Health Is Not Earned
Wellness culture gives us the idea that if we eat certain things, move our bodies in certain ways, and get enough sleep, we will be healthy. Health is a privilege. It is not something everyone is born with. It is not a full cup that just starts emptying as we get older and stop doing the “right” things. We are dealt a hand and sometimes it’s a healthy one. We cannot buy health, we cannot sell health.
Before and After Pictures
Before and after pictures have been around our society for decades; as a person interested in a marketing career, I initially saw it as a marketing and campaign tool. It was a way to depict the changes that have taken place during the use of a product or service and how it has impacted the person and, thus, how the company can utilize it to capitalize on that fact. However, being introduced to intuitive eating, learning more about body acceptance, and how toxic diet culture can be has helped me re-think before-and-after pictures from a body image standpoint.
Wrong Pants Vs. The Right Pants
Wrong pants and right pants; what does that mean to you? It could be based on style, color, fit, or a number of other factors that matter most to you. Pants shopping can be a super vulnerable time for all of us. With a dieting mentality and being surrounded by diet culture, we might try to force ourselves into a pair of pants that no longer fit us or a size we think we should be. But that isn't fair to our bodies, which do so much for us! This post will harken back to last week's topic of body-checking and what we can do to overcome that feeling.
A Lesson on Body-Checking
What is body-checking, and how can it affect us and the people we compare ourselves to? Today we will discuss body checking and how it is rooted in diet culture to make us feel shame about our bodies. Body-checking can lead to more underlying issues if left unchecked. If you ever feel shameful or guilty about how your body feels, please practice kindness to yourself and your mind.
What Type of Eater Are You? Part 2
We may become aware of some residual effects as we recover from diet culture. Whether it be how we look at ourselves or our food, a sense of bitterness can be left behind. Today we will discuss what type of eater you may be, the triggers accompanying that eating style, and some of the characteristics. Having been a product of diet culture and recovered from it, this blog post felt essential for me to write for you all.
What Type of Eater Are You? Part 1
We may become aware of some residual effects as we recover from diet culture. Whether it be how we look at ourselves or our food, a sense of bitterness can be left behind. Today we will discuss what type of eater you may be, the triggers accompanying that eating style, and some of the characteristics.
A Word About Moderation
Moderation is defined as the avoidance of excess or extremes. In diet culture, moderation can be described as eating only the amount of food that your body requires to be healthy. But what is healthy? Is my ‘healthy’ the same as your ‘healthy’? ‘Healthy’ does not consider a person’s underlying health condition or an invisible illness. Moderation can also look like limiting portion sizes which can be very much like policing; something we are trying to unlearn through Intuitive Eating.
Making Scary Foods Less Scary
Coming from diet culture, we all have been in contact with food labeled bad and forbidden, or we have dubbed them as such. With this, you may still be scared to be around that food or to have it in your home. The purpose of this blog post is to give a reason for how to reintroduce these scary foods back into your life without fear of overeating or binging on the food. We are going to talk about how to make scary foods less scary and how to reintroduce them into your life.
History of the Clean Plate Club
The clean plate club has two meanings. It started as a government initiative to concierge specific food groups for the soldiers during WWI. The dieting version of the clean plate club is an unofficial club that people join when they have cleared their plate of food. Today we will examine the history and how they can start in childhood and have lasting repercussions into adulthood.
Factors that Influence Fullness
As we spoke in the previous post about the characteristics of fullness, now we will delve into the factors that influence fullness. We will be talking about 5 of them, but there could be more or less for you; every body is different. Dieting itself is a factor that can influence our fullness but also our understanding of fullness. These factors are things that we can grow back into being aware of and strengthening.
Characteristics of Fullness
Fullness is a capacity different for everyone; my fullness cues and level may be similar or vastly different from your cues. There are also a few factors that influence fullness that we will discuss in a future blog post. Feeling your fullness can be a journey in and of itself if you have had a lengthy past with dieting. This is especially true if you have also had a disconnected relationship with food for some time.
10 Principles of Intuitive Eating Series, Principle 9- Movement - Feel the Difference
The vicious cycle of dieting usually includes exercise. Dieting often can come with overexercising and pushing ourselves to break at least an hour either running or doing cardio, hoping we see a considerable number on the treadmill counter. But this is not the original purpose of exercise; this is what diet culture has morphed exercise into being. In this post, we will discuss how to reintegrate movement into our lives without any connection to weight loss.
10 Principles of Intuitive Eating Series, Principle 8: Respect Your Body
Respecting our bodies, especially when they do not fit into what society would deem acceptable, can be hard. This can start by accepting what our genetic blueprints look like. Our genetic blueprints include height, eye color, foot size, and weight. Think of it like this; if your shoe size is a 7, you will not try to fit your foot into a size 5, right? How would that feel? Tight, uncomfortable, your toes would feel pinched and rubbing against the walls of the shoe. If you would not do that to your foot, why are we taught to do that same thing to our bodies? While saying all of this, it is good to note that we will be unlearning body comparison and seeing our bodies negatively.
10 Principles of Intuitive Eating Series, Principle 7: Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness
Every time food is introduced through a cultural or life event, the emotional bond with food strengthens. This can be through the presence of wedding cake at the reception, cupcakes at a child’s birthday party, turkey for Thanksgiving, and my fondest memory was my Poppop’s baklava at Christmas. When food is introduced to help us cope with life or comfort us, it deepens our emotional bond with food. Food symbolizes different things in our lives; food can be our comfort when we feel a sense of homesickness or loss. Food can be celebratory. Lastly, food can also be our friend because we can rely on food.
Introducing Me! Stephanie
My name is Stephanie Marceron, and I wanted to take this opportunity to talk more about myself and my background. I have been attending the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, since the fall of 2021, pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Media and Communication Studies. I am a senior about to enter my last semester and will graduate in December. I want to start a career in either public relations or marketing in the cosmetics/skincare industry.
10 Principles of Intuitive Eating Series, Principle 6: Feel Your Fullness
Honoring our hunger will help to lead us to Feel our Fullness. When recovering from diet mentality, we tend to realize that we have lost the ability to feel our fullness. Whether from food deprivation or not allowing ourselves to eat the foods we want to, we may have severed our fullness cues from our very being. We must learn to trust that we will give ourselves the foods we desire and the quantity we need.
10 Principles of Intuitive Eating Series, Principle 5: Discover the Satisfaction Factor
What does “Discover the Satisfaction Factor” mean to you? For me, the satisfaction factor is when I take my first bite of a dinner I just finished prepping for the week, and I can taste the different sauces I marinated my protein of choice in. Savoring the spices put in gives me a feeling of satisfaction in my meal. Figuring out what the satisfaction factor is for you can be a process depending on what your relationship with food used to be and is in your current status in the intuitive eating journey.
10 Principles of Intuitive Eating Series, Principle 4: Challenging the Food Police
As we have grown up, we have been taught that we have a symbolic angel on one side of the shoulder and a little devil on the other. But what if I told you that there was a third entity that we need to worry about? In the form of voices in our head that tear us down whenever food or eating is in question? These voices are called the Food Police. The Food Police also comes with a few other voices that do not help us on our journey through Intuitive Eating, and we will go more in-depth on these voices later in the post. These extras are the Nutrition Informant and the Diet Rebel.
10 Principles of Intuitive Eating Series, Principle 3- Make Peace With Food
Making peace with food can be a tall order for those recovering from an eating disorder. This part of intuitive eating can be challenging for anyone who participates in dieting and diet culture. Each principle in Intuitive Eating is not a small step but the whole staircase. Making peace with food is about ending the ongoing battle and calling for a truce. What may be hard for us to grasp is having unconditional permission to eat. Coming from a dieting background, hearing the phrase that you have UNCONDITIONAL permission to eat can be intimidating, even scary.
10 Principles of Intuitive Eating Series, Principle 2: Honor Your Hunger
In this post, we will learn more about how to honor your hunger. Honoring our hunger can be considered a way to rebuild trust between us, our bodies, and the hunger signals we have lost touch with. It can also be a way to start rebuilding your trust in food.