After years of jumping from one diet to the next, Valerie hit rock bottom.
Fed up with the weight-loss roller coaster and obsessing over every morsel she ate, she swore off dieting forever.
Yet, months after quitting, she still shuns carbs, avoids snacking and seconds, never eats after 6:30 p.m., and runs an extra mile whenever she has dessert.
Valerie is a pseudo-dieter.
She genuinely believes she’s given up dieting, yet she continues to engage in dieting behaviors.
As a result, she still experiences many of the side effects of dieting, including thinking about food all the time, struggling with intense cravings, feeling out of control with her “trigger foods” (i.e., ice cream and chips), and feeling frustrated, guilty and ashamed when she thinks she’s eaten badly.
Deeply Ingrained
As seen with Valerie, the diet mentality can be so deeply ingrained—or hidden under the guise of “health," "wellness,” "lifestyle" or “biohacking”—that you may not realize you're actually pseudo-dieting and that your restrictive eating behaviors are making you vulnerable to the same physical and psychological damage dieting causes.
Falling into the pseudo-dieting trap is completely understandable given how prevalent and seductive our diet and wellness cultures are.
Here are some more examples of pseudo-dieting:
Restricting your eating to include only “clean,” “whole” or “unprocessed” foods.
Switching from calorie counting to macro counting for weight loss.
Limiting carb or fat grams regardless of what you want or what your body needs.
Determining what you deserve to eat based on what you ate earlier or if you exercised, rather than your hunger level.
Compensating for eating certain foods by doing extra exercise, skipping your next meal or eating less tomorrow.
Attempting to manage your weight with detoxes and cleanses.
Allowing yourself to only eat at certain times of the day despite your hunger level.
Becoming vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, etc. for the purpose of losing weight.
Bringing your own food to parties so you aren’t tempted to eat anything else.
Weighing and measuring your food to limit how much of it you eat.
Do you see yourself in any of these behaviors? I certainly do. My own journey included years of pseudo-dieting. Unbeknownst to me, I was a dieter in disguise!
A Dieter in Disguise
After I stopped focusing on calories in/calories out, I became obsessed with only eating “clean” foods. I also unnecessarily cut out gluten and dairy. I never considered any of this dieting.
Instead, I claimed my restrictions were all in the name of wellness even though secretly my goal was weight loss. I mean, come on. If I thought eliminating gluten and dairy could possibly lead to weight gain, I would never have done it.
As Christy Harrison, the author of Anti-Diet and The Wellness Trap says, "If it involves restricting how you eat, demonizes certain food and is centered around the size of your body, it’s a diet."
Same Adverse Outcomes
Looking back, I can see how my pseudo-dieting resulted in the same adverse outcomes as my more official calorie-counting dieting.
I still adhered to rigid food rules, fixated on food, skipped social events out of fear of eating “bad” foods, binged on sweets when I let myself have them, got angry at myself when I felt I ate poorly, overexercised to make up for my eating, and so on.
Releasing the Diet Mentality
Just like bona fide dieting, pseudo-dieting can disconnect you from your body inhibiting your ability to hear and honor the messages it’s sending you.
And, as was the case with Valerie and me, all restrictive eating, no matter what it’s called, leaves you vulnerable to the pitfalls of dieting, from binge eating and weight cycling to food preoccupation and social withdrawal.
Escaping the dieting roller coaster and experiencing true food freedom requires letting go of your diet mentality and relearning how to nourish your body based on its internal cues versus external rules—that is, eat intuitively.
As pseudo-dieting behaviors can be quite subtle and disentangling from our pervasive, insidious diet culture can be very difficult (but not impossible!), it can be helpful to get support from an Intuitive Eating counselor, therapist, dietician or nutritionist so you can truly let go of dieting in all its various forms once and for all.
