Episode 4: Recognizing and Overcoming a Diet Mentality

Do you find yourself trapped in the unending cycle of wanting to feel better, dieting, giving up, and then starting all over again? Or maybe you feel frustrated and tired of the choices you feel are necessary to improve your health and wellness? You might have a diet mentality that’s sucking all the joy out of your routines. The good news is there is a way to break out of this mindset. Today we’re talking about overcoming diet mentality and bringing joy back to your health and wellness routines.

Episode Transcript:

INTRO MUSIC: Welcome to The Compassionate Wellness Podcast. I'm Alex Treanor. I'm a Nationally Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach, and I am so excited you're here. The wellness industry is full of do's and do not's, should's and should not's. But I like to take a different approach. I'll be sharing all things health and wellness from a joyful, real-life compassionate perspective. If you're ready to drop the cookie-cutter approach and create a life you truly love, while eating a cookie or two along the way, let's dive in.

Hey, friends! We are back with another big one this week. Today, I wanted to talk a little bit about defining and recognizing diet mentality. I want to start by talking a little bit about the mission that I have for my coaching practice, which is to bring joy back to health and wellness. The reason I focus on that is because of a paradox that I have noticed over the years.

Here's what typically happens: I have a client who wants to improve their health and wellness, and the reason for wanting to improve it is so that they can live a long, happy, joyful life. They want to share that life with those they love, to experience all that life has to offer, and to feel good. They start making changes in order to accomplish that, and often what comes to mind is "well, I better lose weight". So they start restricting foods, and they start doing whatever they have been told they should do, using one-size-fits-all meal plans, whatever their neighbor tells them to do, the things they feel are necessary in order to lose weight and eventually feel better.

The paradox comes in, in that these things they're doing, the foods that they're eating and the activity they start, sucks all the fun out of life. They're eating foods they hate, doing activities that are miserable, and feeling worse about themselves for not being able to continue doing the things that they don't like doing.

And to me, it just epitomizes diet culture. We start making these changes with hopes of feeling better, and the things that we do to feel better make us feel worse.

As we're talking about diet culture, I want to take a minute to clarify what that means because I know it's a phrase that gets thrown around a lot. Diet culture is when we equate health and happiness with thinnes. So if you want to be healthy, if you want to be happy, you need to lose weight in order to do that. This also creates a lot of moral judgments around bodies, and that we need to fit a certain mold. If you want to feel good about yourself, you need to look a certain way and then you will be worthy, right? So diet culture makes us feel like if we do not fit the mold, we're not worthy, we're not deserving, we're less than.

As humans, we have this desire to belong. We want to fit the mold. We want to be able to relate with everybody else. So we tend to develop a diet mentality in order to fit into diet culture, and that's what we're talking about today. Diet mentality is the thoughts and the beliefs that we form around food, and around physical activity, that help us to fit that mold, or that we think help us helps us to fit that mold. Usually, these thoughts are built around fear of not fitting in and around restriction.

My perspective when it comes to these things is that, as far as we know, this is the one life that we have. Your health and wellness routines are meant to bring you happiness and fulfillment and joy. They're there to enhance your quality of life and allow you to do the things that you want to do. Recognizing our own diet mentality, and the thoughts that hold us back from that, is then essential to being able to improve our relationship with food and with activity and to bring joy back into the equation. So really, my whole practice around bringing joy into health and wellness is about this topic today: recognizing, learning about diet mentality, and then figuring out what is that process like to overcome that.

Before we dive in with how we overcome it, we first have to recognize it. So I want to share four different ways that diet mentality may show up in your life.

The first one is that having a diet mentality often traps us in the dieting cycle. See if this sounds familiar, we want more happiness, and we want to feel better about ourselves. Because of diet culture, that means we must need to lose weight. So we start dieting. And as we're dieting, it sucks. We have more cravings. We want to emotionally eat. We have disordered eating tendencies. We're hungry. We're feeling restricted. All of these things naturally are going to lead us to feeling that sense of control but at some point, it's going to crumble. This might look like binge eating. This might look like telling yourself, "I failed at this diet. I'm done. I'm starting over. Maybe never, who knows". Which then leads us to feel like we failed. We feel down about ourselves, and in order to pick ourselves back up and to feel better...how do we feel better? We lose weight. So it starts all over again, and we start dieting. Having a diet mentality just keeps you stuck in that cycle.

The hard thing about this, well, there's many hard things about this, but one thing in particular that becomes challenging to making change, is that we begin to feel a little bit hopeless. We're stuck in this cycle, and we lose our confidence in our ability to do it differently. We lose our confidence in our power to make a change, and that feels exhausting and hopeless.

Another way that diet mentality impacts us is feeling that all or nothing thinking, which can lead to more guilt or shame around food, and increases our stress around food. I want to talk about this one because it is a big one. This really shows up a lot with diet mentality. What this looks like is often thinking that foods are good or bad, and those are the only two options. You're either on track or you're off track. The problem is, you can never be fully on track, life is always going to happen. There is no reality where things will ever be perfect in that sense. If we feel we can't have the "good" food option, if that's off the table, because of whatever circumstance may have arisen, the only option is the "bad" and so we overdo it. We say "well, I ruined it for today. I'm going all in!" This mindset doesn't allow for any nuance. There's no room to actually make a choice or make the best choice because the only option is to go 100% good or throw in the towel.

All or nothing thinking can also show up in this hyper-focus on food labels, on calorie counting, on getting all your macros in, because it's perpetuating this idea that there is a perfect way. "If I count all the calories, it will all line up, and everything will be fine".

A third way that diet mentality might show up is if you're feeling rebellious around your food or your activity levels. What I mean by this is that often when we are dieting we are given food rules. We are told what we can or can't eat, or what activity we have to be doing. What we tend to do, in that sense, is there will come a day when we rebel just for the sake of being able to choose, for the empowerment of being able to make our own choice and say, "I can do what I want". When you choose a behavior, you're more likely to do it. When a behavior is assigned to you, you're more likely to rebel against it.

The fourth and final way that we'll talk about diet mentality, how it shows up, is that you feel separated from your internal body cues, things like your hunger level, your fullness level, your satisfaction, and what sounds good. When we are in a diet mentality, we're used to using external devices or cues to tell us about our eating habits. We rely on the calorie counting app to tell us how much we're able to eat, or we rely on the macros we were given to tell us what types of food are important.

The consequence of that is we feel separated from our body. We ignore our hunger cues, we ignore our fullness cues. This eventually leads to less mindful eating, less of the ability to recognize what we need and respond accordingly.

If you're recognizing any of those things, the good news is there are things you can do to overcome diet mentality. I want to give you four steps today, and before we dive in with the four steps, I just want to preface that sometimes when we're given a "three step process", or "a four step process", we tend to think it's just a checkbox of like, "Do step one, step two, step three, good to go. I'm done forever". I just want to preface that this is not that kind of four step process. This is an ongoing thing. It takes years to develop diet mentality and it's gonna take years to unravel it. These are just things that you can keep in mind, that you can work on as you are trying to change that perspective in yourself.

The first thing that I would recommend is to build awareness around your diet mentality. This often shows up in food rules. Remember, we talked about diet mentality being about the thoughts and the beliefs that you have? Often what we do is take those thoughts and beliefs and give ourselves a system of rules that our brain can easily say, "this fits in, that doesn't" to be able to make decisions about our food.

Some of the common ones that maybe you recognize are, "I can't eat after 7pm", or "I don't eat sweets". Sometimes we give ourselves food rules based off of circumstances. something like, "oh, I had a big dinner last night, so I need to eat less at breakfast". Or maybe it involves activity too, "I know, I'm going out to dinner tonight, I better do an extra long workout". Start recognizing some of these thoughts that you have, and journal them. Actually writing them down is key, because then you can see them, and they become tangible and recognizable. Pay attention to any shoulds that you have. Shoulds are basically any time you hear yourself saying "I should...". Give yourself a little bit of a pause to think about that. If you're saying "I shouldn't eat pasta", write that down. That may be something to explore a little bit. Where's that coming from? What makes you feel like you shouldn't have that? In intuitive eating, they call this the food police. So anything that is feeling like you are monitoring yourself, might be a good thing to write down.

The second thing I would recommend is probably no surprise, practice self compassion. These food rules have developed over time as a way to help you navigate diet culture. You know how they talk about the goldfish not knowing it's in water, because it's just in water? That's what this is. You are living in diet culture; you have food rules and diet mentality that have helped you to navigate that. They're self preservation tools. They've been helpful for you. As you're working to overcome them or to change them, give yourself some compassion and recognize that you're human for having them. It's not a bad thing to have them, it's just not helpful for you. We also can't expect it to change overnight. So practice self compassion, and giving yourself the time, and the grace, and the patience to overcome it. Don't criticize yourself when it does take time, because that's very normal.

My third recommendation would be to set your goals based on what you can add instead of what you can restrict. We're so used to thinking that when it comes to making nutrition changes, we constantly need to be taking away. We need to make our food intake smaller. Instead of looking at your nutrition to find the flaws, and then want to take those out, look at your nutrition and say "What's missing? What could I add to this to make it feel more balanced, or more well rounded, or bring more enjoyment back into my routine?"

The last thing I would recommend when you are working on nutrition changes is to dismiss the idea of failure. This is going to be a continual process. Going along with giving yourself self compassion and grace, you can just dismiss the idea that failure can even exist when it comes to food. If you ate enough, and you made it through the day, it's a good day. That's all there is to it. There is no perfect. There's no benchmark that we need to meet. If you're not feeling great about your nutrition, take a look at why you feel that way. Maybe there's a food rule that you could journal about or discover that is giving you some kind of emotion around the food that you ate. Or maybe you didn't feel good with the quality of food that you ate that day. Instead of judging yourself for it or feeling like the day was a failure, get curious and look at it to say, "Why do I feel that way? What changes would have made me feel better? Or what could I have done differently to make this day feel a little bit more balanced?" If we classify each day as being good or bad, it's just reinforcing that all or nothing thinking. It's reinforcing the idea that there is no middle ground. Every day is going to look different and that's okay. That's normal. We can celebrate the days that we feel better about and we can get curious about the days that we don't feel went great.

Hopefully we were able to clarify what diet culture is, and how you can identify a diet mentality and how it might show up for you. If this is something that you're interested in working on and you feel that working with a coach may be helpful. It is a new month, if you're listening to this when it releases, which means I have coaching spots open! You can click in the show notes to find my contact information. I can do a free call with you to see what we can come up with together and see if coaching might be a good fit.

This is what I am passionate about. This is what I built my entire coaching practice around. Figuring out how we can identify our own food rules, our thoughts that aren't serving us, and transition them into something that does feel more helpful.

Thanks for sharing this episode with me today and I look forward to talking with you next week!

OUTRO MUSIC: Thanks for joining me on this episode of the compassionate wellness podcast. If this message resonated with you, please share it with someone you care about. I'd love to connect with you as well follow me on Instagram @alextreanor.coaching, or visit my website alextreanorcoaching.com. And as a reminder, Treanor spelled kind of goofy, it's T-R-E-A-N-O-R. For any references mentioned in this episode, be sure to check out the show notes. I hope you have a wonderful day and don't forget to make time for something you enjoy.

References:

• Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach by Evelyn Tribole & Elyse Resch

• The Joy Choice: How to Finally Achieve Lasting Changes in Eating and Exercise by Michelle Segar, PhD