What to Expect Downstream (from your new food rules & diet plan)
Yes, it’s that time of year when the wellness/diet industrial complex takes advantage of you! If you are feeling like you need to do “damage control” following the holidays, I see you!
The combined forces of cultural and family beliefs, familiar patterns, the wellness industry, and the medical-industrial complex are all pressing in on you. To say this is a vulnerable time is an understatement!
Before you commit to a new “plan”, please take a breath and review what you’ve tried before- and how that worked out for you.
I promise it is not that you failed, that you didn’t work hard enough, or that you don’t have “willpower”. These are the thoughts that the wellness industry has conditioned you to think-and keeps their business model of repeat customers thriving. Grrrrrr!
I know that part of you already knows that “diets don’t work” and the wellness industry is counting on that. Therefore the slick rebranding (we see you @ww) or the “not a diet” claims by plans that are SO clearly another diet (we see you @noom). Or you may be especially vulnerable to thinking that you are not going to be fooled by diets again, but a detox or cleanse would be a great way to start the New Year. Whatever plan you begin that includes a list of foods that are good and bad, the side effects are the same!
Downstream from these plans, you will likely experience some, or all, of the following:
Rigid thinking and damage to your relatinship with food (seeing foods and good and bad)
Feeling out of control arond “bad” foods
Breakthrough binge eating
Guilt and self-doube increases
Intrusive thoughts of food/fitness/body, therefore youare unable to be present with yourself/people/tasks
Loss of your ability to discern hunger and fullness
Feeling cold when others are not (slowed metabolism)
Feeling FATIGUED and foggy headed (your body/brain needs are not beeing met)
Difficulty sleeping due to your body’s hunger and brain’s anxiety
Irritability, mood swings, and increasing anxiety
Shame and defining self as a “failure” when unable to sustain deprivation
Damage to relationship with your body-seeing body as “project”
Risk of developing an eating disorder
When you realize this, is in fact, the truth, and your truth, you have arrived at an opening! This is the beginning.
The alternative is to begin the process of dismantling your internalized diet culture beliefs and begin to make peace with food, eating, and your body. This is a process and can be messy-not nearly as simple as following the rigid rule sets offered by wellness culture! This process offers peace and liberation that is priceless! A more Embodied way of nourishing and caring for yourself means:
Developing curiosity about yourself, your patterns, and your food/eating/body beliefs
Incorporates skills to regulate your nervous system
Estalishes an invitation to care for yourself rather than control yourself
Cultivates access and connection to your body and body information (hunger, satisfaction, fullness, etc)
Develops a gentler approach to nourishg yourself
Encourages joyful movement
As we step across the calendar’s threshold to a New Year, I hope you will choose to move toward yourself with curiosity and kindness, if you are able and ready. If you are not, that’s okay. This process will be here for you when you are ready.
Here’s to this being your year!