The No Diet Diet

I was watching The Today Show this morning (as I do every morning before work) and saw a segment about "The No Diet Diet". It basically consists of intuitive eating. You eat when you're hungry, stop when you're full, and don't deny yourself anything (just eat it in moderation). After watching my mother and sisters (and many other women) torture themselves with various diets (and essentially yo-yo diet which leads to perpetual weight gain and causes detriment to your body's metabolism) for years, and after several failed attempts at calorie counting during high school (which demolished my self-esteem and my self image), I came to a critical conclusion when I came across this profoundly ironic statement: Diet is just DIE with a T on the end. I stopped "dieting" and started living when I understood that we (particularly meaning Americans) have come to think that a diet is something you go on instead of how you live. Diet and exercise...that's what determines what your body looks like and how healthy you are...and diet is a way of life. All those "diets" that come out, aren't sustainable. It has to be a lifestyle choice.

I learned to listen to my body and eat whatever my body told me, but only eating when I was feeling hungry and stopping when I was feeling nearly full (the body takes about 15 minutes before it's full to tell you it's full). I learned that it's your relationship with food that determines what you choose to put in it and kept what my father always said ("you are what you eat") at the forefront of my mind. After an important seminar about health in college (most of the important things I learned in college were not in a classroom), I started making healthy choices with food and eating by color (eat something green every day, stay away from white things [sugar, flour], and brown things [meat and other living things]), avoid processed foods (because the more a food's been handled, the fewer nutrients it has), and fried foods (I'm missing a gallbladder thanks to my pregnancy with Shorty...nevermind that fried foods are full of fat [remember, you are what you eat]). By God's grace, I've never been obese. I've been overweight before (160 lbs when I was severely depressed in 8th grade...and the same max weight when I was about to give birth to my son), but I've stuck with this philosophy since and have never carried around an excessive amount of extra weight.

I hope that sharing my philosophy (the so-called "No Diet Diet") will save many young (and older) women from the self-detriment I witnessed growing up. It's shaped (no pun intended) the way I treat my own body and my relationship with food. The funny thing about it, I was miffed when I realized I could've been rich if I'd just written the book years ago because intuitive eathing's what I've been doing for over 10 years!