It may seem like everybody you know gets weird about their eating every Januarymaybe its Whole30, maybe its a sugar detox, maybe its a wholehearted commitment to keto. What to do if youre not on that bandwagon and its all a bit too much? Anti-Diet author and registered dietitian Christy Harrison has some tips for us.
Diets and weight loss rarely get called by those names anymore. Instead, the idea that youll get thinner if you change how you eat is often touted as a happy side effect of healthy eating or other lifestyle changes.
Thats why eating patterns that are marketed around wellness or feeling good can end up creeping into our brains the same way diets dotheyre diets in disguise, or they include stigma against larger bodies, perhaps unspoken, but heavily implied.
So if youre trying to avoid diet culture, be aware that youll probably need to avoid this too. For example, unfollow or mute any Instagram account that only uses photos of skinny people when they post about health and wellness.
Okay, so your best friend is committed to quitting sugar, and youd just rather not think about dieting or restricting food. How do you maintain your relationship without arguing or spending all your conversations hearing about her new, uh, wellness plan?
Harrison suggests simply setting boundaries. Ask your friend if you can avoid talking about what were eating and how were exercising right now and instead keep conversations to everything else that matters to the two of youafter all, your friendship is built around more than just food.
I think if theyre a good friend, theyll honor what youre asking, Harrison says, even if they dont quite understand. And maybe this discussion will spur them to reflect on their own relationship with dieting.
If you tend to get swept up in what other people are doingtotally understandable, since we are social creaturesit may help to decide what you are doing instead of restricting or obsessing about food.
Now might be a good time to explore intuitive eating, or as Harrison puts it, true intuitive eating, not the sort of fake diet culture version that expects you to intuitively eat your way to thinness.
Instead, its fine to just eat, and not expect your food choices to work some particular magic on your body. You get the time and the space to focus on your career, on your relationships, on social justice, causes you care about, changing the worldtheres so much more life available to you outside of [just thinking about your] diet, says Harrison.
No diet lasts forever. Whole30 is a single grueling month, if people make it that far. Many new years resolutions fizzle out by mid-January, and even if somebody loves a new way of eating and loses weight, odds are they will fall out of love with it within a few months, maybe a year.
You dont need to rub the chances of failure in your friends faceremember, youre trying to respect each others boundaries and not argue about foodbut thinking about where youll each be in five years can help you to keep perspective.
Read more from the original source:
How to Keep Perspective When Everyone Around You Is Dieting - Lifehacker
