Steph Bradley commented on Ditching Dieting
2014-09-13 12:57:31 +0100
The word ‘diet’ to me means; restricted, disciplined, miserable, hungry.
I’ve never been on a ‘diet’ in the typical sense of following a specific diet plan but I have attempted to cut calories, eat less junk food & carbs etc. I had hoped that through doing this, I would lose a small amount of weight with minimal effort.
Dieting hasn’t had a huge impact on my life, as I don’t choose to follow diets & try to listen to what my body wants or needs but the indirect impact dieting has on me is that I constantly feel as if I should be on a diet, or attempting to lose weight. This compulsion tends to be a lot stronger when I am speaking with other women about weight & what they are doing to reduce their weight (i.e ’I’ve joined the gym’, ’I’m drinking smoothies for breakfast’, ’I’ve cut out sugar’) and the compulsion to diet or restrict my food in take in some way becomes stronger. Other women are doing it & worrying about it, so I should too right?
When I do restrict my food, (and by this I mean cutting out junk/trying to eat healthily) I feel great for the first few days but after the reality sets (when I WANT to eat chocolate/doughnut etc) then that’s when it gets a lot harder to discipline myself & not reach for the cookie!
I think I’ve always been carefree about eating, until I hit the age of around 22. I’ve always been naturally thin & lost/gained weight naturally but now as I begin to head into my late twenties, my metabolism has naturally slowed down as it does for many of us. Now that I can’t just eat junk food & burn it off naturally (sitting in an office all day, commuting, not running around as much!) then the weight has begun to slowly creep on. This has worried me and I have attempted to ‘hang on’ to the naturally thin body I had in my teen years & early twenties. But this just makes me miserable, I don’t think it’s realistic to expect to have the same body when you’re 26 as you did when you were 16.
So this is what I am currently trying to make peace with, that it’s OK to have put on weight, to not be the size you used to be, to have developed bigger boobs, bum & hips. In my everyday life, I am truly ok with that but then something external really knocks my body positivity. I bump into an old school friend & all I can think is ‘god they must be thinking ’look how much weight she’s gained’ or a dieting advert comes on TV or a friend on social media shows off her new ‘gym body’ or (and this one has left me in tears on occasion) someone asks me ‘are you pregnant?’
Because of the external pressures & my internal desire to be to be at peace with my body & embrace my size, I feel like I am in a constant debate with myself when I think about health & body image. On the one hand, I want to be healthy (& we all know that exercising is good not only for your body but for your mind) but then I am just not down with slaving away in the gym. At the moment I feel like I can’t separate the two – to be healthy you must exercise/be regimented/disciplined/restrict junk food which to me feels exactly the same as dieting and doesn’t sound like much fun. For me the lines between health & dieting have really been blurred.
I’ve never been on a ‘diet’ in the typical sense of following a specific diet plan but I have attempted to cut calories, eat less junk food & carbs etc. I had hoped that through doing this, I would lose a small amount of weight with minimal effort.
Dieting hasn’t had a huge impact on my life, as I don’t choose to follow diets & try to listen to what my body wants or needs but the indirect impact dieting has on me is that I constantly feel as if I should be on a diet, or attempting to lose weight. This compulsion tends to be a lot stronger when I am speaking with other women about weight & what they are doing to reduce their weight (i.e ’I’ve joined the gym’, ’I’m drinking smoothies for breakfast’, ’I’ve cut out sugar’) and the compulsion to diet or restrict my food in take in some way becomes stronger. Other women are doing it & worrying about it, so I should too right?
When I do restrict my food, (and by this I mean cutting out junk/trying to eat healthily) I feel great for the first few days but after the reality sets (when I WANT to eat chocolate/doughnut etc) then that’s when it gets a lot harder to discipline myself & not reach for the cookie!
I think I’ve always been carefree about eating, until I hit the age of around 22. I’ve always been naturally thin & lost/gained weight naturally but now as I begin to head into my late twenties, my metabolism has naturally slowed down as it does for many of us. Now that I can’t just eat junk food & burn it off naturally (sitting in an office all day, commuting, not running around as much!) then the weight has begun to slowly creep on. This has worried me and I have attempted to ‘hang on’ to the naturally thin body I had in my teen years & early twenties. But this just makes me miserable, I don’t think it’s realistic to expect to have the same body when you’re 26 as you did when you were 16.
So this is what I am currently trying to make peace with, that it’s OK to have put on weight, to not be the size you used to be, to have developed bigger boobs, bum & hips. In my everyday life, I am truly ok with that but then something external really knocks my body positivity. I bump into an old school friend & all I can think is ‘god they must be thinking ’look how much weight she’s gained’ or a dieting advert comes on TV or a friend on social media shows off her new ‘gym body’ or (and this one has left me in tears on occasion) someone asks me ‘are you pregnant?’
Because of the external pressures & my internal desire to be to be at peace with my body & embrace my size, I feel like I am in a constant debate with myself when I think about health & body image. On the one hand, I want to be healthy (& we all know that exercising is good not only for your body but for your mind) but then I am just not down with slaving away in the gym. At the moment I feel like I can’t separate the two – to be healthy you must exercise/be regimented/disciplined/restrict junk food which to me feels exactly the same as dieting and doesn’t sound like much fun. For me the lines between health & dieting have really been blurred.
