Feeling Full Is Not Failure

What a Year of Saying F-It to Diets Has Taught Me About Myself, My Body and Diet Culture

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It’s been almost a year since I said F-it to diets and began intuitive eating. When I started, I was hoping I would fix my food issues, and in learning to eat the “right way,” I would become the size I was meant to be. Of course, I was hoping that might eventually include weight loss, although I expected to gain weight initially. Oh, how different expectations can be from reality.

I’m grateful for the liberation I’ve found in diet recovery, but there are still days when I question what I’m doing. Making this kind of change is never easy. It takes an incredible amount of courage to examine yourself and your sometimes not-so-pretty behaviors. And let me just be real and acknowledge that having the ability to make these changes comes from a place of deep privilege. I have the socioeconomic means to partake in intuitive eating. I don’t experience fat stigma or discrimination. I’m incredibly blessed to have the full support of those closest to me. 

Here’s What I’ve Learned from a Year of Intuitive Eating

Feeling full is not failure. No, it’s a sign that your body is getting the nutrients it needs. It’s a sign that your body has had enough to eat. It’s a sign that your body is sated.

Oh, and the first sign of fullness is not a signal to stop eating. Many people attempting intuitive eating often think that to do it right, they should only eat when they’re starving and stop the moment they think they might be getting full. Turning intuitive eating into the hunger and fullness diet will keep you trapped in diet mentality and keep you from truly understanding what your body needs. It’s also a surefire way to keep you trapped in the binge-restriction cycle.

My eating is not the problem. No, really. When I started this process, coming from all the messed-up diet culture mentality, I thought I was the problem. I was doing something wrong. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be the size I am.

If I just ate the right foods instead of the wrong foods…

If I just ate at the right time instead of all the time… 

If I just didn’t eat…

If I was just stronger…

If I just had more self-control… 

 

I would have the body I wanted. 

Nope. My body is where it’s supposed to be. We can’t all live in thin bodies, and thin is not a synonym for health. 

The problem is we live in a society that rewards thinness and pathologizes people in higher-weight bodies.

I don’t need to control myself around food. This is a big one. When people contemplate giving up dieting, one thing that stops many of them is the belief that if they give themselves unconditional permission to eat (part of principle three in Intuitive Eating), they wouldn’t ever stop. That fear is understandable, but it’s simply not true. Once we understand that binging is a reaction to restriction, actually a survival mechanism, we can begin to trust that our body will signal to us when we’re full. Once we start allowing forbidden foods, we take away some of their power over us.

There was a time I feared food, especially those that were my weakness. I still love chocolate, but it holds much less sway over me now. I crave less of it. I eat less of it. I stress less over it.  

It’s not the end of the world when I overeat. It’s a fact of life. Sometimes, we eat too much. Sometimes, we eat too little. If we’re listening to our body, it all balances out.  

Emotional eating isn’t the enemy. Just like with overeating, emotional eating is just something that happens sometimes. The more we demonize emotional eating, the harder it is to break free from it. When we acknowledge that we’re going to eat for reasons beyond hunger from time to time, we stop letting it rule us. So when we catch ourselves in a moment of emotional eating, we learn to kindly ask ourselves why and see if there might be a better solution to our issue than food.

Sometimes food is the answer, and there’s nothing wrong with that.  

It’s ok to savor your food. Even bad food. Especially bad food. Punishing yourself isn’t helping. Actually, it’s keeping you locked in negative eating behaviors. Lean in and enjoy the food you’re eating. Be present for your meals. Savor the taste and texture. If you’re eating because of something you’re feeling emotionally versus physically, look for the underlying causes, not blame.

Our bodies are meant to change. This is a hard reality to face. We spend so much time and money in pursuit of thinness and the fountain of youth. The weight loss and beauty industries help feed this obsession. 

I can’t really control my body. Yes, I have some limited control over my body, but not to the extent society would have us believe. Yes, I could stay locked in this tug of war with my body and continue to diet until my death (a morbid thought), but I would never win. Our bodies have a natural weight they want to be at. This is why so many diets fail. People blame themselves, but really we can’t fight where our bodies naturally want to be.

When I stopped trying to control my body and started listening to it, I felt way better about myself.  

I can be kind to myself. When I thought I was a complete and utter failure because I couldn’t control my body, I was really, really hard on myself. I was constantly measuring myself against everyone else and coming up short. There was no mercy. 

I needed to grieve the illusion that I could achieve my dream body. It sounds silly to grieve something I’ve never achieved, but I had to do it anyway. Working through the stages of grief is a necessary part of accepting that diets don’t work. I also had to make space to mourn my former body. 

I am still struggling to accept my body, and I’ve had to adjust to living in a larger body. This is still my biggest challenge, and it’s not simply an issue of physical appearance. At times, I’m battling the limits of what my body can do now versus what it once did. I’m actively working toward acceptance. 

When I stopped intuitive eating, I gained weight. This is very common and one reason people give up on intuitive eating. Depending on what state of diet recovery you are in when you begin, you may gain weight as your body seeks to get back to equilibrium. And the body will often overshoot its needs initially before settling back down to its set point. And, no, there’s no definite answer for how long all of this takes.

I don’t know what’s going to happen with my body, and I am in a much better place with this now than when I began intuitive eating.

I still have so much more to learn. There is no “end” goal with intuitive eating—it’s a continuous journey, with points of progress and regression. You can't fall off the wagon with intuitive eating, and once you conceptualize that, you're much less prone to crazy eating. 

I am less afraid to follow my dreams. Before I stopped dieting, so much of my headspace was occupied by diet thoughts and negative self-talk. The strangest thing happened when I stopped dieting—after I realized that all these years I had been holding myself back because of my perceived failure to control my body—I started treating myself with way more kindness and started believing in me.

Without all the self-bashing, I dared to dream.

What could you gain if you stopped dieting? And for those of you who have, what have you learned in the process?

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