Tag: intuitiveeating

Posted on

Sin, Snacks, and Self-Control: Revelations on the denial of pleasure and reclaiming satisfaction with food

Written by: Raquel Griffin MSW RSW
Time to read: 5 minutes

Sinful snacks, cheat days, and junk food— oh my!! These phrases probably sound pretty familiar; they demonstrate some of the ways in which diet culture’s flavours of puritanism, morality, and virtue are baked into our common discourses surrounding food and eating.

Historically, religion has long shaped the way we think about food and our bodies. Religions issued warnings about gluttony, engaging in fasting practices and avoidances of what could be seen as indulgent. These practices weren’t about weight loss for its own sake or the effects of eating on a person’s size, but about how bodily pleasure was thought to compromise the soul. It was penance: a way of making up for all the times you had screwed up that year, rather than a way of punishing your body for being too large.

Early Protestant Christianity associated bodily pleasure with moral weakness, emphasizing restraint and self-discipline as pathways to spiritual purity. Protestant Christian clergy and leaders like Sylvester Graham and John Harvey Kellogg were pioneers of so-called “healthy eating”, linking bland diets to moral and sexual chastity; this included their own inventions of the Graham Cracker and Cornflakes. Graham believed that all of America’s moral failings could be traced back to “unholy” ways of eating, which could be cured with a strict diet. Graham’s list of “excess” of sinful indulgences included: meat, spices, caffeine, alcohol, and warmed/heated food, to name a few. He even instructed his followers to abstain from dancing (“Footloose” style), to take cold baths, and sleep on hard beds. These practices weren’t merely about health—they were about control and conformity. 

While some of these diets would be seen as overkill today, their legacy persists in modern diet culture’s manifestations, emphasizing individual responsibility which equates thinness with virtue and fatness as a moral failing. In practice, this looks like promoting restrictive eating as a marker of self-worth, abstaining or using “caution” with demonized foods, and pathologizing fatness as inherently diseased and wild. Diet culture’s obsession with categorizing foods as “good” or “bad” not only distorts our relationship with food but also fuels systemic oppression. It marginalizes those who don’t fit its narrow ideals, often targeting women and femmes, racialized folks, queer folks, disabled and those in larger or fat bodies. These standards are rooted not in health but in control—diet culture is a system of oppression, in all its facets.

Reclaiming Pleasure with Intuitive Eating
Intuitive Eating principles offer a roadmap for this reclamation like rejecting the diet mentality, honouring hunger, making peace with food, and discovering the satisfaction factor.

  • Unconditional Permission to Eat
    Instead of viewing food as an enemy, allow yourself to enjoy it— label guilt as such when you notice it. You’ll notice that when you embrace variety and remove restrictions, food eventually loses its “forbidden fruit” allure.
  • Discover the Satisfaction Factor
    Tune into your senses: what flavours, textures, or aromas do you truly enjoy? Eating with intention—savouring each bite and minimizing distractions—can transform meals into moments of joy.
  • Create Joyful Food Memories
    Food doesn’t solely meet physical needs but also serves as a source of emotional and social connection. It brings people together, creates traditions, and tells stories. Recognizing these facets helps us see food as more than calories or nutrients—it’s a part of life’s richness. Make meaningful connections to memories involving food that were joyful. Who were you with? What made the experience special?


Reclaiming pleasure in food is an act of resistance against diet culture and the oppressive systems that sustain it. By rejecting rigidity, embracing flexibility, and reconnecting with ourselves, we can rediscover the joy and pleasure that eating was always meant to bring. A parting invitation: take that treasured creation of Sylvester’s Graham cracker and squish between two of them a warm, toasted marshmallow and melted chocolate square… Mmmm… what a delicious “Fuck you” to diet culture.

References:

Carlton, G. (2022, February 2). Meet sylvester graham, the religious health nut who thought white bread was evil. Retrieved from: https://allthatsinteresting.com/sylvester-graham

Look, M. (2024, February 12). Why was cereal invented? A brief history of corn flakes. Retrieved from: https://history.howstuffworks.com/american-history/why-was-cereal-invented.htm

Harrison, C. (2019). Anti-diet: Reclaim your time, money, well-being, and happiness through intuitive eating. Little Brown: UK.

Harrison, C. (2019, May 20). Episode#196: diet culture’s racist roots with Sabrina Strings. Food Psych. Retrieved from https://christyharrison.com/foodpsych/6/the-racist-roots-of-diet- culture-with-sabrina-strings-sociologist-and-author-of-fearing-the-black-body 

Harrison, C. (2018, August 10). What is diet culture? Retrieved from: https://christyharrison.com/blog/what-is-diet-culture

Smith, A. F. (2009). Eating history: 30 turning points in the making of American cuisine. New York: Columbia University Press.

Strings, S. (2023, May 6). Fatphobia as misogynoir: gender, race & weight stigma. Body Talks Conference, Untrapped Academy. 

Strings, S. (2019). Fearing the black body: the racial origins of fatphobia. New York University Press: New York.

Tribole, E., & Resch, E. (2020). Intuitive eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach, 4th ed. St Martin’s Publishing Group: New York.

Tribole, E., & Resch, E. (2017). The intuitive eating workbook: ten principles for nourishing a healthy relationship with food. New Harbinger Publications: Oakland.

Posted on

Taking Up Space: How to honour and connect with our bodies in a fatphobic world

Written by: Dustin LindenSmith

Time to read: 12 minutes

Please allow me to introduce myself: I go by Dustin, my pronouns are he/him, and I’m grateful to live with my wife and three children on a lake situated on the unceded ancestral territory of Mi’kmaqi and the Mi’kmaq people, at Punamu’kwati’jk (”Boonamagwaddy”), known in modern times by its colonialist name of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia (across the harbour from Kjipuktuk (Chebucto), now known as Halifax). I am a White, cisgender man, a stay-at-home dad, a jazz musician, a recovering IT professional, and a peer supporter for people in recovery from eating disorders. I am also currently studying for my Master’s in Counselling Psychology to become a psychotherapist.

I come to this work by way of my own lived experience and my ongoing recovery from childhood trauma and an eating disorder.1 I first started eating for emotional comfort and stress relief at age 7, and I was always known as a “husky” child. I went on my first weight-loss diet in my pre-teens, and by the time I reached high school, I had “dieted my way up to” a very high weight. After another couple of weight-loss cycles followed by longer periods of weight gain, I became very fat by the halfway point of my undergraduate degree. I would go through about eight large swings of weight-cycling from that point until I entered recovery some 30 years later.

What I needed to recover from was an eating disorder. When I entered recovery, I estimated that I had gained and lost the equivalent of four times my adult body weight throughout my life—truly an epic, lifelong cycle of yo-yo dieting. Once I really connected the dots between my childhood trauma and my decades-long, food-based emotional coping habits, I was finally able to stop my weight-cycling behaviours by never starting another weight-loss diet again. However, in the fatphobic, diet-obsessed culture we live in, refusing to go on a diet is itself a quasi-revolutionary, countercultural act.

SOTU (State of the Union) for Fat People Today

First, a word about the word “fat”. People “of size” are reclaiming the word fat as a simple descriptor for our bodies that is stripped of its usual negative and pathologizing connotations. I will use the word as a non-judgmental reference term for people like me who live in larger bodies, and whenever I use the word, I do not imply that there is anything inherently wrong or unhealthy about merely being fat.

Second, our status: our numbers seem to be increasing every year, with the causes being multifactorial, complex, and interrelated with one’s socio-economic, cultural, and intersectional positioning within their community. In healthcare, the medical community certainly treats obesity as inherently pathological, but there is no consensus on how to “solve the problem of obesity” or even how to clearly define what “the problem” is in the first place (recent pharmaceutical developments with GLP-1 inhibitors such as Ozempic notwithstanding).

Third, how fat people might present today is multifaceted, but many of us share similar backgrounds and experiences. For years—likely dating back to our childhoods—many of us have had a dysregulated relationship with food, movement, and our bodies. Many of us have experienced chronic and severe weight cycling throughout our lives as a result of chronic weight-loss dieting, and many of us have experienced adverse childhood experiences that involved trauma, neglect, or abuse. Once more for the people in the back: Fat people are themselves often survivors of trauma and abuse.

A Primer on Anti-Fat Bias and Toxic Diet Culture

Anti-fat bias is rampant in our culture, and it is a force which is colonialist, misogynist, and racist in origin. It arises from holdover imperialist ideas about man’s apparent dominion over our mind and our bodies, and of mind over matter. It clings to the ill-conceived notion that we should all be capable of keeping the body “in line” through the rigours of our own mind and willpower, and this has cultivated a learned distrust within ourselves about our bodies. Many of us have lost faith in our own judgment about what is “the right thing” to do for our bodies.

Fat stigma is shot through our families, popular culture, our society, and in our physical spaces (e.g. restaurants, airplanes, and public seating areas which cannot comfortably accommodate fat people). In healthcare settings, it shows itself through the relentless pursuit of thinness for its own sake (+ the inanity of considering one’s BMI on its own as a diagnostic indicator for anything clinically useful on its own merits). We are also all involved (willingly or not) in a multi-billion-dollar dieting and weight loss industry that is deeply pervasive in our popular culture, news and social media, and within many of our friends and family groups.

Why Are We Fat, Anyway?

With apologies to any medical folks in the crowd, I’d like to start with a disavowal of our collective and cultural drive to be thin in the first place. It is simply not necessary to be thin in order to be happy or healthy, and just like anyone else, fat people deserve to be loved and to feel joy.

There are also well-established links between trauma, adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), and disordered eating behaviours 2. Some of us have that history + a personality type or an entrenched pattern of behaviour that derives emotional comfort or stress relief from eating or overeating, and this has led to weight gain over time.

Dieting for weight loss also contains a painful, intrinsic paradox: people can easily become fat by dieting for weight loss. Dieting has a 95+% failure rate for long-term, sustainable weight loss because of how our biology thwarts long-term weight-loss due to its protective metabolic functions against famine and starvation2. There is almost always an unhealthy rebound effect with dieting and weight-cycling, which can best be described as the result of a restrict*-then*-binge cycle (and not a binge-then-restrict cycle—i.e., the restricting comes first).

Being fat in this culture also brings with it body shame, self-loathing, a lack of self-trust, and pervasive feelings of failure and worthlessness resulting from years of “failing” at weight-loss diets. Shame is a physical manifestation of the existential fear that we might become excluded from our group, and this can often lead to dysfunctional and maladaptive behaviours and relational patterns3.

Many of us also deprive ourselves of food (and/or we have an adversarial relationship with it), and this can result in caloric restriction which then incites binge-eating behaviours. The truth is, *we all deserve to eat—*but not all of us believe that we deserve to eat (and/or not all of us believe that we deserve to eat what we want to eat and when we want to eat it).

In my observation, there are also certain factors that do not usually contribute to our fatness: these are a lack of self-insight, a lack of awareness, a lack of motivation, a lack of information, or a lack of knowledge. What we are missing is something much different than those things.

So What Do We Do Now?

So far, I’ve set some of the context for what it’s really like for fat people to live in a fatphobic world. But what can really do about all of that? I have four concrete things to suggest: (1) changing the way we think (and act) about fatness and our bodies; (2) cleaning up our social media feeds; (3) working on our boundaries; and (4) seeking professional support to work with any or all of the above.

Let’s get into each one in some detail.

1. Changing the way we think (and act) about fatness and our bodies

Here are some ways we can start to adjust our mindset and self-view about our own fatness and how we deserve to show up in the world.

  • cultivating accurate empathy and self-acceptance towards ourselves by working with our shame and forgiving ourselves for our past behaviour with food and movement
  • acknowledging our inherent sense of goodness and self-worth: acknowledging that we are all perfectly good, worthy people and we deserve to exist, to eat, and to take up space in this world—no matter what size we are or what number comes up when we step on a scale or whether we think “society” finds us attractive or whether we’ll find a partner or have a family
  • personal self-development and embodiment work: practicing personal self-development work that gets us into our bodies and cultivates mindfulness and self-acceptance (e.g. journaling, art, writing, crafting, singing, dancing, playing, music, acting, movement, or other embodiment exercises such as sports, yoga, tai chi, swimming, strength training, martial arts, walking, working out, golfing, racquet sports, sports in the water, hiking, camping, bouldering, landscaping, and more)
  • radical self-love: learning how to transform our adversarial relationship with our bodies into what Sonya Renee Taylor calls radical self-love

2. Cleaning up our social media feeds

Extensive research has confirmed that the use of social media has been linked to various poor mental health outcomes (e.g., Gioia et al., 2020; Keles et al., 2020). Here are some suggestions for how to mitigate those harms for yourself:

  • acknowledge SM’s real potential harms to our self-image, body image, and self-worth when we drench ourselves in comparisons with the beauty and health content online
  • initiate some accurate (but compassionate!) self-inquiry about your usage habits and about what you really want to “get” from your social media (e.g., if it’s for entertainment but the end result is that the images you’re exposing yourself to are harming you and making you feel terrible about yourself, is it really giving you what you’re looking for?)
  • revisiting privacy settings, posting/reading frequency, screen time settings
  • unfollowing accounts focused on weight loss, dieting, “clean” eating, excessive exercise, and anything that otherwise appears to promote toxic diet culture or misogynistic beauty standards
  • adding new accounts that pass your new fat-positive vibe check (e.g., the beautiful Black yogini Jessamyn Stanley (@mynameisjessamyn) (and don’t miss this guest reel by @funkingafter50); the ineffably happy Toronto gay bear Lukas (@bearlyfriendly); and the photographer and artist Sugar McD (@shooglet), who has taken some of the most beautiful pictures of fat people experiencing joy that I have ever seen)

3. Working on boundaries

This is the one I have personally found the most difficult; throughout my entire life, I have pre-emptively made self-deprecating fat jokes about myself in social settings in a misguided attempt to make everyone comfortable. I now understand that this habit was causing me more harm than I knew, and it was also giving everyone in my life implicit license to speak disrespectfully about my own weight.

It takes real courage (along with possibly a previously-unknown self-respect) to build up the confidence to start the challenging but worthwhile work of informing the people in your life that you’re no longer willing to put up with a certain type of discussion or judgment about your body weight, your diet, your food choices, or your health.

The best introduction to the topic I can suggest is Aleo’s own Lee Thomas’s 2-part blog post on this topic. When you’re ready to go deeper, I recommend looking at Black psychotherapist Nedra Glover Tawwab’s excellent work (e.g., her website, her Instagram, her book, and her workbook are all excellent resources).

4. Professional support

One of the sweetest gifts you can give yourself is the gift of professional support for what you’re struggling with. If you want to take a fresh new approach to your recovery, working with anti-diet, anti-oppressive practitioners such as the ones you will find at The Aleo Collective would be a great start. Lee and Raquel are MSWs; Courtenay is a Registered Dietitian, and I am a Peer Supporter who works with people in recovery from disordered eating and self-image issues.

  1. i.e., Binge-Eating Disorder (BED); see APA, 2022, p. 392 ↩︎
  2. Bakalar et al., 2018; Brewerton, 2022; Hemmingsson et al., 2014; Schiff et al., 2021 ↩︎
  3. Freire, 2020; Spreckley et al., 2021 ↩︎
  4. Doran & Lewis, 2012; Noll & Fredrickson, 1998 ↩︎

References

American Psychiatric Association [APA]. (2022). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th ed., text rev. (DSM-5-TR). https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425787

Bakalar, J. L., Barmine, M., Druskin, L., Olsen, C. H., Quinlan, J., Sbrocco, T., & Tanofsky‐Kraff, M. (2018). Childhood adverse life events, disordered eating, and body mass index in US Military service members. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 51(5), 465–469. https://doi.org/10.1002/eat.22851

Brewerton, T. D. (2022). Mechanisms by which adverse childhood experiences, other traumas and PTSD influence the health and well-being of individuals with eating disorders throughout the life span. 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40337-022-00696-6

Doran, J., & Lewis, C. A. (2012). Components of Shame and Eating Disturbance Among Clinical and Non-clinical Populations: Shame and Eating Disturbance. European Eating Disorders Review, 20(4), 265–270. https://doi.org/10.1002/erv.1142

Freire, R. (2020). Scientific evidence of diets for weight loss: Different macronutrient composition, intermittent fasting, and popular diets. Nutrition, 69, 110549. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nut.2019.07.001

Gioia, F., Griffiths, M. D., & Boursier, V. (2020). Adolescents’ Body Shame and Social Networking Sites: The Mediating Effect of Body Image Control in Photos. Sex Roles, 83(11–12), 773–785. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-020-01142-0

Hemmingsson, E., Johansson, K., & Reynisdottir, S. (2014). Effects of childhood abuse on adult obesity: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Obesity Reviews: An Official Journal of the International Association for the Study of Obesity, 15(11), 882–893. https://doi.org/10.1111/obr.12216

Keles, B., McCrae, N., & Grealish, A. (2020). A systematic review: The influence of social media on depression, anxiety and psychological distress in adolescents. International Journal of Adolescence and Youth, 25(1), 79–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/02673843.2019.1590851

Noll, S. M., & Fredrickson, B. L. (1998). A Mediational Model Linking Self-Objectification, Body Shame, and Disordered Eating. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 22(4), 623–636. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-6402.1998.tb00181.x

Schiff, M., Helton, J., & Fu, J. (2021). Adverse childhood experiences and obesity over time. Public Health Nutrition, 24(11), 3205–3209. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1368980021001804

Spreckley, M., Seidell, J., & Halberstadt, J. (2021). Perspectives into the experience of successful, substantial long-term weight-loss maintenance: A systematic review. International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-Being, 16(1), 1862481. https://doi.org/10.1080/17482631.2020.1862481

Posted on

Reclaiming Your Birthright (Part 1)

An Introduction to Intuitive Eating: Rejecting the Diet Mentality

Posted by: Raquel Griffin

Time to read: 5 minutes

“I just want to eat normally”. In my experience teasing this statement out with folks, I typically learn that what they mean is they don’t want to feel so preoccupied with food, or worried, or scared. They are tired from being at war with food and with their bodies. Many of them want Intuitive Eating, but it feels far off, out-of-reach, out of their capacity.

But, what if I invited you to consider that we’re born Intuitive Eaters? Of course, there are always going to be exceptions to most things, but generally speaking we come out of the womb with much of our intuition (evolutionary and survival responses) when it comes to eating. However, what happens often is that internal wisdom becomes polluted by external factors like diet culture. We learn to disconnect from our bodies and deny our needs and wants. Intuitive Eating is about reclaiming our birthright by shifting focus away from external factors rooted in diet culture and rebuilding trust with our internal wisdom and intuition.

This blogpost is the first entry of a series, an Introduction to Intuitive Eating. To summarize, Intuitive Eating:

  • Its philosophy is rooted in an anti-diet positioning and is aligned with the concepts of Health At Every Size and weight inclusivity.
  • It is comprised of 10 principles that are dynamic in nature (not sequential steps, though the positions of #1 and #10 are intentional)
  • Interoception is the foundational skill of reference; it is the ability to perceive physical sensations that originate from inside the body. 
  • It has a solid footing in research in numerous ways: 
    (a) evidence for the ineffectiveness and damage of diets or intentional weight loss
    (b) is an evidence based approach that demonstrates the benefits of intuitive eaters (220+ studies and counting)
    (c) has a validated assessment tool. 

In this post, I want to focus on explaining the anti-diet positioning of Intuitive Eating, which is related to the first principle of Intuitive Eating, and I’ll pull in some research pieces to corroborate that stance.

The first principle is the most important, Reject the Diet Mentality, where right away things get real specific on why an anti-diet approach can be a helpful cornerstone in your relationship with food repair. Diets do not work, and by this I mean weight loss that can be experienced from dieting is not long lasting. On top of that, the ineffectiveness of dieting is not a neutral quality: diets can cause a lot of harm and damage on our health in a variety of ways.

Dieting and intentional weight loss have been have showing their hand in research for a while now. You can see a non-exhaustive list of some of this research at the end of this post. Way back in 2007 a team of researchers came together to conduct a meta-analysis of all the long term weight loss studies they could find to assess whether long-term weight loss was actually a thing. The results from this meta-analysis, and other research studies since, report a 5-year maximum window where approximately 95% of people will not only regain the weight they did lose from dieting initially, but up to 2/3 of people will actually regain MORE weight than they lost. Let’s recognize for a moment what that means: dieting is more likely to make you fatter in the long-run. Now, this is not meant to demonstrate colluding with diet culture, but instead to point out the ridiculousness of a product that worsens the very “issue” it claims to resolve. Imagine purchasing a water bottle that not only is ineffective in quenching your thirst, but instead actually makes you thirstier. Pretty ineffective product, eh?

So, the diet is the problem itself, yet we are convinced by diet culture that WE are the problem. We are somehow at fault. When the weight inevitably comes back we blame ourselves and try the next diet or “lifestyle change”, and the next, and the next. This often results in weight-cycling: the pattern of weight loss and regain that occurs with chronic dieting. Weight cycling is seldom controlled for in many large studies that associate weight with health issues; this is a major oversight because weight cycling itself is an independent risk factor for many health conditions including: cardiovascular disease, inflammation, high blood pressure, and insulin resistance. And what do you know, these health issues often are blamed on one’s weight or fatness, resulting in various prescriptions of the very thing that could be contributing to these health issues = intentional weight loss via dieting and exercise.

In future posts for this series on an introduction to Intuitive Eating, I’ll share more on how the concepts of Health at Every Size and Weight Inclusivity have overlaps with an an-diet approach, some of the benefits of Intuitive Eating that research has shown, Interoception, and more. For now, my hope is maybe reading this has helped you begin to consider a different perspective toward the normalized attempts to shrink our bodies via some rendition of eating less. If you’re feeling exhausted from the never ending pursuit of weight loss, or feeling obsessed with food or eating, know that exploring Intuitive Eating could bring more peace and ease to your food and body relationship. It has the potential to reconnect (or introduce) you to your birthright.

Research references (for dieting being ineffective), a non-exhaustive list:

Bacon, L., & Aphramor, L. (2011). Weight science: Evaluating the evidence for a paradigm shift. Nutrition Journal, (10) 9. DOI: 10.1186/1475-2891-10-9

Dulloo, A. G., Jacquet, J., & Montani, J. (2011). How dieting makes some fatter: from a perspective of human body composition autoregulation. Proceedings of the Nutrition Society, 71, 379–389. doi:10.1017/S0029665112000225

Field, A. E., Austin, S. B., Taylor, C. B., Malspeis, S., Rosner, B., Rockett, H. R., et. al. (2003). Relation between dieting and weight change among preadolescents and adolescents. Pediatrics, 112, 900– 906.

Fothergill, E., Guo, J., Howard, L., Kerns, J. C.,  Knuth, N. D., Brychta, R., et. al. (2016). Persistent metabolic adaptation 6 years after “The Biggest Loser” competition. Obesity biology and integrated physiology. doi:10.1002/oby.21538

Mann, T., Tomiyama, A. J., Westling, E., Lew, A., Samuels, B., & Chatman, J. (2007). Medicare’s search for effective obesity treatments: Diets are not the answer. American Psychologist, The American Psychological Association, 62(3), 220-233. doi: 10.1037/0003-066X.62.3.220

Montani, J., Schutz, Y., & Dulloo, A. G. (2015). Dieting and weight cycling as risk factors for cardiometabolic diseases: Who is really at risk? World Obesity, (1), 7–18. doi: 10.1111/obr.12251

Neumark-Sztainer,D., Wall, M., Larson, N. I., Eisenberg, M. E., Loth, K. (2011). Dieting and disordered eating behaviors from adolescence to young adulthood: Findings from a

10-year longitudinal study. Journal of the American Dietetic Association.  doi: 10.1016/j.jada.2011.04.012

O’Hara, L., & Taylor, J. (2018). What’s wrong with the ‘war on obesity?’: A narrative review of the weight-centered health paradigm and development of the 3C framework to build critical competency for a paradigm shift. SAGE open, 1–28. DOI://1d0o.i.1o1rg7/71/02.1157872/241450812484707128878728888

Richmond, T.K., Thurston, I.B., Sonneville, K. R. (2020). Weight-focused public health interventions: No benefit, some harm. JAMA Paediatrics. 

Ross, R., Blair, S., de Lannoy, L., Després, J., Lavie, C. J. (2015). Changing the endpoints for determining effective obesity management. Progress in Cardiovascular diseases, 57, 330–336. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pcad.2014.10.002

Tribole, E., & Resch, E. (2020). Intuitive eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach, 4th ed. St Martin’s Publishing Group: New York.

Tribole, E., & Resch, E. (2017). The intuitive eating workbook: ten principles for nourishing a healthy relationship with food. New Harbinger Publications: Oakland.

Pietiläinen, K. H., Saarni, S. E., Kapiro, J., & Rissanen, A. (2011). Does dieting make you fat? A twin study. International Journal of Obesity. doi:10.1038/ijo.2011.160- online publication, 9 August 2011

Wing, R. R., Bolin, P., Brancati, F. L., Bray, G. A., Clark, J. M., Coday, M., et al. (2013). Cardiovascular effects of intensive lifestyle intervention in Type 2 diabetes. The New England Journal of Medicine, 369, 145-54. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa1212914

Posted on

Postpartum body image tips: from an ED therapist with ED lived experience

Posted by: Raquel Griffin

Time to read: 5 minutes

Originally appeared on: NEDIC.ca

At first, I thought I was successful in combating ED thoughts and the diet mentality that followed the birth of my child. Sure, my ear would initially be tickled with ED whisperings of fatphobia and diet culture. But just as quickly as they appeared, self-compassionate and comforting hums would replace them. But as time passed, I began to feel more stress about my new body shape and size. I had a number of friends and acquaintances who gave birth very close to when I did, and I really began to struggle with body comparison. Why was my body larger than theirs? Why did it seem like they were restored to their pre-pregnancy body sizes when I wasn’t? These fatphobic thoughts and expectations hung like a cloud as I squeezed my body into my too-small clothes.

At 4 months postpartum, I was horrified to come across a post in my social media feed from my local hospital’s pregnancy unit for an upcoming Q&A on C-sections. The post included a naked, very thin, flat-tummied, stretchmark-free, White person, from the navel down to the thighs. Laying on top of this body was a newborn baby, peaceful in slumber, blocking the birthing person’s labia but also positioned low enough down to wonder how this person had no pubic hair. It was a completely unrealistic picture of any body, let alone a postpartum body. I was so upset that a reproductive-focused medical facility was perpetuating such a harmful body standard (not to mention a weirdly sexualized one). I felt  shame about my postpartum body and at times bought into this diet-culture idea that my body should be getting smaller the further away I got from  my child’s birth date.

Pregnant people are often highly encouraged to try nursing at any cost (a whole separate conversation) and one of the “benefits” often included is weight loss. I hate to admit it… but when feeding/nursing was going well with my baby I was partially relieved, because in the back of my mind, I thought it would help prevent me from needing to adjust to a drastically new and different body. But, I was wrong. I was experiencing shame that my postpartum body was “too large” or differently-shaped. And, then I had shame about my fatphobia-induced shame, as that was not aligned with my values.

It’s a strange thing to hold reverence for the body that withstood such a major medical event and brought my treasured child into the world, while also resenting the bodily evidence left behind. To admire the softness and smoothness from stretched skin where my child was held in their first home, then to shortly thereafter hold disgust for new skin/fat folds and stretch mark scribblings. The good news is, with a lot of work, over time my relationship to my new body as a result of pregnancy and childbirth is becoming easier. If I’m being honest, I’m not yet at a place where I like my postpartum body and I’m willing to accept that maybe I will never be. But, I am at a place where my feelings toward my body are much more neutral and compassionate. My body has been and is capable of great things. My body is worthy. 

These are some of the things that have been helping me move toward body acceptance:

Remind yourself that eating is especially important during this time
Our bodies need energy in the form of food. Providing consistent and adequate nourishment following labour and delivery is extremely important—especially for postpartum bodies. The last thing your body needs right now is to have its starvation response triggered.

Whether your birth was vaginal or Caesarean, your body needs to recover and it needs food to do that. You will need the energy from food to help you combat the sleep deprivation you’ll be experiencing. I was able to have several family members and friends provide food and meals in the weeks after my birth so that I didn’t have to worry about cooking. This was an absolute life-saver. I also made sure I had Ensure and meal supplements on hand to quickly consume nutrients with little time/effort. Eating enough consistently and regularly will also help your milk production if you are nursing.

Respect your body by dressing in clothes that fit and are comfortable
Stop trying to squeeze into your old clothes. Wearing clothes that are too tight does not feel good. 

Pregnancy/maternity clothes are meant to accommodate a changing body. Your body may keep changing postpartum so just because you’re no longer pregnant doesn’t mean you should stop wearing pregnancy clothes if they are comfortable and fit. If it helps you feel better, stay away from the items that accentuate a “bump”.

If you find that your new body shape does not fit in any of the sizes provided in a store, consider buying a size that is too big and then taking to a tailor or a family member who has some sewing skills. Get familiar with thrift stores. I have bought some items new, but I have found most of my success with thrift stores. I’ve even bought a couple items with the tags still on.

Engage in re-embodying activities
With pregnancy, labour, child-birth, and nursing, there is a long period of time where you may feel like your body isn’t fully your own anymore. And, if you have a history of disordered eating and disembodiment, these feelings could be exacerbated. Where possible, engage in pleasurable activities that help you reconnect with your body in positive ways. For me, that was prioritizing walking, getting back to choir rehearsals and singing, and maintaining sexual intimacy with my partner. 

Reject the Diet Mentality
Shortly after giving birth, I completed my Intuitive Eating Counselling Certification. Immersing myself in anti-diet values, principles, and scientific research really helped me to reject the diet mentality and ED thoughts as they arose. 

There is no research to indicate that long-term weight loss is a realistic endeavour.
Speak out against harmful diet culture when you see it. For example, that Instagram post I mentioned— I commented something along the lines of “I’m really happy to see this event on C-sections will be taking place but I am very disappointed you chose to use a promotional image that perpetuates an unrealistic body standard”. Many other commenters followed suit and the account ended up removing that promotional image.
Consume weight-inclusive content, media, and literature that aligns with anti-diet values, fat-liberation, and Health at Every Size. Some of my favourites are:

Join our mailing list!

We promise to never spam you or sell your information.
You can unsubscribe at any time.