A guide to navigating diet culture and ditching diets for good
On this page, you’ll find out why diets don’t work and how dieting actively harms your physical health and damages your relationship with food. You may also be wondering, “What is diet culture?”. As part of your healing journey, I invite you to consider your dieting history and your motivations for dieting.
Women aren't struggling to get back on track because of time or motivation. They're struggling because someone (society) told them there was a track in the first place. And the biggest problem with 'track' suggested by society is that it only has one destination: weight loss.
Diet Culture is a system of beliefs held by society about food, weight, body sizes and shapes and health. These beliefs are reinforced by industries that directly profit from them, such as the dieting, fitness, beauty (cosmetic surgery) and fashion (shapewear) industries. The media and clinical research which is often funded by weight loss companies, and so these also perpetuate the myths and misconceptions found in diet culture.
Many of us start diets and set new goals on New Year's day and Mondays, but often abandon these goals by the end of January or mid week. Find out why and how to change this.
There are loads of great podcasts presented by dietitians, nutritionists, doctors, and therapists. Often, they feature other experts on their shows. It’s a fantastic way to learn a lot about a topic and hear some of the discussions and debates on an issue. Here are my favourite podcasts on Health At Every Size®, Body Positivity, and Intuitive Eating.
Looking to make peace with food, exercise and your body? These are the books you need to start with. These books cover the topics of intuitive eating, body confidence, emotional eating and listening to your body's own cues and wisdom.
Diet culture is life-threatening, toxic and damaging to both our physical and mental health. It can also spread like wildfire through the family tree. Many of the women on my courses have spoken of their friends, mothers, sisters and aunts dieting. If you struggle with disordered eating now, I can pretty much guarantee that someone in your circle has experimented with diets, body-shamed you or body shamed themselves in front of you. Can you relate to my story?
Do these 7 stages of the dieting cycle sound all too familiar to you? Find out how to finally escape the dieting trap, make peace with food and your body, and improve your health (both physical and mental).
Fitness trackers and food journals are still big business. Nowadays it seems everyone is wearing one and there hundreds of different types and brands too choose from. But is tracking fitness and writing down every bite, for everyone? Here are the pros and cons of tracking your food and fitness…
Many of us have managed to lose weight at some point in our lives, But how many of us have managed to keep this same weight off for 5 years or more? In this post, I'm going to be summarising some of the most commonly cited biological explanations.
Do you feel more ‘in control’ of your life on some level, when you're restricting or micro-managing your weight, food and exercise? Here's how to handle that.
Dieting and diet culture encourage a cycle of self-hatred -> regret -> food restriction or purging -> binge. Which is why you need to rebel against it.
Where does the dieting mindset come from? We're not born with the instinct to diet or restrict food, in fact, it completely goes against our instincts (which is why dieting fails in the first place!). This is something we learn (and sometimes from a worryingly young age!). So let's look at some of the factors which contribute to the dieting mindset.
When it comes to our health and fitness, our mindsets (i.e. our attitudes, beliefs and assumptions) are often the hardest part of us to change. Mindset matters because it affects the relationship you have between food, exercise and your body. In this blog post we look at the difference between a dieting mindset and a healthy mindset.
Here's why I won't be joining my local slimming club, and why I gave up on weight loss in favour of much more worthy pursuits of my time and mental energy (and what happened to my health and fitness when I did this).
Where do the lines between healthy Eating, Clean Eating, and Orthorexia blur? A look at Wellness Bloggers and the cult of wellness, inspired by BBC3's Clean Eating's Dirty Secrets and Selfridges #Bodytalk
For some people, exploring Intuitive Eating and Body Acceptance for the first time, there will still be the temptation to look for 'a better diet' or the 'one that fits'. Here is an exercise I do with my coaching group, where I ask people to look at their own evidence gathered over the years, for why diets don't work!