Just Eat It, Laura Thomas on intuitive eating
If you’re stuck in an endless cycle of diet restriction and failure, Laura Thomas may have the answer - intuitive eating.
The start of a new year, is the time everyone jumps on the latest fad dieting bandwagon. This year it’s keto, pegan, and the super low energy ‘Fast 800’ – fast route to disordered eating more like, but I digress. Whatever your diet of choice, they all have a couple of things in common.
1) They ‘work’, at least in the short term by reduce the total number of calories you eat.
2) They are pretty miserable, and
3) they don’t work in the long term.
For anyone who has ever been on a diet, this probably doesn’t come as a surprise. Yet every year, we enthusiastically jump on the bandwagon, and try to convince ourselves this will be the one that sticks. And we go for one more spin around the diet cycle.
Step 1: Desire to be thin: When you start a new diet or ‘lifestyle’ it’s usually pretty exciting, you're pumped about becoming the version of you you always wanted to be. And if you're being totally honest, that's probably something to do with changing the shape/size of your body.
Step 2: Restrictive Diet: So you follow all the rules: HIIT 4 x a week plus a couple of yoga classes to keep you chill. You ditch gluten, dairy, sugar and anything 'processed'.
Step 3: Diet Mentality: You become hyper vigilant of food choices, carefully pick which restaurant to eat at, compulsively check labels, track activity/calories/macros/whatever.
Step 4: Weight Loss: You start to see some changes in your body and feel encouraged.
Step 5: Hunger + Cravings: But the cravings start to kick in and you can't keep up with the exercise.
Step 6: Blow Out: You end up saying 'f*ck it' and eat all the food.
Step 7: Guilt + Anxiety: You feel crappy about all the food.
Step 8: Weight Regain Your weight loss slows due to increased cravings and slowing metabolism. So, you're back at the start – the restrict/blow out cycle continues, maybe next time you try Whole 30 or intermittent fasting. You convince yourself that THIS is the one what will stick, but the cycle goes around and around until you decide to break it.
So, how do we get off this merry-go-round? Intuitive eating is a process that has caught the attention of nutritionists, dietitians, and researchers as a viable alternative. To help us get unstuck; helping us make peace with food, our bodies, and ultimately ourselves.
Just Eat It
by Laura Thomas
'Truly life-changing' - Dolly Alderton
'The only 'diet' book worth reading this new year' - Alexandra Heminsley, Grazia
Just Eat It isn’t just a book. It’s part of a movement to help us take back control over our bodies. To free us from restrictive dieting, disordered eating and punishing exercise. To reject the guilt and anxiety associated with eating and, ultimately, to help us feel good about ourselves.
This anti-diet guide from registered nutritionist Laura Thomas PhD can help you sort out your attitude to food and ditch punishing exercise routines. As a qualified practitioner of Intuitive Eating – a method that helps followers tune in to innate hunger and fullness cues – Thomas gives you the freedom to enjoy food on your own terms.
There are no rules: only simple, practical tools and exercises including mindfulness techniques to help you recognize physiological and emotional hunger, sample conversations with friends and colleagues, and magazine and blog critiques that call out diet culture.
So, have you ever been on a diet? Spent time worrying that you looked fat when you could have been doing something useful? Compared the size of your waistline to someone else's? Felt guilt, actual guilt, about the serious crime of . . . eating a doughnut? You're not alone. Just Eat It gives you everything you need to develop a more trusting, healthy relationship with food and your body.