3490: Why You Want To Diet by Stefanie Bonastia with Jessi Kneeland on Mindful Eating

[00:00:00] Right now, get up to 15% off Select Storage Solutions. Put heavy-duty HDX totes to good use, protecting what's important to you. The solid, impact-resistant design prevents cracking. And the clear base and sides make items easy to find even when the totes are stacked. Find Select Shelving and Tote Storage up to 15% off at the Home Depot to organize every room in your home, from your garage to your attic. Visit homedepot.com. How doers get more done.

[00:00:30] Hey friends, Olivia from OLLI. Between new routines and the ultimate group project known as parenting, you need science-backed solutions that work with your life. That's where OLLI comes in. Start your mornings off right with Maltese made to support nutrition and immune health. Choose from our lineup of gut-supporting probiotics. And we've got occasional sleep support to help the whole fam chase their big dreams. Head back to class with the number one gummy supplement brand. Stock up on OLLI.com today. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

[00:01:00] This is Optimal Health Daily. Why You Want to Diet? By Stephanie Bonastia. With jessenealand.com. And I'm your host and narrator, Dr. Neal Malik. Hey there, happy middle of the week Wednesday and welcome back to Optimal Health Daily. Where I read to you from popular health and fitness blogs to help you optimize your health. And always with a bit of my commentary at the end. Now, it is the middle of the week which means I need to share a little bit of inspiration with you. So here we go. Quote,

[00:01:29] The first wealth is health. Ralph Waldo Emerson. I actually love sharing health quotes from those that lived like over a hundred years ago. Because it's like we knew this for so long. We've known about the benefits of staying healthy for so long. And yet, it seems like we've forgotten how to prioritize it. Now, before I jump on that tangent, let's go ahead and get to today's post and start optimizing your life.

[00:02:03] Why You Want to Diet? By Stefanie Bonastia. With jessenealand.com. There is so much information about dieting. And about how to stop dieting. But why do we diet in the first place? Why is it such a compelling topic? On the surface, we pursue dieting because we want to lose weight. We live in a culture that explicitly values thinner bodies.

[00:02:28] So, this is certainly a valid part of our motivation for wanting to control the size and shape of our bodies. But weight loss alone is not the whole story. There are deeper reasons for why we feel so compelled to lose weight. And they don't have much to do with weight at all. Because weight is socially sanctioned as meaningful, anything we project onto our weight is like saying, Hey, this means something to me.

[00:02:54] Healing your relationship to food and body size involves figuring out what your core issues are. We'll get to examples of those later. And addressing them more directly. Even after doing that work, you may experience times when dieting still feels like the answer. This is not a sign that dieting is the answer. But that another core issue has come up and may require more investigation. Take my client, Nicole, for example.

[00:03:22] Nicole came to me in the beginning of 2020, looking to heal her relationship with food after decades of dieting. After nine months of working together, Nicole was binge free and had mental space to focus on her actual life goals, which included starting her own branding business, enjoying time with her husband, and being an aunt to her new niece and nephew. By the end of our sessions, she reported feeling more at peace with herself than she had felt in her entire life.

[00:03:51] Nicole and I kept in touch after that. But almost a year after our program officially ended, she reached out to say that she thought she might need another round of coaching. While she was still binge free and feeling miles away from where she had been just two short years ago, she said she was grappling with self-doubt and thoughts of returning to dieting. I'll never go back, she said. But I keep thinking about doing another round of a fad diet I tried before. I know how that will end.

[00:04:21] So why is this happening? I was doing so well. I reminded Nicole that she was still doing well. Despite feeling the seduction of diet culture's promises, she wasn't obsessing about food around the clock, or falling into patterns of restriction and binging that controlled her life. Sometimes we forget how difficult life really was inside of that cycle. I offered Nicole a few clarity sessions to see if moving ahead with another coaching package was warranted.

[00:04:50] But within a few weeks, it was clear that Nicole wasn't experiencing a shift in her value system like she had feared. Instead, Nicole was dealing with family boundary issues that had been dormant during our work together during the pandemic. Now that her family was physically more present in her life, the old issues were creeping back in. As a response to feeling a lack of boundaries, her mind went straight back to dieting,

[00:05:16] which historically gave her a feeling of control and insulated her against her mother's comments about her body. Nicole didn't need an intuitive eating overhaul. She just needed a recalibration. She had already learned that dieting wasn't the answer to her life's problems, but she hadn't fully challenged the quick-fix diet response regarding this particular trigger. After about four sessions, Nicole was able to access her empowered voice again

[00:05:44] and focus on boundary setting with her family instead of unnecessarily eliminating entire food groups from her diet. This is just one example of how diets lure us in by promising to fix areas of our life that feel out of control, uncomfortable, or downright painful. Lacking boundaries with others, with ourselves, our time, or our environment can leave us feeling like we have no control over where we end and something else begins.

[00:06:14] We may respond by channeling the desire for boundaries into a clear meal plan with definitive rules or shape-shifting our body to fit more securely into a certain size, which is just another boundary. In addition to needing boundaries, here are some other examples of root cause issues that may be behind your desire to diet or lose weight. 1. Feeling misunderstood or not accurately seen

[00:06:40] I have noticed this is a pattern that usually starts in childhood when we get assigned a family role that does not give us room to grow and expand. When we feel shades of this misinterpretation showing up in adulthood, we may feel the same sense of injustice that we once felt as children and use dieting as a way to carve out an identity that says, I am strong. I am willful. I am able to carve my own way.

[00:07:07] I will not be passive. I am able to shape myself into my own mold. 2. Feeling like you have no impact or agency If you have a history of feeling like your opinions and preferences don't matter, dieting may feel like a way of having a say in what happens to you. When you restrict food, your body responds, at least initially, by becoming smaller, which is reinforced by cultural applause and admiration.

[00:07:35] When we feel like we have no say in our own lives, dieting becomes a way that we can manifest, cause and effect. 3. Feeling isolated, alone or rejected meaning lacking connection As humans, we need connection Thinness is a free pass to acceptance in the culture we live in and it's no wonder that we would turn to it in times when we otherwise feel abandoned, lonely or like we don't fit in.

[00:08:02] This is one of the most common patterns I see in the people I work with because beauty, and by extension, thinness, are the most direct channels to social approval that we know of. And 4. Feeling overwhelmed or dysregulated We live in a world that can easily trigger our nervous system into hyper-vigilance. Think political climate, pandemic uncertainty, fast-paced living and a productivity culture.

[00:08:30] If our body needs more access to calm, dieting may feel like a good way to use structure, rules and routine to provide that sense of groundedness. Unfortunately, diets are only a temporary band-aid for all of these issues. They feel compelling because they work so well at first and our brains are wired to remember what feels rewarding so that we are more inclined to seek it out again. But, after a while, the original emotions resurface

[00:08:59] and we realize that dieting is creating its own system of problems. Exposing root causes can go a long way to healing this pattern of distraction by dieting. When we know what it is that we're really craving, we can stop giving so much power to methods that aren't actually uprooting the original problem. What patterns do you notice in yourself when it comes to your own root causes? If you have trouble identifying this, think back to what was going on in your life when you first began dieting

[00:09:29] and see if there are any lingering patterns to your present-day triggers. What are you seeking through your diet? What diet promises feel particularly compelling or believable? Will the diet truly provide these things to you in a sustainable or meaningful way? These questions can help you get closer to the story behind your own dieting so that you can continue to peel back more layers when the urge to diet strikes again.

[00:10:00] You just listened to the post titled, Why You Want to Diet by Stephanie Bonastia with jessenealand.com And I'll be right back with my commentary. Now, it's just me and a small team behind this show, so I get how much the right hire matters. When you need the right person, this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Stop struggling to get your job post even seen on other sites. Sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95% more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs.

[00:10:30] Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at indeed.com slash podcast.

[00:10:54] Just go to indeed.com slash podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Quince is all about fewer, better pieces. Premium materials, built to last, designed to become the ones you reach for day after day. They specialize in everyday staples that work harder.

[00:11:23] Ultra soft organic tees and premium Mongolian cashmere sweaters that go from a casual workday to dinner out. Still hanging on to worn out basics? Their premium denim and tailored chinos start at just $60, with the fit and fabric you'd expect from a luxury designer brand. Everything is 50 to 80% less than similar brands because they work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen.

[00:11:48] I always recommend the Quince cashmere sweater because it's great for virtually any occasion. Unbelievably soft and the fit is perfect. And don't forget, Quince has hotel quality bedding, cookware and travel essentials. Upgrade your everyday. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com slash OHD. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too.

[00:12:17] That's quince.com slash OHD. Dr. Neal Malik here for my commentary. Researchers have found that for some, not everyone, losing a sense of control in our lives may contribute to dieting. I'll explain. Again, this doesn't happen to everyone. But in some, when they start to feel like they're losing their ability to control certain aspects of their lives, they may end up getting more strict with their food intake.

[00:12:47] This is because what we eat, meaning what we put into our bodies, is ultimately our choice. We have control over that. We may not have control over the traffic or how our supervisor reacts to our job performance or whether the train is running late. But we can control what we eat. So as today's author Stephanie said, we may need to dig a little deeper and ask ourselves things like, Why am I doing this? What am I looking to accomplish?

[00:13:18] What am I searching for? What are the root causes of my behavior? If you find it may be because you're feeling like you've lost control over certain aspects of your life, then we may need to find a way to gain some, not all, of that control back. And hopefully, getting some of that control back doesn't have to be through dieting. Alright, that'll do it for another episode of Optimal Health Daily. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for sharing the show with someone.

[00:13:46] I'll see you back here tomorrow where Optimal Life awaits.