Is Weight Loss the Hero You Never Needed

I was thinking about how many hours I must have spent in my life at war with my body.

I don’t even think I could figure it out but holey moley it’s a lot.

I feel sad and angry, but mostly just sad, thinking about the amount of time I spent obsessing over the scale and everything that went into lowering that number. Ruminating over my shameful weight and all the things that I believed that meant about me as a person.

All those years at WW lining up, with my empty bladder, a cheesecloth dress and no jewellery, to of course avoid any extra weight even, a few grams. I remember the feeling when I had a ‘big’ loss vs a ‘little’ one, and how that would shape my mindset and food choices for the day and the week ahead.

I can still feel that shame when the scale went up instead of down.

Like a thud in my chest.

What I didn’t realise then, was it didn’t matter what I wanted my body to weigh, she had plans of her own.

Wild huh! These incredible bodies of ours have a set point weight where they are happiest and healthiest, and spoiler alert, that set point will often sit outside a ‘healthy’ BMI.

Even at my leanest (thanks to my most disordered eating), I STILL didn’t fit into that illusive ‘healthy weight’ category per BMI. The mental gymnastics of trying to control that number became my north star.

While we focus on weight loss as a measure of success for our efforts, we can’t focus on truly nourishing our body. Our choices will be guided by that number, by the scales, by our points or calories or macros as if they hold the key.

Nourishment is so much more than the food we eat.

It’s connection and movement and rest. It’s creative and spiritual and so many things that diet culture and hustle culture dismiss.

I wonder when it become so normal to hand over our bodies expertise to an online tracker or a macro target developed by someone who got their nutrition qualification on Instagram.

When you go on your ‘health kick’, or ‘try to lose a few pounds’ or ‘need to shift this baby weight’, there’s a good chance you will up your veggies and your physical activity. You might swap some of those caffeinated or alcoholic bevies for water, and low and behold see stress reduction, improved sleep, fitness and energy levels on par with my kelpie.

What boggles my mind is that even though we are engaging in all of these health promoting behaviours, the veggies, the movement, the sleep, the reduction in caffeine and alcohol, it’s still the weight loss that is the hero of the story. It’s the weight loss that gets the praise for the change in behaviours.

And goodness knows, change is fucking hard!

Sometimes, with a change of behaviour, weight doesn’t shift. If you are a reformed or current diet culture junkie you may have very well experienced this. Once again, it’s not you darling. Just like when you regain all the weight you lost (the most likely outcome of a weight loss diet), it’s your body trying to keeping you safe.

Focusing on that number and all the accolades weight loss brings makes us forget about all the juice that is actually going to improve our health. We can’t see the forest through the trees.

This typical weight centric approach takes us out of our body and catapults us into the external world of numbers, validation and praising those often incredibly disordered behaviours. It makes us focus less on nourishing and more on controlling these meat suits.

Round of applause for Kate, she now is sooo close to meeting the criteria for an eating disorder. #dontgiveup

Now if you are reading this thinking yeah but I don’t want to be fat and I’ll be fat if I stop controlling my body, I would like to offer you this.

Of course in the world we live in you don’t want to be fat. We have been fed the message that fat is THE worst possible outcome. It makes sense that you feel this way. My darling, your body has wisdom that you have never known about while living in diet culture. She knows where she needs to sit on the weight spectrum when she’s nourished, and there’s a good chance that doesn’t fit into that ‘healthy weight range’ per BMI.

When I let go of dieting I did gain weight. It may have been seen by the outside world that I let myself go. Actually though, it’s that I let myself be. Be the weight and shape my body decides to be when I am taking GOOD care of her.

A non-diet, weight neutral approach, (including Intuitive Eating and Health at Every Size), invites us to turn inwards, rather than outwards to improve our health. These paradigms know that you have always been the expert in and of your body.

It acknowledges that our bodies have a set point weight. A weight range where it is happiest and healthiest. That if your genetic blueprint is a great dane, you are never going to get the body of a pug. No matter how carefully you measure out your macros.

It invites us to focus on making changes to those habits and behaviours that aren’t serving you anymore. In a realistic, gentle and informed way.

It appreciates and celebrates that “healthy” and “unhealthy” bodies come in all shapes, weights and sizes and that health professionals need to do better and focus on the human in front of us, not their weight.

It recognises that lifestyle plays a role in our health, sure, but it’s one of many many puzzle pieces to consider. Also, health is not a moral virtue or accessible to everyone in the same way.

It removes food morality and of course can recognise that a carrot and a piece of carrot cake have different nutrient profiles, but morally they are no different. One is not good and the other is not bad. They have different roles to play.

It’s absolutely evidence informed practice, while being very aware of the bias and stigma that comes along with (most) scientific research. Yes evidence is vital to shape our practice but again, not as important as the experience of the person sitting across the room from us in a consultation.

My favourite part though of a non-diet, weight inclusive approach to nutrition and more broadly health is that it encourages us to stop measuring our worth and value to the world against a scale or tape measure and start taking up space to live our one crazy beautiful life.

If I may just throw some glitter around for a tic, it’s so fucking magical over here in non-diet world, it’s literally a little utopia of self-care, and who doesn’t need more of that! It’s almost a dream to think about my dieting days now, even though it was such a huge part of my life for so long. It’s like someone woke me up from diet land and I can now see the nightmare it really was.

If you are a current or former diet culture disciple and you need some more support in your relationship with food and body. PLEASE know there is support available for you, and a little reminder beautiful human you are so deserving of that support!