So I’ll start by saying I don’t believe in diets. Obviously I’m not saying I don’t think they exist as that would be plain silly but I don’t think they are healthy for us. I’m not talking about healthy in view of what you eat on them but more for our mental health. In fact I think they are quite the opposite and quite damaging so have avoided them like the plague.
I could qualify this statement by saying that diets don’t work for people who suffer from ‘disordered eating’ but I’d probably argue that if you did not suffer from an eating disorder and had a healthy relationship with food then you are unlikely to ever need to go on a diet. Yes, believe it or not, there are some people out there that naturally regulate what they eat, so if they have a lot of food one day they cut down the next or perhaps they will just eat what they need. It reminds me when I took my niece, 13 years old at the time, on a cruise. Now for those that have been on a cruise you’ll be aware that you can virtually eat 24/7 and have a massive buffet with so many attractive looking foods available. Despite this my niece seemed to eat portions according to how hungry she was and not according to how many foods she wanted to try! I was astonished as remembered back to when I was 13, I would have HAD to try a bit of everything! But I can now see that back then was around the time I developed disordered eating.
For those that have not heard of this new fangled condition – there’s certainly nothing new about it but it’s now been given a name, there’s a great blog post that sums it up in a nutshell:
I made a conscious decision years ago to accept myself for how I am and accepted that my weight can go up and down and that I am not defined by how I appear on the outside but who I am as a person. With this acceptance actually led to weight loss and to me eating much healthier and ditching the negative connotations I had with food. Yes, I still put on weight if I consume too much but I also lose weight, it’s never more than a few pounds either way but this is not a conscious effort and just happens.
We need to go back in time to look at my journey. I was very fortunate to grow up in the era where most things were homemade from raw ingredients so very little over processed or packaged food for me. We were also lucky to have a decent size garden so we grew a massive range of fruits, vegetables and herbs and we kept chickens so nice fresh eggs. Genetically modified foods were not around and none of this pumping water into chickens malarky went on.