For an emotional eater, giving up dieting can be terrifying. Suddenly there are no rules. You\u2019re responsible for your own food choices, and you\u2019re not sure you can be trusted. You may have struggled for years with lack of control around food. You may fear that Normal Eating can\u2019t work for you, that you don\u2019t have the ability to choose well. You may feel that the only possible way to control what you eat is through the external strictures of a diet. <\/p>\n
The culture at large reinforces this fear. If you tell someone you\u2019ve decided not to diet anymore, you’re likely to be told what a dangerous mistake you\u2019re making, how natural appetites have no natural limits, and the only way to lose excess weight is through a diet. You’ve probably been told every day of your life that you’re not competent to choose your own food.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s not true! Natural limits are part of our natural instincts. You just lose touch with your natural, internal controls when you become used to looking outside yourself for guidance. As you reconnect with yourself and learn to meet your needs in authentic ways, compulsion melts away and you are able to eat normally.<\/p>\n
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Eating normally means eating as much as you want whenever you want, but it doesn\u2019t mean eating without any limits or control. When you’re on a diet, control comes from external rules that are unrelated to hunger, satiation, or how different foods make your body feel. When you’re eating normally, controls come from within, from what your body is telling you it needs. <\/p>\n
We are born knowing how to eat normally. An infant knows when she\u2019s hungry, and knows when she\u2019s had enough. If you try to put food into the mouth of an infant who is no longer hungry, she purses her lips and moves her head from side to side to avoid the spoon.<\/p>\n
This body wisdom about what and how much you need to eat is still inside you \u2013 you just need to reconnect with it. You don\u2019t need a diet to tell you what to eat. Animals in the wild manage to get exactly the nutrition they need. Have you ever seen a fat deer in the woods? We are born with this same body wisdom.<\/p>\n
People with a history of compulsive eating are often so disconnected from their natural internal controls that they don\u2019t even know when they\u2019re hungry. A primary goal of Normal Eating is to put you back in touch with your own inner wisdom, and show you that you can trust it. (The other main goal of Normal Eating is to redirect the emotional needs behind cravings – check out the archives for more on that.)<\/p>\n
Learning to trust yourself is key in Normal Eating, and I\u2019m not just talking about eating choices. We are integrated beings. Either we trust ourselves, or we don\u2019t. If you distrust yourself in one area, you will tend to distrust yourself in all areas \u2013 food, relationships, money, or whatever.<\/p>\n
Happily, the spillover effect goes both ways. As you develop self-trust around food, you will trust yourself more in other areas. With self-trust comes self-respect, since you can\u2019t trust yourself if you don\u2019t respect yourself. And self-respect is the foundation of self-love. Just as you can\u2019t love a partner you don\u2019t respect, you can\u2019t love yourself without respecting yourself. When you love yourself, you\u2019ll take care of yourself. And when your needs are met, you won\u2019t need to self-soothe with food. It all starts with trusting yourself!<\/p>\n
Some newcomers to Normal Eating have likened the decision to stop dieting to jumping off a cliff with no parachute. But as they work through the Normal Eating stages they discover, to their surprise, that they can fly.<\/p>\n
Please post your thoughts and experiences. I’d love to hear from you!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For an emotional eater, giving up dieting can be terrifying. Suddenly there are no rules. You\u2019re responsible for your own food choices, and you\u2019re not sure you can be trusted. You may have struggled for years with lack of control around food. You may fear that Normal Eating can\u2019t work …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[13],"tags":[17,31,51],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/normaleating.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/normaleating.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/normaleating.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/normaleating.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/normaleating.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=950"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/normaleating.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/normaleating.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/normaleating.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/normaleating.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}