This Blog

I've had the idea for an Intuitive Eating blog for some time now, and I'm finally getting it launched. This is the maiden post.
A little personal background: I'm a Diet Survivor. When I hit adolescence and my body began changing, I went on my first (screwy) diet. I think it was something like eggs and grapefruit, I can't quite remember. I DO remember picking up a little diet booklet at the supermarket that showed a very leggy, slender woman in short-shorts standing on a scale and staring down, happily (I guess she liked what she saw).
Never mind that I was about 11 and she was probably in her early twenties. THAT was how I thought I needed to look (and also like Brooke Shields in her Calvins--she was, after all, the hot commodity teen at the time). It was enough to influence me to buy the booklet, and I believed--instantly--the visual message: if I follow this diet, if I do what it says, I will look exactly like that. Slender, leggy, happy. I will be happy. If I am hard on myself, if I withhold, if I struggle, if I have discipline, I will be happy.
Well, it didn't quite work out that way. More than 30 years later, I remember my growing adolescent body craving food, more food, more sustenance. I was hungry, I was, effectively, starving myself, and all I could think about was more food. Dieting had the exact opposite affect: I became even more obsessive about food. I was growing, and my body needed it, but I didn't know that. I just thought I needed better self-control, which in turn established a damaging belief system that I was weak, I succumbed too easily, I had no discipline, I was a failure.
At something as supposedly simple as sticking to a grapefruit-and-egg diet.
Loser.
But not in the way I wanted to be.
So that's my early, early dieting background. There were many, many more attempts, which I'll subsequently post. It's been a long, strange journey but I am happy to say I have emerged wiser and more empathetic as a result of my former life as a Chronic Dieter.
Diets do not work. That is the bottom line. They are not about nourishment, they are about getting thin (being in a perpetual state of semi-starvation will do that, after all) and a response to unrealistic cultural dictates that do enormous damage by establishing a vicious cycle of restrictive eating that in turn leads to struggle, compulsiveness (dieting makes us fixate even more on food) and self-loathing, and more negative self-talk and renewed promises--for more of the same: "I'm eating this today, because tomorrow, I'm really going to be good."
Intuitive eating is win-win. It's all about letting go of tyranny and moving into a place of abundance, nourishment, self-awareness, and what is really important to each of us. It is about honoring ourselves and our passions. It is about letting go of fear and embracing trust. And this is what it means to live our lives. And that's powerful.
We are not meant to spend our lives dieting; we are meant to spend our lives living.
But it is a true joy. And if you're reading these words, I hope it means you've been looking for a better way. A non-diet way. A loving way.
By all means. Join me on this good journey.
And welcome.