Intuitive Eating and Weight Gain—How Do I Handle This?
You’ve given up dieting for good, you’re ready to make peace with food and have embarked on a new, exciting journey with Intuitive Eating—sounds pretty good right?
Of course, it does! But with any new journey there are realities we must accept—one of those being “yes, it’s true. You may gain weight when you start practicing Intuitive Eating!”
But how can you learn to be okay with this new reality after struggling with food and trusting your body?
Let’s start with the WHY
Why does weight gain even happen to some people when embarking on an Intuitive Eating journey?
First, it’s important to mention that when beginning any kind of journey, you never know how your body is going to react. Each person comes into this journey at different points.
For example: some may come from a place of food restriction and an eating disorder, some as a chronic yo-yo dieter, and others from years of being stuck in a binge-restrict cycle.
Therefore, given each of those examples—the body is going to react completely different when you begin to listen to it and provide it what it needs!
If you’ve been suppressing your weight through restriction, it actually makes total sense that once you begin to lift the restrictions and learn to listen to your body, that you might gain weight simply by eating enough food to meet your body’s needs.
This idea of weight gain and Intuitive Eating also revolves around the concept of “set point weight theory”, defined as “the weight your body wishes to be at in order to function and be at its best”.
Therefore, when embarking on this journey, weight gain may occur because it’s what your body WANTS and NEEDS to do in order to be at its best for YOU.
This requires trust in yourself and your body, which is something that can be difficult to do when you are new to Intuitive Eating. But it IS possible to regain this trust.
Another important point to make is that if you’ve been chronically dieting with a long list of “can’t have” foods, once you begin allowing these foods back into your eating world, you may overdo it for a while, eating beyond comfortable fullness. This may cause some temporary weight gain. But as you normalize your eating of these foods, your weight will normalize too.
Navigating the Fear
In order to be at peace with allowing your body to do what it needs to do to ultimately regain its trust, here are a few things to keep in mind:
(1) There’s nothing wrong with weight.
A practice within Intuitive Eating is to neutralize all foods—let go of the “good” and “bad” labels you place on food. The same concept applies to weight gain—it’s time to neutralize, or destigmatize, the idea that weight gain is a “bad thing”.
This can be hard to accept because of the toxic diet culture messages we’ve heard for many, many years— “gaining weight is unhealthy”, “if you gain weight, you have no self-control”, etc.
Whatever weight your body ends up at, whether it’s less, more or remains the same, that is the weight your body feels safest and best.
If weight gain happens, take a moment to embrace it and reflect on if it’s a sign that you were previously NOT caring for yourself in the way your body needs to be.
(2) Turn away (and off) the diet culture messages.
Diet culture is unfortunately all around us—on television, in the news, on social media, and even within our own environment (family, friends, workplace).
It’s time to remove those toxic diet culture messages from your mental and physical space. It can be hard to do but take some time to reflect on how years of dieting and restriction has negatively impacted your life, your relationship with others, your relationship with food and your body, etc.
Start by:
- Unfollowing social media accounts that promote diet culture and instead following body positive accounts
- Throwing away your scale, or other weight loss tools (measuring tapes, etc.)
- Removing yourself from conversation that revolves around weight loss, restriction, or anything that negatively impacts how you feel about yourself.
(3) Shift your focus.
Instead of focusing on the fact that weight gain is, or may be, a possibility, think about what else you are gaining by practicing Intuitive Eating consistently.
For example…
- Peace with food and food freedom
- No longer letting food and food decisions control your life
- A positive relationship with food
- Better sleep, mood, and outlook on life
- A better social life with more spontaneous plans
- More energy
- A positive community and support system
Shift your focus to highlight the wins or little victories that you are gaining from practicing Intuitive Eating.
(4) Practice self-compassion.
Self-compassion is another important part of Intuitive Eating. Practice self-compassion by approaching weight gain in a new way:
- Choose to support and care for your here and now body
- Nourish yourself consistently
- Dress and wear clothes that are meant for your current body
- Provide yourself with adequate rest
- Remind yourself of the long term, overarching reason you’ve adopted this new way of living and eating
Get the tools and strategies to redefine your self-worth away from your body weight or number. And, join a community of women who have started their Intuitive Eating journey! Want to find out how?
