How Can I Trust My Body if I Keep Gaining Weight?
Welcome to this new series where I answer your questions about diet culture, HAES, intuitive eating, and health! If you like it, please consider subscribing.
This first newsletter addresses a question from Carole:
“What would you say was your biggest help in switching from dieting to intuitive? I have read up on it and I can relate but I always get panicked because if I could "trust" my gut, why has my weight kept going up?”
What a great question, Carole! Before I dive deep into it, I want to give a disclaimer that the information provided in this newsletter is for informational and educational purposes only and is not a substitute for individualized medical care. Please speak to your medical professional if you have any questions.
When someone starts their intuitive eating journey there are always a lot of questions that come up. I think that stems from the fact that intuitive eating is so different than how diet culture tells us to eat. The former is about listening to your body and making decisions based on past experiences with food. Unfortunately, it’s also more complicated than that. There are 10 principles to intuitive eating that get miscommunicated and sometimes completely disregarded in online content. On the other side, diet culture is all about mistrusting your body, trying to change it in some way, and eating the “cleanest” possible.
When I started my intuitive eating journey, I had one foot stuck in diet culture and one foot in the intuitive eating / anti-diet world. All the knowledge I had around food involved a diet culture narrative because that’s the information I saw, heard, and read constantly. In addition, all the knowledge I had around my body and other bodies came from that same narrative. One that definitely didn’t have my best interest at heart.
Ensuring that the information I got was accurate was one of the biggest and most important steps I took in my intuitive eating journey. I made sure to follow reliable sources on social media like anti-diet dietitians. I also read the Intuitive Eating book written by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, the creators of the framework, as well as other books like The F*ck It Diet by Caroline Dooner and Anti-Diet by Christy Harrison.
These books and accounts gave me the information and guidelines I needed to reject diet culture and finally trust my body.
Let’s talk about trust. The hardest part of this journey was trusting that my body knows where my ideal healthy weight is. The weight where it’s at its happiest without my interference (tracking every morsel of food I ingest or every step I make).
Our weight is affected by a multitude of things varying from hormones, genetics, the environment, and our weight set point. (source)
The set point theory is that our bodies self-regulate our weight by adjusting our food intake and energy expenditure. In other words, it affects how hungry we are for food and it might make us naturally move more or less in order to find homeostasis. (source) Some studies mention that instead of having this exact weight that our body thrives at - like the set point theory would suggest - that it would aim to stay within a certain range. That’s called the dual-intervention model.
The researchers explain the dual-intervention model from an evolutionary perspective. The lower limit of our weight (the lowest weight our body would be comfortable at) would be determined by the risk of starving and the upper limit (the highest weight our body would be comfortable at) would be determined by the risk of becoming a prey to other animals. Interestingly, our bodies don’t like when we get close to the lower limit and it fights back harder to keep us within our range. However, when we get closer to the upper limit, it doesn’t put up as much of a fight. This means it doesn’t fight as much to lower our weight when we get too close to our highest weight limit. (source 1, source 2)
Another thing that can affect our weight is whether we have dieted or not. Restricting our food intake in order to lose weight may have the opposite effect by increasing our weight. Most of us have experienced it ourselves: we diet to lose weight, the weight comes off fairly easily but then we gain the weight back after a few months. We try again by controlling our food intake and exercise, we lose weight a little bit more slowly this time and then gain back even more weight a few months later. (source)
It’s also important to consider that being afraid of gaining weight can affect our intuitive eating journey. That fear of weight gain or becoming fat can make us hang on to those food rules that diet culture fed us through the years. That means that you’re not truly trusting your body because you can’t fully believe that your body knows best if part of you is afraid of how your body may change. Challenging your internalized fatphobia can be a great way to move forward in your intuitive eating journey. The best way to do that? Read up on the topic and ask yourself some questions and answer them honestly: why would gaining weight be such a bad thing? Who decided that it was a bad thing? How do they benefit from that?
The truth is, some people will promote intuitive eating as a weight-loss tactic. It is not a weight-loss tactic. In fact, it’s about putting our desires to lose weight aside because, as mentioned earlier, it’s more difficult to listen to our body and trust it if we’re afraid of what physical changes may follow. Practicing intuitive eating can mean losing weight for some people. It can mean maintaining the same weight for others. And for some, it might mean gaining weight.
If we gain weight, we might feel like our body is failing us. That’s not what it means at all. Our body’s only job is to keep us healthy and in a balanced (homeostatic) state, as much as possible. That might mean that you end up at a weight higher than your perceived “ideal” weight. For your body, that higher weight might be where it thrives and that’s ok. Although it might not feel ok since we live in a fatphobic society fueled by a 71 billion dollar industry that aims (and succeeds) to make us fear and hate fat bodies.
Gaining weight is scary when you see how fat people are treated in the doctor’s office, in airplanes, at the mall, etc. A study that looked at the experiences and sources of weight stigmatization in “overweight” and “ob*se” adults mentioned that “as weight increases, more stigma is experienced”. It’s important to acknowledge that but know that your feelings are valid if this is how you feel right now. (source)
Intuitive Eating goes hand in hand with learning about weight stigma and that’s something that the media doesn’t talk about when addressing this framework. It involves a lot of learning and unlearning. It takes patience. It takes trust. It’s a life-long practice and there’s no perfect way to eat intuitively. That’s the beauty of it.
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