The 80/20 rule, intermitted fasting, no sugar diets, keto diet – these and many other diets are being promoted on social media or in several magazines. But the question is: Are they the saviour for people’s health and change their life’s for the better or do they ruin their lives and their relationship to food completely? Personally, I think dieting is almost never a good way to lose weight and shows a high likelihood of destroying a person’s relationship with food along the way.
Searching for the right diet plan for oneself can be tough due to their high variety. On top of that, most people can’t even stick to this structured eating behaviour for more than two weeks. Changing one’s whole life to stick to 10 eating rules for expample doesn’t sound like a hard journey, but it is. Not eating your favourite dessert at your favourite restaurant, because the new diet forbids you to do so, isn’t living a healthy lifestyle. It’s rather building a mindset around food that is influenced by all these rules and myths around eating in a healthy way, resulting in having a strict daily life without any enjoyment around food. Additionally dieting can lead someone into believing the most unhinged things, like “one piece of chocolate will ruin your whole progress” or “eating fat and greasy food will instantly make you fat”.
Not only a bad relationship to food can occur through dieting, but also the beliefs someone has around “looking healthy”. Therefore, their mindset abour their body and how they look becomes more and more strict and controlled, up to a point, where body dismorphia can emerge. These two factors can then in combination with a genetic predisposition lead to developing a mental disorder, like anorexia nervosa.
All of that only intensifies my belief that dieting simply does not work for majority of people and different approaches are key to a healthy lifestyle. One example for that is seeing a dietitian. They help you lose weight with a personalized plan, while remaining a healthy mindset around food and focusing on physical but also mental well-being. One approach, I personally think works best, is intuitive eating. This method consists of connecting with the own body again and listening to it’s signs, like hunger cues or the sign of being fuelled. Through that we are going back in evolution and learn to eat like babies again, which, at first, sounds humouristic, but makes total sense biologically. Babies aren’t as influenced by rules around food made up by society than, for example, teenagers. Therefore, the only thing they hold onto are their own hunger and fullness cues. Intuitive eating allows people to eat whatever they want without any restrictions, but under the condition of always listening deeply to the own body and its needs.
In conclusion, dieting, for me, builds the basis for ruining one’s health – mentally and maybe even physically. Too many rules don’t support a healthy lifestyle and definitely do not contribute to one’s psyche. Instead, other approaches have to be considered, like visiting a dietitian or eating intuitively.