forgotten_aria

I gave up on dieting a while ago, but in the last few years I've been really focusing on unlearning diet culture. We are saturated by being told that we are bad for eating certain things. Things are marketed as "guilt free" and products will proudly tell you what they don't have, even if they never would have had it in the first place. Example, a pure sugar product proudly announcing "fat-free!" While I do believe that eating too much of one thing will leave you short of many things your body needs, and that I personally do much better on lots of protein (I wish I had known that earlier) so I'm not against adjusting what one eats for your own personal needs and health. But I do think labeling foods as "bad" and "good" does more harm than good. Food is more than calories, food is more than building blocks. Food is mentally stimulating. Food is social, cultural, and nostalgic.

What I've been doing lately is really trying to listen to what my body wants and needs. This wasn't easy at first, partly because dieting had made my body just desperate for things that would not make me feel my best. I was hungry all the time too. That hunger was often unhelpful in communicating what I wanted/needed.

Now that it's been a few years where I am actively telling myself it's ok the eat things that our society says are "bad" if that's what I really, truly want, I have a much better relationship with food, with hunger, and in generally have been craving calorically dense, but otherwise nutritionally light foods a whole lot less. My body is also getting better at telling me "oh you need more protein this meal," or, "you really need some complex carb," or even "alert! sugar now!" Most importantly I am not hungry all the time and food doesn't dominate my thoughts. Things aren't perfect yet, but this feels a lot better than when I was restricting. I am not formally following intuitive eating, but I think this falls close to what it is.

The most important thing is I am no longer at war with my body. I experienced a lot of harm from treating what I ate and exercise as consequences of being fat. I hated being hungry all the time, since I was still fat AND hungry, so clearly my body was the enemy. Exercise was about shrinking, not about health, so I would push through pain, safety, how I was feeling, and feel bad if I didn't "keep up" with my thinner counterparts, because clearly it wasn't that they had less weight to move around, it was that I wasn't thin because I wasn't doing what they did. Hating your body is so damaging psychologically too.

The more I look into studies, the more it seems that restriction (other than for allergies or sensitivities) actually makes things worse in the long run. A lot of more modern nutritionists suggest adding things to your diet that you think you might be missing, rather than restricting "bad" things.

As a side note, a few of the nutritionists/dietitians I follow point out that the diet industry is also racist, since it will often treat almost equivalent foods differently depending on their roots. If you are interested in this side of things, check out https://www.instagram.com/theblacknutritionist/ and https://www.instagram.com/fit.flexible.fluid/ and I'm sure a whole bunch others.

Anyway, this post came about because this week I've been skipping a lot of my physical activities because of both my booster and the physical effects of the stress and sadness of Iz passing and my body seems to have very quickly compensated by reducing my hunger response to match the reduced activity and it feels really nice to have my body adjusting correctly rather than being in "famine panic mode" and just generally with a messed up relationship with food.

So today I tried a dairy free day because my digestion has been less than happy and things do seem to have improved. This makes me super sad because I LOVE cheese, cream sauces, ice cream, butter and sour cream.

I did try a coconut ice cream from the store that took a bit of getting used to, but I ended up enjoying it.

I can't believe that this happened after my local store got finally Black Label Turkey Hill. :(

In the past I've tried lacaid without much success, so if this experiment continues to point to dairy, I will have to change my eating fairly dramatically. I am hoping some cheeses and the sour cream will still work, but it does seem that ice cream and whipped cream are out of the picture.

I was reading a webpage a small sampling of what thin people tend to eat. Many of them would have soup for lunch. I don't find soup at all satisfying. I wonder why it is that I don't.

I've continued to gain weight, despite eating reasonably modestly (but far from perfectly) and my knees have started to complain again, so I think I have to be no fun eating again, at least for a month. I'm sure it will just make me miserable and not do anything useful, but I have to at least try.

If you're doing anything active and social, please invite me along. Social food will have to be kept at a minimum.