The Belgian dietician Alessia Couvreur, after years of frenzied diets and sports to lose weight, was completely done with it:eating and exercising should be fun. No more dieting, but 'just' do what your body tells you. That turned out to be her best decision ever.
Alessia had a very slim build as a child, but ended up in a spiral of gaining and losing weight as a young adult. In an effort to find balance in her weight and confidence, she tried everything. From severe restrictions and heavy sports to making her own plant-based milk. She thought it was very stressful and exhausting.
Disappointed
“I graduated as a dietitian in 2017 and it was my turn to help others lose weight, believing that your weight determines everything about you. This didn't feel right. If my client hadn't lost a few pounds, we were both disappointed, and if there was weight loss, it was usually short-lived. As soon as they stopped on me and stopped following the diet I gave them, the weight came back," Alessia writes in her book Bye, bye diet .
Liberating
When she first read about intuitive eating, she was skeptical. "Okay, dieting isn't the way, but eating without a single rule? How can that work?! Still, I was triggered and started reading more about it. A new world opened up for me and at the same time it was very confronting. I realized that I was completely entangled in the diet web myself and had to get out of it too," she writes. Alessia then signed up for a trajectory from American intuitive eating dietitian Rachel Goodman and read the book Intuitive Eating by Evelyne Tribole and Elyse Resch. Step by step she freed myself from the eating rules and the false beliefs, and found her own intuitive eater again. “This was without a doubt one of the best steps I've ever taken. It brought me so much more than a healthy relationship with food. It's not an easy process, but once you see that you can trust your body when it comes to food and let go of your weight goal, it's so liberating.”
Intuitive eating
Intuitive eating was developed in the 1990s by two American dieticians, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, who questioned the effectiveness of diets. After going through numerous studies, they came to the conclusion that slimming diets are never a long-term solution and do more harm than good. They decided to do things differently and came up with ten principles that form the basis of intuitive eating. Important:these principles are not rules! So you're not 'doing bad' because you overeat once. They are principles that you will want to follow because they make you feel good. So you do it for yourself and there is no one to tell you what to do.
Take off the diet glasses
respect your hunger
Make friends with food
Send the food police away
Discover satisfaction
Do you feel satiety
Be kind to your emotions
respect your body
Movement – feel the difference
Honor your health
Born intuitive eaters
The fact is that we are all born as intuitive eaters. If you think about it, it makes sense:why should humans be the only animal species that can only eat according to external guidance or rules? Animals and babies listen perfectly to their body signals, so why can't we? Don't we also feel when we are hot or cold and when we have to go to the large or small toilet? We have all these signals in us, but unfortunately we learn from childhood that we cannot trust our bodies. Babies who eat according to an eating plan immediately learn that their feelings of hunger and satiety do not have to be respected. And as soon as we learn to talk, we have to deal with eating rules:'Eat your plate!', 'Eat your vegetables!', 'No dessert if you don't eat them!', 'How can you be hungry?'… A little later we will have to deal with diet culture anyway. Children under the age of ten who go on a diet and develop eating disorders are no longer an exception. By systematically ignoring our own signals and believing all external influences, we stop listening to our own signals. We end up in the diet culture with all the consequences that entails and we are getting further and further away from our own body. Weight stigmas and fat phobia make us want to do everything we can to achieve 'the ideal body'. Intuitive eating is a counter-reaction to diet culture. If the diet culture never emerged, intuitive eating would simply be food.
Alessia wrote Bye, bye diet for anyone who likes to learn how to trust and respect your body in a world that constantly tells you you can't. She discusses the physical, mental and emotional side of food and gives useful tips on how you can achieve freedom in your eating patterns and self-image.
