The next chapter the dietician recommended reading was Chapter 7 Making Peace with Food. The essence of this is that you can eat any food you want. Really. I know that they hit that in Chapter 10, where I began, but it was a review of this chapter, which, obviously, came first.
After that, the dietician said to read chapter 5 which is about ditching dieting. It sites a lot of studies demonstrating that diets don't work and, in fact, contribute to them problem. (We feel we must obey a set of rules rather than listening to what our body wants.)
They said we should get rid of the scale. I haven't. In fact, I weigh myself almost everyday. So I'll get on one day and be like, "Yea! This is working! I'm losing weight!" and two days later I gasping in horror as I think, "I'm 0.6 lbs away from THAT NUMBER. The number I swore I'd never be again. The number I kissed good bye. Oh. Freak. What am I doing?"
The book says not to count calories, carbs, or follow some kind of ridged guideline because that invariably backfires. Eventually, we break the "rules" and after that, who cares?!? They have studies that talk about that too.
Of course, me, I'm still going to Weight Watchers. But I'm becoming more skeptical. I think, "Are cookies really the enemy?" Or as members talk about how WW works as long as you work it and that they just struggle with "will power," I think, "There was a study that should that people with tremendous will power still couldn't stick with diets and will power had nothing to do with it."
I have prepaid for two more weeks. I thought I'd keep doing this and keep going and keep weighing myself until it turned around. Surely I can over come all my "stuff" and start losing weight in 5 weeks, right?
Wrong. This week I'm up 3.6. That's the most I've gained in a single week in quite a while. And I've been eating like it. I can't remember the last time I bought sausage. It's probably been more than a decade. It's been months since I've had bacon in the house and I could go a year or more without baking even a single batch of chocolate chip cookies.
And I've done it all. It's been very...freeing. But, unfortunately, also very fattening.
This post by a friend of mine has me thinking even more.
2 comments:
Thanks for the linky love Jenna.
Body image is something we all definitely have to come to terms with. It's a pretty fragile balance between taking care of our temples and worshiping our own temple.
I want to check out this intuitive eating book.
I haven't read the book on intuitive eating, but I do know that when I eat whatever I feel like I gain weight, so maybe my food intuition isn't too good! My favorite diet/exercise book is called Business Plan for the Body. It doesn't give lists of good food and bad foods. You don't have to do anything extreme like quit carbs (really??? not going to do that!) but you do have to count calories and exercise. My ultimate goal is to feel healthy and to have the strength to do the things I want to do - like keep up with my kids! I think you're beautiful regardless of which plan you're trying. You'll have to keep us posted on whether or not intuitive eating is working for you. I'm interested to know.... :)
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