At a party I recently saw a friend who I hadn’t seen for almost a year. She had lost a lot of weight and was being praised for the achievement by all the women at the party. With my history of rapid weight loss, crash dieting, binge eating and excessive exercising I stayed silent. I wasn’t jealous (I swear) but it just didn’t feel right to congratulate her.
I’ve actually put on about 20 lbs in the past eighteen months and I’m still coming to terms with how my body feels since I quit dieting. I’ve immersed myself in an online world where it’s OK to have lumps, bumps and visible cellulite. It’s also OK to be thin and not have boobs, wide hips or a bubble butt. I believe all body shapes are acceptable and should be represented in the media.
When I meet women who still praise each other for weight loss I feel icky. In my opinion weight loss itself doesn’t make you beautiful, nor does it deserve a “well done” sticker. Weight loss may lead to a healthier lifestyle, more confidence and self-love but that isn’t attainable purely from calorie restriction. It comes from learning to accept yourself warts and all.
In celebration of National No Diet Day which takes place on May 6th, I wanted to speak to online fitness babe Carly Rowena. She’s someone who promotes an exercise regime, balanced diet and above all self-acceptance for what your body looks like at all times.
In the online fitness world there is SO much pressure to appear lean, muscular and eat a clean diet and I’m impressed that Carly cuts through the bullshit and gets honest with her audience. She’s often captured eating chocolate, ice cream and pizza and will express candidly the negative feelings she’s had towards her own body in the past.
When I asked Carly about diet culture in social media she spoke about the importance of being upfront with her viewers;
“I think there is a lack of honesty to a degree, we need to remind people that we don’t eat like that all the time. That’s why I enjoy Insta-stories, it’s a chance to show a behind the scenes. I always try to share my clean days and my relaxed days, honesty is the only way forward”.
As someone who has always dieted, I’m curious whenever a new brand comes to market promising to deliver the best plan for optimal health and fast weight loss. Even if I don’t follow the plan I’m still interested in the science behind new fad diets and how they claim to work. However, Carly promises there is no one perfect diet that will work for everyone;
“We are all individuals so how can we ever all have the same results from the same diet? I recommend people really think about what they want, how they want to live and what they can afford both to give and to spend. Most people just need to make a few adjustments, swaps if you will. We need to stop thinking about our bodies as something we have to keep changing, we need to think about our lives and want we want our bodies to be able to do”.
Dieting has often left me with the overwhelming urge to binge. I would restrict my calories to 1000 per day, only consuming foods which I deemed ‘safe’ such as salad, fruit and vegetables. After a few weeks the urge consumed me and I would eat up to 5000 calories in the space of an hour to satisfy my hunger. The binges continued for days at a time before I forced myself to restrict again, only to result in an inevitable binge eating episode a few weeks down the line.
“Take a step back, rethink what you want from your life. Are you trying to be a bikini competition or an athlete? If the answer to both is no, then why are you trying to diet or train like one? Most of my clients are under-eating which is why they’re forever struggling to reach their goals. Top tip is to write own your food for a week and find out exactly what you’re eating, how many calories, are you getting enough fats, proteins, carbs or fibre, then you have a starting point from which you can make adjustments”.
I’ve found keeping a food diary is a great way to analyse your behaviour if you feel like food is ruling your life. I’ve learned that urge to binge often comes during a stressful time in my life, or after a period of restrictive eating and now I feel more equipped to deal with those urges when they arise.
The biggest thing I’ve learned is that ultimately dieting doesn’t work for me. It works on the surface and I can easily drop pounds by making a few simple changes to my food intake but the damage done to my mental state lasts longer and has been a challenge to rectify.
I’m glad that people like Carly Rowena are talking about the realities of over-restriction and the negative affects of dieting. There’s no shame in simply eating for health, exercising for fun and focusing on loving your body as it is!
Will you be celebrating National No Diet Day on May 6th?
I’ve seen my anxiety start to level off in the last twelve months, after struggling to cope with it everyday for over five years. Like many of you, I was particularly anxious about work and social interactions. I’ve always been happy to go to the gym, walk around town and use pubic transport all on my own, but facing big groups or social situations has always been a trigger for me.
As my depression has slowly become less prevalent I’ve found my anxiety also become easier to manage. Can I get a ‘hell yeah’? Along with medication and therapy I’ve also found that eliminating a few bad habits from my routine has really helped me take control of my anxious mind.
Although not completely cured (is that ever really a possibility? I’m not sure) I’m happy to say I can now face most social interactions with a positive attitude. Here are a few bad habits I’ve given up along the way…
1. Drinking too much alcohol
I gave up booze a few years ago after my GP told me I couldn’t drink whilst taking anti-depressants. In all honesty, I continued to get drunk for several months into my treatment before I took the advice on board and went completely tee-total.
I drank to excess and was making my situation considerably harder to bear. Lots of people around me were telling me to loosen up and enjoy a few drinks -as though that could cure my low mood – but I knew deep down I was using it as a crutch.
Since going without alcohol for a full year I’ve dabbled in drinking now and again. When my anxiety is bad I often consider having a drink to ease my nerves, but thankfully I’ve not felt the need to self-medicate in that way.
The truth is that even one drink can trigger a depressive episode for me and that then leads to an increase in my anxiety. Living without alcohol means I’ve more in control of my moods so it’s a no brainer really.
2. Relying on caffeine
I’ve loved drinking coffee ever since I started working in cafes when I was seventeen. You would think being a barista all week would make me sick of it but I think it make be more addicted. Having the good stuff on tap at all times has been a temptation that I’ve given in to for years, knocking back between two and ten espresso shots every day to keep me energized.
Walking into the welcoming smell of freshly ground coffee beans feels like home to me. It’s so familiar that I gravitate towards it when I need pick me up or some down time.I’ve always been quite sensitive to caffeine, so I felt like giving it up was something that would definitely help.
I often get the shakes and butterflies in my stomach after too many cups. Considering my anxiety symptoms are very similar, intentionally bringing them on with coffee seemed like a silly thing to do.
I made the switch to decaf about six months ago and I’ve really not missed my caffeine fix at all. My favourite drink when I’m out is a decaf soya latte, and when I’m at home I love Percol Decaf Columbia which you can pick up in most supermarkets.
3. Restricting my food intake
I always thought my approach to healthy eating was having a positive impact on my life, but recently I’ve realised that it contributed a lot to my anxiety.
I’ve always been on some sort of crash diet or eating plan which dictated a set of rules to follow for weight loss. This meant whenever I ate out at a restaurant or at someone’s house I was constantly about what I would be able to eat.
I was forever scouring the internet for menus, asking people to cook specific food, requesting we go to a certain restaurant or avoiding eating all day in order to save enough calories to indulge at night.
Not only did this put pressure on my mind because of all the extra stress and willpower involved, but the lack of calories put my body through hell. My blood sugar was all over the place and I wasn’t fuelling myself properly to do all the exercise I loved. I was always tired and aching all over which meant I wasn’t recovering properly. I had brain fog, was always very tightly wound and I snapped and people because I was so hungry all the time.
I started eating intuitively a few years ago and of course I gained some weight. That made me really upset, so I went back to dieting. It wasn’t until 2016 that I truly began listening to my body and follow the Intuitive Eating guidelines; eating when hungry and stopping when full.
I now find my anxiety around food has almost completely gone, although I’ll admit I still get a little worried when I have to eat whilst travelling. However, this is an ongoing project for me and one that I’m committed to working on to create a more balanced relationship with food. I absolutely support the Intuitive Eating method especially if you’ve had a history of anxiety around food, or been a yo-yo dieter for years. It really is a great piece of writing which can help retrain your brain to properly respond to hunger cues again, the way your body is supposed to.
The great news for you guys is that the Intuitive Eating book is now available on Audible, which means you can listen to the book whilst you walk, do your household chores or relax in the evening. If you haven’t downloaded the Audible app then give it a go using the link above. The first month is free – like completely and utterly free – then you only pay £7 a month. Even then, you can cancel at any time and still retain all the downloads on your device. It really is awesome!
Have you given up any bad habits in order to improve your mental health?
Since ditching the dieting lifestyle that gave me the ‘perfect’ body and a twisted mindset, I’ve made a conscious effort to redefine what beautiful means to me. I’ve retrained my brain to realise that not everyone can or should look the same.
We can’t all have a tiny waist, a big perky butt, a generous bosom and golden, cellulite-free skin. The constant quest to be a bit skinnier, more toned and overall more aesthetically pleasing to others is exhausting. I wondered if maybe I could use that energy trying to love myself the way I am, instead of picking apart every flaw I saw in the mirror.
So decided to take action and unfollow any accounts on Instagram that made me feel bad about myself. It’ll come as no surprise to you that Instagram is a big player in how I construct my idea of beauty in the modern world. I’m sure it is for you too, even if you don’t realise it.
I thought following fitspo accounts (FYI I am an avid gym-goer) were good motivation for me. I thought looking at their chiselled abs and jiggle-free triceps everyday would make me workout harder and stick to my low-calorie diet with ease. I thought I was tapping into an endless source of will power; just what I needed if I was going to succeed at creating my dream body. Unfortunately, all it was really doing was convincing me that my body would never be good enough.
It’s not that slim, toned, Caucasian female bodies shouldn’t be inspirational. Every body needs representation. It’s that they shouldn’t be the only type of body we see in mainstream media. It might be inspirational to someone else, but to me it was an unattainable goal that was damaging my self-esteem and mental health. We all need people to look up to, but the pool available to us has become rather exclusive in my opinion. You only have to look at a magazine stand to see that there is a certain type of ‘look’ that gets to bask in the glory of front-page status.
I choose to follow women who are fuller-figured, because that’s similar to my own body shape. When I’m feeling crap about myself I want to scroll through my Instagram feed and see Megan belly-dancing in her underwear and Grace talking about her lopsided boobs, because that shit gives me life. It’s relatable. It makes me feel worthy.
So I’ve surrounded myself with women who don’t normally get media attention, but I forget that the rest of the world hasn’t caught up yet. Every now and again I catch sight of a new celebrity promoting laxatives to teenage girls, or hear that the latest Kardashian show is grotesquely named ‘Revenge Body’, and my heart breaks for the pain and torment our young women are forced to go through as the result of what is forced down their throats.
The good thing with social media is that if we want to, we can control what we see. Don’t like it? Unfollow. Easy. Unfortunately it works both ways and we only see what our Instagram idols want us to see.
The fit-chicks show you their bulging biceps and monstrous pancake towers stuffed with Oreos and Reese’s Pieces. They don’t show you the 5am starts, sleep deprivation, endless cardio and egg-white-only omelettes they endure 90% of the time to achieve their look. I adore images of real women sat in their underwear exposing their tummy rolls. It’s not until I spot the caption underneath – explaining how they felt fat, ugly and reluctant to even share the picture with their fans – that I realise even Instagram-famous girls have insecurities.
The truth is that neither of these images is better than the other. There are the preened models like Ashley Graham who show us that plus-size women can wear designer clothes and walk on catwalks. Then there are the ladies like Melissa who show themselves rocking mini-skirts in the bacon isle . Both are equally important. They are showing the world that we can be whoever we want to be.
The power of what Instagram can do is down it it’s users. We can continue to filter the shit out of everything or we can start posting real images like Kenzie Brenna. She started a campaign called Cellulite Saturday and it’s one of the most fantastic acts of positivity I’ve seen. She actively encourages others to share pictures of their own cellulite and they did.
Guess what? No one dropped down dead at the site of dimpled legs and bums on their screens! Women can be real and authentic and beautiful and empowered all at the same time!
Without Instagram that may not have been possible, so we should be grateful for that. With more women using social media to make their voices heard and their supposedly imperfect bodies represented, who knows where we’ll end up? I know for one I’ll be using it as a tool to spread the word that we all deserve to love our bodies, no matter what.
I’ve been on a diet for the last ten years and I’m so exhausted from it all. I got thin. Now I’m a bit chubby. Life goes on. There are so many worries in the world that I don’t have the will power to count calories and fight cravings any more. I’m free.
The hard truth is that it’s not that easy to free yourself from dieting. I’ve trained my brain to see foods in a certain light, to view exercise as punishment and to see clothes size as a way to categorise beauty. I was a serial dieter for such a long time, and looking back now the habits that I formed were very strange indeed. I know I’m not alone either; because magazines, books and slimming clubs everywhere have created little subcultures of calorie-counting women who all practice similar behaviours. Here is a humorous look at the things that only a serial dieter will understand…
1.Buying two miniature bottles of wine instead of one full sized bottle because it’s the only way you can exert self-control on a Friday night. This almost always results in a late night dash to the corner shop for a full size bottle after consuming said miniatures. Cue hangover.
2. Eating only vegetables throughout the day so that you can eat a very specific amount of cheese later on. This means being hungry all day as well as bloated and gassy from all the vegetables. At least you get your romantic moment with 40g of cheddar.
3. Spending money on diet magazines because you need ‘motivation’. You may also seek so-called ‘motivation’ from buying clothes that are too small in order to give you something to work towards. This never works.
4. Buying branded diet ready meals to make life easier when you’d rather eat a piece of cardboard smothered in peanut butter. The ready meal will undoubtedly be chucked in the bin in favour of some Warburtons Thins which are equally as disappointing.
5. Knowing the exact number of calories in a tablespoon of peanut butter and knowing that you could never just have one. Smirking with glee when you see the peanut butter sachets now available and shamelessly licking the packet clean on several occasions.
6. The obsession with stocking up on things that are labelled 100 calories or less. Muller Light Yoghurts and Special K Bars are your favourite, and your blood sugar levels are being carefully controlled hour by hour by these bad boys.
7. Living on diet drinks and espressos in between meals to distract from hunger pangs and keep your energy up. This leads to the odd migraine but you find more caffeine tends to sort that out in a jiffy.
8. How exciting it is when you’re going out for dinner, and you find that the restaurant’s website provides calorie information for every meal they sell. Obviously you can’t eat a full meal, but an interesting combination of two starters and a side salad with no dressing should just about suffice. Then a good long sniff of your friend’s chocolate pudding.
9.Refusing to buy clothes from H&M because their sizes come up small and you KNOW you’re no bigger than an 18. New Look are more forgiving so let’s stick with them.
10. Looking in the mirror and thinking you look pretty good today, only to have a rude awakening when you step on the scales to find that you weigh exactly the same as yesterday. How can this be? The detox starts today.
All joking aside, isn’t it time we all started forgetting about the calories in our food and instead concentrated on nutrition? Shouldn’t be be eating fatty avocados and avoiding sugary cereal bars? Isn’t it obvious that ‘diet’ foods are often void of the amount of energy we need to sustain a healthy lifestyle?
In fact, the low calorie plans most of us try to stick to are destined for failure from the outset. Maybe not instant failure, but inevitably these crash diets are unrealistic for most people. Let’s all rejoice in the fact that we live in a part of the world where we actually have enough food to eat, and work on retraining our brains to pick the best of the bunch.
As I sit here with a belly full of porridge and and nice strong coffee in front of me, it’s easy not to think about food. Well when I say easy, it’s not consuming my thoughts like it often does during every waking moment of my life. In fact, forget the ‘every waking moment’ crap because I regularly dream about what I’m going to eat for breakfast (usually some sort of pancake affair lovingly decorated with blueberries) only to wake up late and grab an under-ripe banana on the way out the door.
As I was saying; I’m currently not obsessing over food. I know I’m not alone when I say that this rarely happens and it’s a pretty hard state of mind to achieve on purpose. I’m among the millions of young women who have spent their teenage and adult lives separating foods into categories such as;
good, bad, calorie free, post-workout only, post-goal weight only, weekend only, carb free, fat free, good fat, bad fat (these are the tastiest), emotional crutch and I’m on my period so screw you world
…..and so on. I’ve been conditioned (partly through my own doing) to label foods, or at least see them in a certain way so as to choose the best ones to lose weight. I’ve read a lot of diet books (Atkins, GI diet, carb-cycling, Scottish slimmers, 5:2) and the cumulative effect of this has been an information overload.
The truth is that all of these diets work (short term at least, I don’t recommend any of them) but only on their own. You can’t retain all that knowledge and apply it all at once as it simply won’t work.
Correction: it might work but will leave you nutritionally deficient and acting fucking mental because you’re deprived of anything substantial. Have you ever eaten condiments because you’re craving pure flavour? This is real people, I’ve eaten onion chutney straight out of the jar.
I’ve read that I need to eat low fat, low carb, lean protein, grain-free, gluten-free and sugar-free to get ripped. Let me tell you, that doesn’t leave a lot of tasty food on offer. I’ve lived a life comprised of eggs, chicken, broccoli and NO FRUIT for crying out loud. If that doesn’t make you run screaming for the ice cream isle then nothing will.
That’s the point I’m getting at here. The more you focus on what you can’t eat, the more you want it. It’s simply inevitable that you will fall off the wagon and eat the food you’re not supposed to. The act of eating the forbidden fruit isn’t the problem though – it’s the affect this has on your mental state. You feel guilty, unhealthy and like you’ve failed at life.
But what if there were no good or bad foods? What if we just forgot about food entirely until our bodies signalled to us that they were hungry? What if we learned to listen to what our bodies craved and found out that it wasn’t really garlic bread after all?
I believe I’m on the path to figuring that shit out. I’m trying to embrace all foods for all their beauty. Avocados are no longer relegated to the ‘high calorie’ pile. They are now my go-to food when I need an energy boost of B vitamins, amino acids and anti-oxidants. They are a great fat source that leave me feeling satisfied and satiated.
Carbs are no longer the enemy. If I’m craving that kind of food I choose the best version I can, instead of avoiding it altogether and caving in later with a bag of Doritos and a bar of Dairy Milk. My carbs of choice are basmati rice, brown tortilla wraps, rye bread, sweet potatoes and regular potatoes. I don’t eat pasta because I’m honestly not that fussed for it, but I know some people go mad for it.
I’ve started to notice these little things, how my tastes have changed, and it’s amazing what you pick up on once you really start to tune in to your body (wow I sound like a totally hippy right now).
We had a fry up for breakfast the other day and as soon as I sat down to eat I realised I wasn’t hungry. Alarm bells should be ringing right now, people are rejoicing in the streets and shouting “Hallelujah! She’s finally full”…. But honestly, this rarely happens. I normally scoff it down quicker than the rest of the family and sit staring at my empty plate with my mouth half open waiting to see who will toss me seconds.
But after a few weeks of eating freely, this plate of food suddenly didn’t meet my expectations. It’s not that there was anything wrong with it, quite the opposite in fact as my father-in-law is a great cook! But after a few weeks of listening intently to my body’s needs and fuelling it accordingly I could somehow sense that it didn’t want to eat a fry up today. It wasn’t that I consciously chose not to eat the food, but rather that my hunger signals simply told me that the food was not required.
I find that to be bloody extraordinary. Even though as I write this I realise that I have just described the way the body and mind should naturally function!!!!
As you’ve probably figured out, I love food. The hard thing about dieting is that it makes food important for all the wrong reasons. Eating out is difficult,as is cooking and socialising,even eating your lunch in front of other people can be enough to send you to the bathrooms to hide your green salad. The great thing about forgetting about food is that you give yourself the freedom to eat whaveter you want, whenever you want. This means you can live on beans on toast when you’re skint, eat lobster when you’re rich, eat avocados for breakfast, grab a burger on your way home from work in a rush and have scrambelled egg for supper if you want. To someone who has lived a life planning out each meal hours or even days in advance, this idea of essentially ‘eating what you want’ initially seemed terrifying and a recipe for disaster.
I thought, and many people do, that if I allow myself to eat whatever I want then I really will eat whatever I want. Because I have restricted my food intake for so many years this is unfortunately how it goes down for the first few weeks. I gave myself permission to eat all the things on my naughty list like; cake, biscuits, chocolate, pizza, bread and cheese. Lots of cheese. Embarrassing amounts of cheese. But honestly, after eating like this for a few days at a time all my cravings had been somewhat satisfied and I could hear a tiny little voice inside screaming EAT SOME BROCCOLI!
Over the course of a few weeks this voice began to say other interesting things such as;
Eat more for breakfast Eat some fat You don’t need protein for dinner, just eat some veggies I’m craving sugar but rice with dinner will be good Eat more Eat less You’re hungry You’re thirsty
Don’t be fooled though, the voice comes in many forms and recently had said things like
Eat that whole chocolate orange Eat pizza for dinner Eat pizza for lunch Pizza Pizza
So as you can see it’s an ongoing struggle, where above all I am learning to listen to what my body is saying. It sounds airy-fairy, and I guess in a way it is, but everything else I’ve done up until now has given me such a negative and complicated relationship with food that at this point I’m willing to take a stab in the dark and try this intuitive approach to eating.
Learning how to think positively about food is a long and bumpy road. I can’t fix all the problems overnight when it’s taken a lifetime to rack up all the mistakes. I’m taking it each meal at a time, if I have a crap day I try and understand why and move on. If I don’t understand then that’s OK too, but I still try and move on.
There were many days over Christmas and New Year where I ate uncontrollably, just because it ’twas the season’ but that doesn’t mean I’m going to restrict myself for the rest of January. I now refuse to restrict myself, and the truth is that may mean not losing weight quickly or even at all. The priority for me now must be long term. I’m on a journey to build a healthy relationship with food, and that starts with forgetting all about it.
Is this something that you are struggling with too? Please comment with your tips!
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