and I’m going to let go of it.

It’s okay to mourn that loss. You may also have to mourn the loss of the fantasy of what Dieting and what weight loss would do for you. We’re sold on the fantasy, right? I mean, picture the before and after photos that you see. I’m envisioning this billboard that I used to drive by. And the woman looked so sad in her larger body, the before picture.

And then the after picture, she was thinner and smiling and happy and holding up her bigger pants that are too big for her now. And the implication is my life is so much better. I am happier now because of this. Here’s the hard truth. That before and after picture was a before and during. They didn’t show you the after the after when she almost certainly regained the weight that she lost.

We’re sold on the fantasy of my life will be sunshine and rainbows. My life will be a fairy tale when I lose weight. Here’s the spoiler alert. Let’s say you did achieve your dream weight or your dream size or your dream body appearance. Stuff’s still going to happen. Somebody you love is going to get cancer.

You might lose your job. Your kid might go through a terrible bout of depression or addiction. Your dog might run away from home and get run over by a car. Like, bad things are going to happen in life. Life is not just going to be amazing because you lost weight. But I think on some level, that’s what we’re yearning for.

You know, it’s like, if I can control my body, if I can control my weight, my life will be amazing, or I could handle anything if I just had the perfect body. Life is still going to be hard, regardless of your size or your shape, and on the flip side, life can be amazing. You can experience the full spectrum of emotions and experiences in life in the body that you have right now and in the body that you’ll have 5, years from now.

It doesn’t have to be contingent upon a number on the scale, so you may have to sit with the loss of that fantasy. The grief of giving up on this project that is your body and you may have to find something else that is fulfilling to you in life, something else that gives you a thing to work towards or a new skill to master, something that you can focus your time and attention on, something that challenges you, something that fulfills you.

And that’s what letting go of dieting and weight obsession can do is it opens up this space. In your life and in your brain for other things. So let’s recap those four buckets that these fears about weight gain tend to fall into. The first one is the social and relational consequences. The ways people might treat you differently or think differently about you.

The second one is that fear of losing a sense of control over your body or over your health. The third one is the fears around health specifically. And the fourth one is that fear of losing a goal or a sense of purpose and the loss of the fantasy. So, as we move through this fear, I want to talk about how do you break free and how do you actually embrace intuitive eating?

The first thing I would say is challenge those core beliefs. Consider and maybe even journal about where did you first learn that your weight determines your worth? Where did you get that messaging from? It’s all around us in our culture, for sure. But that were there also places throughout your life that you’ve gotten that from parents, doctors, coaches, family members?

What messages have you absorbed about what happens when people gain weight? Like, what are your knee jerk assumptions about that? And I want you to recognize, because it’s easy to shame ourselves for thinking this way, I want you to recognize that these beliefs were given to you and taught to you by diet culture.

You didn’t choose to think this way. You were taught to think this way. You were actually born thinking that your body was pretty wonderful and cool. I mean, if you look at a little kid, like a toddler or preschool, they think their bodies are awesome. They don’t have the judgment. In fact, I recommend you go watch a video, look this up on YouTube, it’s called 50 people, one question.

And they ask a group of adults and a group of kids this one question. The question is, if you could change anything about your body, what would it be? And this video is both fascinating and saddening and maddening and also kind of, like, warms your heart at the same time. So, I want you to watch it. It’s interesting.

The adults, they immediately know what they would change about their body. They’ve clearly spent a lot of time thinking about this. And it’s always something about their appearance. I would make my forehead smaller. I would have less wrinkles. All that time. My nose would be smaller. I’m sure for a lot of them, it’s like, I would lose weight.

And the kids, all of the kids were like, I would make my body more awesome. I would have shark fins and cheetah legs. One girl said I would change nothing. And it’s just like, gosh, when did we shift from thinking our bodies were so cool and just wanting to be even extra awesome to having this laundry list of things that we would change?

And I want you to think back, when did that shift occur for you? And why? And how can you be more accepting of your body as it is now? We also want to expose the cognitive dissonance. So cognitive dissonance is this, like, uncomfortable mismatch of the thoughts and feelings that we’re telling ourselves.

Our brain doesn’t like dissonance. Our brain wants harmony. So here, here’s what I mean by that. If weight loss was actually the key to happiness, Why didn’t you feel happier when you were thinner? When you look back on those photos of yourself when you were thinner, why weren’t you happy then, if that’s the number that’s going to make you happy?

And is there a chance that 10 or 20 years you’ll look back on the body you have now and wish that you would have been happy with it? It’s not about the number. The number does not automatically fix anything. If dieting and weight obsession were actually making you healthier, why did it make you anxious and obsessive?

And why are you binging at night when everybody else in your house is asleep? Why are you going through the drive thru when nobody’s looking? Why wasn’t the healthy eating sustainable? And this isn’t just a you thing, but this is true for the vast majority of people who diet. If this was actually making people healthier in a long lasting way, Why do most people abandon their diet and regain their weight?

And why do we see worsening health in conjunction with weight cycling? Because it’s not actually promoting health. We need to lean into these contradictions, and to acknowledge them, because it helps to loosen diet culture’s grip. Our society’s appearance standards are based on a very narrow definition of beauty, and this idea of what it looks like to be healthy, but spoiler alert, you can’t tell by looking at somebody whether or not they’re healthy.

There are plenty of people who are thin, who are not healthy, who have health conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure and high cholesterol and PCOS and, you know, all sorts of things. They have joint issues and knee issues and all of these things that get attributed to weight and said if, you know, you have to lose weight and that will go away.

There are plenty of thin people who have those conditions. There are plenty of fat people who are very metabolically healthy, who don’t have any health problems. It’s not a given just because there may be correlations. It’s not a given and we need to challenge our definition of what health looks like of what beauty looks like, because there is an abundance of data.

That shows that dieting is not making us feel better about our bodies. It’s not making us healthier. There’s an abundance of data that shows just the opposite. The math ain’t math in here. So I want you to lean into that cognitive dissonance to help challenge these thoughts and let go of it. And then you get to redefine health on your terms.

We’ve got to ditch this all or nothing approach. Health isn’t about perfect eating or a perfect body. It’s about consistency and sustainability and providing your body with what it needs. And we want to focus on health behaviors that aren’t tied to weight. Movement. Here’s something that most people don’t realize.

Being physically active is the biggest predictor of your health and your longevity. Independent of weight. Being physically active is the number one thing that will make you healthier. We can also focus on stress management. We all know that stress is bad for us. That’s going to improve our health if we work on managing our stress.

Balanced nutrition. It doesn’t have to be rigid, but we can certainly aim to provide our body with all the different food groups and all the different nutrients that we need, and we can do that without depriving ourselves. And we also need to look at our mental health and our mental well being. I have a visualization exercise for you right now.

I want you to imagine your 80 year old self. And if you’re already 80, I want you to imagine your 90 year old self. What would she tell you about how you’re living right now? What would the older, wiser version of you say about the way that you’re living right now? That would be a really beautiful thing to journal about as well.

And then I, I want to wrap up here in just a second. The last thing I want to say is get comfortable with discomfort. These fears are not going to disappear overnight. And your job isn’t to eliminate the fear around your weight gain, but it’s to stop letting the fear drive your decisions. That’s where that cognitive dissonance comes into play and some practical strategies that will help with this.

One of the number one things, this sounds obvious, but sometimes we need to say it out loud and we need to hear it again, is to buy clothing and wear clothing that fits your body right now. Even if you don’t like your body right now, you need clothing that fits your here and now body. You deserve clothing that fits your body comfortably right now.

It doesn’t mean you have to go spend thousands of dollars to get a whole new wardrobe. You may just need to get a few budget friendly pieces that are versatile. You deserve to have clothes that fit your here and now body. Another thing just very practically speaking Follow body diverse accounts online and they don’t have to be like preaching body positivity and all that It could just be a person who maybe they talk about books or something who has A different body type than yours and to show your brain and your eyeballs a wider array of bodies because if your social media feed is just full of thin people and influencers and health coaches and all of that, you’re getting this very narrow definition of what we quote unquote should look like or what normal is.

I mean, even when we’re watching TV, we’re getting a very narrow definition of bodies because most of the bodies that are cast on TV. Are conforming to society’s appearance standards, and if they’re not, often it’s because they’re playing a character that is being portrayed in a negative way because they’re at a higher weight.

So I challenge you to follow A diverse array of body types to show your brain different body types to normalize that. And then I also encourage you to set boundaries with weight focused conversations. Like opt out of those conversations in the break room at work and in your friend group. You can step away.

You could say, Hey guys, can we change the subject? You could let them know that you don’t want to talk about that anymore. You could just stay silent. There, you know, there’s different ways to navigate that, but stop playing into that and fueling your own thinking by participating in those conversations.

And when you start worrying about your weight, I encourage you to pause and ask yourself, what are you really worried about? So when you’re like, Oh my gosh, I’m going to gain weight. I want you to pause and say, why am I worried about gaining weight? You know, which of those buckets might it fall into, and can we really lean into that fear and addressing that fear directly and being curious versus just saying, okay, I’m scared about my weight, so I’m going to eat a salad for lunch, I’m going to go do my workout, and now we’re back in diet mentality and diet behaviors.

So as we’re wrapping up here, I want to reiterate, healing your relationship with food and about, and with your body isn’t about avoiding weight gain. It’s about expanding your life beyond the fear of it. And. To ponder what would change in your life if you made peace. with your body today. If you had peace with your body, what would be different?

And I want you to think about that. And I want you to cast that vision. And if you are listening to this and you’re thinking that you want to make peace with your body and you want to make peace with food and you’re still feeling like that’s a daunting task or that you need some actual structure, some guidance and strategies to help you do it, then don’t forget to go check out Non Diet Academy.

That is where I will hold your hand and walk with you for 10 weeks together. As we talk through what this looks like for the nuances of your situation in your everyday life. Because we have that much time together, I’m really able to get to know each of my clients inside and where you’re coming from and I get to help guide you.

I can go deeper in that capacity because we have that length of time in the program. So feel free to DM me if you want to have a zero pressure chat to make sure that it’s the right fit for you. And if it’s not, we could talk about what other coaching options might be. But if you’re needing more support and more guidance, non diet academy is going to be a great place for you to get that in a very practical way and with a community of others who are on the same journey.

And that is so powerful. And in case nobody has told you today, you are worthy just as you are. We’ll talk again soon.