Joseph
This month, millions of Americans will start 2020 by the Reset the diet. The healthiest – and leanest – version of ourselves will only be achieved through controlling our eating habits. Especially when it comes to carbohydrates and sugar. Or so we think.
But a radical new approach to health is gaining momentum, too. It’s called intuitive eating. Stick to your green drink because it goes against everything we’ve learned about health and weight loss. It is the opposite of wellness programs from Keto to me Intermittent fasting to me “Clean eating. “
Intuitive eating assumes that the best diet is to not diet at all. Instead of strict dietary rules, we should control our innate desires to eat what we want, when we want. While it sounds like a crazy fad diet, research is growing to support its benefits.
For one thing, diets never work: 95 percent Of people who lose weight on diet regain it within five years. comprehensive a study The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey published in November 2019 found that although more Americans are trying to lose weight primarily by controlling food consumption, body mass indexes and obesity rates continue to rise.
But the problems go beyond traditional weight-loss programs. The pursuit of the “perfect diet” is itself a potential health risk. Clean eating, for example, emphasizes local, organic, non-GMO, unprocessed, and plant-based foods. But the focus on avocado, coconut oil, and quinoa while demonizing processed foods takes healthy eating to a serious extent. According to June 2019 a study In the Journal of Eating Disorders, the popularity of clean eating among college students belies its ability to eat disturbed, or nervous orthorexia.
As a food magazine editor in the mid-2000s, Kristi Harrison wrote about the gluten-free and low-carb lifestyle, thinking she was promoting healthy food options. But at home, she was troubled. “I had an inappropriate number of rice cakes to try to get the satisfaction I would have had if I allowed myself to have a sandwich on the bread,” she told HuffPost.
Now a registered dietitian on the Food Psych podcast, Harrison is leading a counter-revolution against diet culture. Her new book, “Anti-diet, It’s a removal from the $ 60 billion weight-loss industry plus a detoxification that celebrities have passed and well-intentioned environmental food rules they call “deceptive forms of dieting.”
Based on deprivation, diets not only lead to nutritional obsessions and binges, but they lead to greater losses. She said, “You start to see that he’s actually not giving you what you want, and taking away a lot of important aspects of your life – your time and money, your well-being, your happiness.”
According to Harrison and a growing chorus of holistic health practitioners, the antidote is intuitive eating.
The brainchild of registered dietitians Evelyn Triball and Elise Risch in the mid-1990s, he was 10 principles Intuitive eating is designed to heal our relationship with food and our bodies. “The journey to intuitive eating is like taking a long hiking trip across the country,” the authors write.Intuitive eating. “Unlike dieting, the process is non-linear and personal with a non-judgmental focus on wellness, not weight loss.
This concept resonates with the body positivity movement, including movement Health in every volumeAnd recently it sparked a new brand of Instagrammers like Embed a Tweet And the @ Olive.eeeats Demonstration of the Anti-Diet Way of Life.
But let’s go back. If intuitive eating relies on our internal eating cues, can we really trust ourselves?
“Eating is key to human survival,” Virginia Journalist Saul Smith told HuffPost. Author of a bookEating instinct“ I found convincing evidence that we were all born with a set of instincts to eat and self-regulate our food intake. Even young children do this. The problem begins when we grow up in a culture that replaces comfort and pleasure around food with feelings of guilt, shame and fear. “We are so convinced that eating the wrong things will make us fat,” she said.
You can blame the diet industry, but Sole-Smith, along with Harrison, blames the natural food movement. Over the course of 20 years, efforts to invoke environmental, social and ethnic grievances in the food system have demonized industrial food as “bad” and “dirty”. And if we choose to eat it, we are just unhealthy by pairing it up.
While it looks good to live on chia yogurt, turmeric, and chickpea curry, it is not sustainable for most people. “I think the pressure to eat as cleanly, completely and naturally as possible is fatiguing people,” said Saul Smith.
Sure, it’s a scary idea to trust our own eating instincts. We’re afraid of losing control, but Sole-Smith said, “You won’t want to eat cake day in and day out, because your body will crave something different after a while.”
Search supported. Body image and eating behavior researcher at Ohio State University, Tracy El Tilka, has conducted large-scale studies evaluating three key components of intuitive eating: eating for physical rather than emotional reasons, the unconditional permission to eat, and reliance on cues of hunger and satiety. she Concludes That iBeginners “perceive and trust cues of hunger and inner satiety in their bodies and use these cues to determine when and how much to eat.”
Current search It indicates that intuitive eaters are less likely to overeat, have a lower BMI, and have the least eating disorder. They also feel more physical appreciation, self-compassion, and optimism as well as increased self-esteem.
It seems, after all, that you are Not What are you eating. For people like me who have lived through clean eating, it’s hard to let go of old ideas about good and bad food. But did anyone benefit from exposing food?
For everyone ready for a drastic change in the next decade, Sole-Smith offers a simple anti-diet challenge: Dare to enjoy your food.
“You really can’t have a healthy relationship with food if you can’t enjoy the food,” she added.
.
