Katy: Well, hello, hello and welcome back to Rebuilding trust with your body. It is Katie here. And today on the show, we’re going to talk about something just a little bit heavier and a little bit more somber. Because so much of the time, it’s like the positivity of how amazing it is when you leave dieting behind.

And intuitive eating is awesome. But today, today we’re going to talk about the grief, the loss, the disappointment, the longing, the. That often comes up when you leave dieting behind. And if you have experienced any of these emotions, I really want you to know. Number one, it is normal.

Number two, it is temporary. You will move through it just like we move through the stages of grief when we lose a loved one. And number three, just because you’re feeling this way doesn’t mean that you are meant to go back to dieting. Because sometimes this is what will lure people back into some type of dieting, because they feel like they need that in order to be somehow fulfilled by the things that dieting was doing for them.

Because that’s the thing. Dieting and restriction and disordered eating, it’s not all bad on many levels. It was working for you. It just, you know, if you’re listening to this podcast, it probably got to the point where it was no longer working for you in the ways you wanted it to.

And it was having maybe m more downsides than it was upsides, but it wasn’t 100% bad. And, uh, we have to acknowledge that, that there is a sense of loss of some of the positive things that it was doing. So that is what we are going to dig into now before we go there, 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 blue glasses for weight loss. So there was this brief trend around 2008 time frame where a Japanese inventor came up with these blue tinted glasses.

It looks kind of like sunglasses with straight up blue lenses. I’m not talking about the, uh, blue light blocking lenses that we all hear about now for like the blue light from our, um, screens and devices. These are literally like blue sunglasses. And the idea is that it would make your food look like an unappetizing blue color that you’re looking through these blue sunglasses while you’re eating so that your food looks unappetizing.

And it was based on the idea that most Foods that look appetizing are in the red, yellow spectrum. And if we step back and think about this, I was like, okay, I’m trying to, like, visualize foods. And I’m like, thinking of, you know, red and yellow bell peppers. And then I was like, oh, but like, pizza, uh, and if you think about food that is blue, blue could often signify something like a mold on a food.

So it would make sense that we might be a little bit more biologically averse to something like that. So, I mean, there’s a little bit of logic to it, but the idea of intentionally making your food unappetizing so that you’ll eat less is really sad to me. And actually, I’ve known so many people, so many clients that I’ve worked with over the years who have done things like that to try to ruin their food basically, or to make food less enjoyable or frankly, in some ways, that’s what dieting does when we’re forcing ourselves to choke down these, like, nasty fake versions of food that allegedly tastes like the real thing.

Like, no, it doesn’t. That. That graham cracker with applesauce on it does not taste like apple pie, Nancy. It just doesn’t. So it’s sad and it perpetuates this idea that we can’t be trusted and our bodies can’t be trusted and that if we ate what we wanted to eat, that it would be too much, so we need to somehow make ourselves want less.

And shockingly, this trend didn’t last very long because it’s such utter nonsense and it doesn’t actually work. In fact, I had a hard time even finding references to this product and to this. This trend, if you will. I don’t even know if it’s fair to call it a trend because it clearly didn’t take off.

And, you know, there’s of course, all these blue light blocking glasses that we think of that maybe a more legitimate thing in terms of, um, our screens and being able to go to sleep at night and stuff like that. Like that is a totally separate thing. That’s not what I’m talking about here.

And I wish I could give you more details on this ridiculous trend, but they are sparse. So we’re gonna just chalk it up to a completely wacky thing that diet culture came up with in the name of weight loss that, once again, didn’t work. If you have an example of wellness.

Woo. That you’d like to share, send it my way. You can DM me on Instagram or Facebook or send me an at, uh, rebuilding trust with your bodymail.com. okay, enough of that. Moving on to today’s main topic. What no one tells you about the grief of leaving dieting behind.

We talk a lot about freedom and peace and body acceptance in intuitive eating and kind of the warm, fuzzy, fun, exciting side of it. And yes, those things are wonderful. Those things are amazing. But what so rarely gets talked about is the grief that comes with letting go of dieting.

And today we’re naming the grief, we are honoring it, we are holding space for it, and we are talking about how to move through it instead of pretending it’s not there. So some of you might be listening and you’re like, grief, what are you talking about? That sounds a little out there.

And yes, and here is why. So let’s define grief in this context. It’s, it’s not the type of. It’s different than the grief when you lose a loved one, but it’s very adjacent. So the loss here is not a person or a pet. It’s about losing part of your identity that might have been tied into, uh, dieting or a certain body type that you had.

It might be losing a belief system that you held so tightly onto. It might be about losing a, uh, coping mechanism. It might even be as you heal your relationship with food. It might even be about losing food as a friend. Sometimes food functions as a sort of friendship in our life.

So there can be a lot of loss that comes up when we leave dieting behind, when we make peace with food. And if dieting gave you a sense of purpose or control, hope, maybe it gave you a sense of belonging because it was a thing that you talked about with your mom or your sister or your aunt or your grandma or your friends or your co workers.

For women in particular, we often will bond with each other over body bashing and talking about how much we hate our thighs and how we need to go on a diet or what diet we’re on, or did you see so and so? She looks so good or so and so over here she has gained so much weight.

We center our relationship and our connection around this topic. And so if you’re not doing that anymore, you may feel a little bit like an outsider or left out or less connected. And even if dieting harmed you in many ways, there are things that you give up with it that are kind of a bummer.

Letting go of dieting also means letting go of all the false promises and all of the hope that came along with it. You’re letting go of the fantasy of what dieting was going to do for you. Because the fantasy you were sold on is that dieting and losing weight was going to make you happier, it was going to improve your life, it was going to make you more successful, people are going to like you more, people are going to respect you more, you are going to have more confidence, you’re going to have more opportunities.

And the sick thing is that in some ways that can be true because of weight stigma and anti fat bias. And so for some people, especially if uh, they were in a larger body and dieted and lost weight into a smaller body and they could really feel that difference in the way life was, there may have been some truth to that.

And that’s where we get so hooked in to this promises and these belief systems that ultimately don’t deliver on the promises, especially not in a permanent way. But it’s so hard to let go of that fantasy of what would happen if I just did it right and I just tried hard enough and I just had the right type of diet that I could lose weight and keep it off and my life would be all better, I would feel better and everything else would fall into place.

That’s the fantasy that we are sold. I have had several clients inside of my programs recently say to me that they didn’t realize until we dug into it and peeled back the layers what a grip that diet culture still has on their thoughts about food, their behaviors and the way that their self esteem is so intertwined with their weight.

And that is because we have just been bombarded with and indoctrinated into this belief system for our entire lives. I also talked about this topic of grief and dieting back in episode 119 with Aaron Kinzel. So I’m going to link to that episode in the show notes because she does such a beautiful job of articulating how she aim to conceptualize and understand grief as it related to giving up dieting and healing her relationship with food and with her body.

I also recommend that you check out Brie Campos on Instagram. She talks about a framework that she has developed called body grief. And it specifically is grief around your body and around your weight. And she has entire programs built around this and it’s, it’s truly just incredible. So if we look at grief in this context as being very similar to and parallel to those stages of grief that we’re all familiar with from death and dying, from Elisabeth Kubler Ross, it’s the denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.

And they’ve added a sixth one. I don’t know within recent decades making, um, meaning. So let me walk you through this real quick of how it shows up with intuitive eating and with ditching dieting. So denial is thinking, well, maybe I can eat intuitively and lose weight, or I’ll just lose weight first and then I’ll do this intuitive eating thing.

Or thinking, the only way that I can ever be happy and healthy is through dieting. Anger might be, why did I waste so many years on dieting? Why did I waste so much time, so much money? Why did I buy into so many lies? Why did I damage my metabolism so much when I thought I was doing the right thing to get healthier?

There is a lot of different anger that can come up when you start to realize when the, the wool is pulled away from your eyes and you start to see things more clearly. You can and should be angry about some of the lies that diet culture has told us.

Sometimes the anger can also be at, you know, a parent or a doctor who made you feel like you needed to go on a diet or that your body wasn’t good enough, or a coach. Maybe the anger can sometimes be towards diet culture itself. And that can actually be really productive where it’s like, yeah, we’re going to take a stand against this absolute BS that we’ve been subjected to.

Next phase is bargaining. Maybe you start thinking, well, maybe I’ll just cut back a little. Like, I’ll still do intuitive eating, but I’m just going to cut back. Or I’m going to do dessert less often, or I’m going to, uh, not drink as many of my calories and so you stop getting your favorite coffee drink or something like that.

Or maybe you think, I’m just going to lose weight the healthy way. I’m not going to diet, I’m just going to do it the quote unquote healthy way. It’s a form of bargaining. Then comes depression, which is where you might start to have thoughts like, okay, I guess I’m just stuck.

This is it. I just have to settle for this being my body and I’m going to be miserable for my whole life. Or you might feel depression in the sense of, if I’m not trying to lose weight, then who even am I? Acceptance. Where is, where you finally get past, uh, all of the, these other phases and you can think, you know, I still don’t love everything about this.

You know, sometimes I, I don’t feel the best in my body or about my body, or I feel a little guilty about food, but, but I’m not going back like, this is what it is, and I’m going to keep working on it and I’m going to take care of my body, even when I might still kind of wish it were different, because that makes sense.

I still live in a society that believes in all of those things, but I accept that this is my body. I accept that dieting does not work and is never going to work. And therefore I am going to keep plugging away at this. And, uh, keep in mind, these stages aren’t linear.

It’s not like you’ll just move from one to the other. You may bounce around, you may cycle back through them. You might have one foot in one stage and one foot in another at times. But when you get to that place of acceptance and you can really sink down in there, you will start to feel this sense of inner peace that is just.

It’s kind of hard to articulate. And that is why we often see people moving into that, that newer phase that has been talked about in the literature around grief, which is making meaning. And that is where you might take your experience and you might start sharing with people in your life or becoming an advocate for why dieting doesn’t work, or standing up against anti fat bias.

Or you might start sharing articles on your social media about intuitive eating or about weight stigma. You might, um, get involved in organizations that help people to be more kind and accepting towards themselves. You might start raising your kids differently than you were raised. And. Breaking those generational cycles of dieting, there’s so many ways that that can play out.

Uh, you don’t have to become some type of, like, coach or evangelist, but there are ways that maybe you do have this ripple effect in the world and you can make meaning of that for yourself. And that’s really cool. You don’t have to. You’re not obligated to do that.

But for some people, that is a really healing aspect of it. The, the next thing I want to talk about is what it is that you’re grieving. When you’re experiencing this type of grief around dieting. You’re not grieving the food itself. You’re grieving what the dieting represented. And so it’s not even the diet itself that you’re grieving.

It’s what it represented. It was the, uh, fantasy and the hope that a thinner body would finally earn you love, approval, confidence, success, success, all of these things. And a lot of us developed that, that someday fantasy along with it. Where you’ll think, when I lose weight, then I will fill in the blank, Then I will sign up for that online dating website, then I will apply for a new job, then I will get in the pool with my kids, then I will start walking my dog in the neighborhood, then I will take a dancing class.

There’s so many ways that we limit our life and postpone our life because of our body shame. And dieting sells us, uh, on this idea that, like, oh, you’re going to be able to do all of the things, you’re going to be able to be who you want to be and have everything you want to have when you are thin.

And therefore, you need to buy this diet program and all these diet products that go with it. And the grief can feel like you are giving up on a dream, that you’re giving up on yourself, that you’re giving up on your life, even though it was never real. It was fantasy.

And when you start to realize that that fantasy, it was like a mirage in the desert. It wasn’t really there. You were going to keep chasing it for forever. You start to realize that you can chase your actual dreams now in the body that you have. You can sign up for the dating website in your here and now body.

I have had numerous clients who finally stopped dieting, stopped focusing on weight loss, went ahead and started dating. They are now married and have children in the same body that they started with. It did not require weight loss. I have had numerous clients who have, you know, taken the vacation, who have had the professional photos done, who have gotten the new job, who have made new friends, started new hobbies, have done all the things, had the life experiences and the adventures in their here and now body.

And when you start living as if your here and now body is worthy of these things, you are going to see that you were worthy all along. And again, I’m m not negating the fact that fatphobia and anti fat bias still exists 1 million percent that is real. And by buying into that lie, it just perpetuates it for you.

So you get to choose what you want to do in your body, with your time, with your life. And you don’t have to follow this arbitrary set of rules set by diet culture, wellness culture, fitness culture, beauty culture that just wants your money, that you know, these, these industries want you to feel inadequate about yourself so that they can solve your quote unquote problem that they made you believe that you have.

There can also be some grief about food in the sense that you might find that food doesn’t offer you the comfort that it once did, or that you realize that when you’re truly honoring what your body needs, when you’re listening to your hunger fullness, that you actually need more food or less food than you used to think you did.

There can be some grief about that, that the food doesn’t fulfill you in such a way that maybe it used to or that you want it to. And that can be kind of a bummer. But when that happens, it is a good indicator that food is taking its place as just one important part of your life.

It’s not taking excessive import anymore. And that, my friend, is progress. Grief can feel like an emptiness and a disconnection. And that’s where it tends to get scary for people. Many women will ask me, they’ll say, katie, if I’m not dieting, then what do I do with my time and my thoughts and my goals?

And it’s a rhetorical question. They’re just like, wow, I did not realize how much time and energy I was putting towards that. And. And so they do start to ponder like, uh, what do I want to do with my life when I’m not obsessing about food anymore, when I am not obsessing about my body in my unchallenge, we look at who you are outside of your body’s appearance and who you are outside of being known as the person who’s always on a diet or the person who is a healthy eater or the foodie or the fit person if those parts of Your identity are stripped away.

Who are you? That can be a really terrifying question to ask because a lot of us have put a lot of our self worth, have, have hung our self worth on those things. And with this identity void that dieting leaves behind, you now have space for something real and meaningful.

We’ve now created breathing room in your life for you to connect with other things that you value, whether it be relationships, hobbies, your pets, your kids, your job. Some other sense of purpose that you might find in life gets bigger when you stop obsessing about how to make your body smaller and part of you might miss dieting.

You might be like, I kind of liked it. It gave me, you know, uh, a sense of control. I didn’t have to think as hard about food. I didn’t have to make decisions for myself. I just had to follow the plan. And if you do miss certain aspects of dieting, that doesn’t make you weak.

It doesn’t mean you’re just letting yourself go if you’re not doing that anymore. It also doesn’t mean that you need to jump back on the dieting bandwagon. I’m going to say it louder for the people in the back. Missing dieting doesn’t mean that you want to go back or that you should go back.

It just means that it meant something to you. And that’s valid. You don’t have to pretend that it didn’t. Grief often shows up as a longing, especially in the hard moments when you have bad body image days. And especially, I think we’re vulnerable when we’re feeling bad about our body and we’re like, oh, this is so hard.

It wasn’t this hard when I was dieting. And we will forget about the really awful parts of dieting. It’s like we’ll romanticize it. And that’s when we start to become more vulnerable to getting sucked back in. So that longing may show up for you in those hard moments when you’re having a bad body image day, or when you put on your pants and they’re too tight and here comes the body image spiral along with it.

Acknowledge that feeling without making it mean that you need to jump in and do something to change or fix your body, because that gets you right back into that diet mentality. You have to give yourself permission to do the grieving. I mean, uh, that’s just like when we lose a loved one.

Grief shows up differently. It’s on its own timeline. You can’t control it. Sometimes it hits you at weird, unexpected times and you gotta give yourself permission to grieve on this journey too. You don’t have to be positive all the time about intuitive eating and about your relationship with food.

I know that the social media version of it is all, you know, cupcakes and donuts and woohoo, food, freedom, blah, blah, blah. It’s okay to be sad and angry and confused too. Grieving is an act of honoring your experience, not wallowing in it. I want to give you a journaling exercise here, and then we’ll.

We’ll wrap up in just a sec. So I want you to plan on taking about 15 to 20 minutes to sit down and you’re going to do a brain dump. You’re going to do a brain dump of all the things that you liked about dieting, all of the positive things it did for you.

Like I said, it did some positive things for you. Maybe it helped you feel in control. Maybe it helped you cope. Maybe it did help you lose weight and then you felt better for yourself when your weight was lower. Maybe it helped you to not have to think as much about food, whatever it did for you.

Then I want you to make a list of all of the hard parts about dieting, why it wasn’t sustainable, the ways in which it took away your joy. Like get deeply honest with yourself. Like the weird things you did, like taking food out of the trash to take a bite of it, or secretly hiding the wrappers of things that you ate that wasn’t on your diet and you didn’t want to be judged for it.

It’s. We all have these deep, dark secrets of the weird things we did when we were dieting, because dieting makes us a little bit crazy, because it goes so hard against our biology, your body sees it as a threat. So think about that. List some of those hard parts of dieting.

And then I want you to also write down what made you decide to stop. There was a reason you decided to stop. If it was all sunshine and rainbows, you would not be listening to this episode right now. There is a reason you stopped dieting. The next thing I want you to do is make a list of the positive sides that you have experienced or that you hope to experience with intuitive eating.

And then I want you to list some of the hard parts, because intuitive eating is also not all sunshines and rain, sunshine and rainbows. So list the hard parts of it as well. And once you have these four lists of the good and the bad of both dieting and not dieting, I want you to just look at Those lists.

I want you to review those lists and just sit with it. Allow yourself to feel the grief over how hard all of it is. The grief of the things you’ve lost to dieting, of how it got you so disconnected with your body and that it’s hard to just eat intuitively because it might sound simple.

Oh, just go eat intuitively. That sounds like it should be so easy and intuitive and instinctual, right? But it’s not because dieting got us so messed up. I want you to let yourself sit with that and feel that and validate it. I also want you, while we’re talking about writing exercises and sitting with this, I also want you to grab a copy of my Body Kindness journal pages if you don’t already have them.

It’s called the Daily three. And the idea is that each day you go through this quick five minute process of checking in with yourself and then you identify three things that you can do to be kind to your body that day. And that is really going to help you.

It’s going to give you something to cling on to on the days that the grief feels big and heavy. So go grab the Body Kindness Journal. It’s totally free. It’s@non dietacademy.com body kindness. I’ll put that in the show notes as well. And let’s cast a, a future vision forward from here.

What is waiting for you on the other side of grief? Peace with food, with your body, with yourself as a human being presence. You will, you will be more present in your everyday life. One of my, my um, previous non Diet Academy clients, she recently told me, she said the food freedom that you’ve given me is insane.

And I love how she was just like celebrating that. But, but she also said in this message that her personality has blossomed through this process and the people in her life have noticed. It is not uncommon for my clients to tell me that their relationships with their partner or with their kids and with their friends gets better when they’re not dieting anymore because they’re, they’re able to be their them, their true selves.

They’re not being so rigid about food. They’re not avoiding certain situations. They’re not obsessing about it all the time. They’re being their authentic selves and they’re able to be more spontaneous, fun, joyful, authentic and it’s more connecting, it’s real connection. On the other side of grief is also a deeper relationship with your body and with yourself.

And there’s a lot of wisdom that comes with that. And it doesn’t mean you just feel happy and wonderful all the time. It allows you to feel the entire spectrum of emotions and it allows you to be more deeply connected with your wants, your needs, your feelings and your wisdom and your experience of life itself.

None of this is instant, but it is so much more sustainable and life giving than dieting ever was or will be. So I want you to keep that in mind. It’s not an easy path. I do not sugarcoat things around here. I do not make false promises and I am not going to sell you this as a quick fix.

But what I will tell you is it is worth it to put the time and effort and energy into this because it will heal you in ways beyond just food and your body image. It will heal you at the core of your soul. Because so much of why we hate our bodies and want to diet and shrink them in the first place has to do with with a deep sense of shame and not being good enough.

And when you heal that wound within you, so much changes. It’s so powerful. And I want you to know you are not broken for feeling any of these things, these feelings that we talked about today. It is all normal and it is all part of your healing process. And if you’re feeling this grief, it’s not a sign that you’re doing it wrong.

It’s a sign that you’re being honest. And that’s powerful. So if you’re grieving right now, be gentle with yourself. You’re not going backwards. You are letting go of what no longer serves you. And even though it hurts, this grief is proof that you are moving towards something better and something more real.

You don’t have to do it perfectly. There is no such thing as perfect. You just have to keep going. You can’t fail if you don’t quit. That’s my motto. Don’t forget to grab the Body Kindness Journal on your way out here. It’s at nondietacademy.com forward slash, bodykindness. Just go to the web page, enter your email, I’ll send it right over and you can dig in with that.

That is going to be such an incredible tool to help you as you are working through all of this. And in case nobody has told you today, you are worthy just as you are. We’ll talk again soon.

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