The Gazillion-Pound Question

Early on in my anti-diet journey, I was ruled by fear and doubt. My body was rapidly changing, and I was worried about what size I would become.

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Trigger warning: In this post, I talk about numbers and show some of my own fat phobia.

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Early on in my anti-diet journey, I was ruled by fear and doubt. It was early in my recovery, my body was still rapidly changing, and I had a lot of worries. One of the biggest worries was my size, of course. This is the big worry of everyone who gives up dieting, understandably because we live in such a thin-obsessed, fat-phobic society, and we’ve been trained to make this our primary concern in life. When I first started gave up dieting, I had a bunch of questions running through my mind. 

Will I gain weight?

How much weight will I gain?

Will it be temporary or permanent?

If I give myself full permission to eat (which is one principle of intuitive eating), will I ever stop eating?

Part of the reason I started writing about my personal experience with intuitive eating is that I couldn’t find ready answers to these questions. And that’s because most of the articles about intuitive eating are written by intuitive eating-certified therapists, nutritionists and counselors who are trying to do right by people—because no one can predict what will happen to your body when you start intuitive eating.  

Even Intuitive Eating author Evelyn Tribole, whose book launched the intuitive eating movement almost 25 years ago, has affirmed she can’t predict what’s going to happen to anyone’s body when they start intuitive eating. 

That said, we have some pretty good hunches. Depending on where you are when you come into intuitive eating, your family history and other factors, it’s likely your body will do one of three things:

• Lose weight as you finally begin listening to your body and not engaging in binging and restrictive behaviors. 

• Gain weight as you work through the principles of intuitive eating and settle at the weight your body is intended to be at. 

• Gain weight temporarily and then lose some as your body overshoots its initial energy needs and then settles back down to where it’s intended to be when it trusts the starvation is over. 

What most definitely will not happen? 

You’re not going to never stop eating and gain weight forever. 

There is another reason most intuitive eating professionals don’t talk about what’s going to happen to your body when you give up dieting, and that’s because the whole point of intuitive eating is to move beyond weight as a measure of health and nutrition. 

Effectively, they’re trying to neutralize our individual and collective obsession with weight, because that’s a big part of what got into this mess of not trusting our bodies in the first place. It makes sense, and the further we go with intuitive eating, the less charged the topic of weight becomes. At some point, we get over it (or as close to getting over it as we can), but that seems almost impossible at the beginning.

What’s the Big Question?

One of my big fears early on was that if I stopped dieting, I would turn into my aunt. My aunt on my mother’s side was a large woman all her life, except at the very end. I don’t have a ton of memories of her because she died of breast cancer in her 50s, which frankly, should be my bigger concern than her weight. But my half-sister, who is 15 years older than me, recalls being at a pool as a child and my aunt threatening to sit on her—all 300 pounds of her—if she didn’t get in the water and learn how to swim. 

My sister brought this story up eight months ago at a family holiday gathering in Raleigh, North Carolina, and it sent me spiraling. Not the story itself, but the thought that I might end up as the same size as my aunt (yes, this is my own fat bias showing).

One question consumed me the entire time: Am I going to be 300 pounds? It triggered a bunch of memories, including one of my aunt and I discussing “In the Kitchen with Rosie: Oprah’s Favorite Recipes,” a cookbook written by Oprah’s personal chef during one of the media mogul’s “skinny phases” and the height of the Snackwell, no-fat era.

Rosie had turned a bunch of otherwise delicious foods into “healthy,” no-fat versions of themselves. I had been working my way through the recipes and was telling my aunt about the cheesecake I had baked entirely out of tofu. I know what you’re thinking, and yes, it was as disgusting as it sounds. But it was the first cheesecake I had ever made, so I felt super sophisticated, and I was so proud of myself for eating “healthy.”

When my sister brought it up last time, I spent the rest of the trip dwelling on it and then wrote a whole post about it.

All throughout the day, while we went hiking in the woods and then having lunch at the food hall and visiting the farmer’s market, I replayed this comment in my head, thinking about my aunt and trying to remember whether she was a dieter or had accepted herself in a larger body. 

Suddenly I wanted to ask my mom a million questions. Was my aunt always bigger? Was she always a dieter? Did she yo-yo? What was her childhood like? Almost as suddenly as the questions popped into my head, I realized I could probably safely guess the answers. With my mother and her just a few years apart, and both coming of age in the 1950s, it’s safe to assume that my aunt grew up being told the same things as my mother about her worth and value as a woman, with an emphasis placed on beauty and body size. I am sure she was told repeatedly starting at a young age that her larger body size was unacceptable and made her undesirable. To combat this, she almost certainly would have taken a variety of measures to control her weight. 

A few weeks ago, my sister brought up the “pool incident” again at a family dinner, and something curious happened. I felt my body tense and braced for the “diet talk” that I expected to follow it, but that was all that was said on the subject. The comment was made, no one engaged, and we moved on, including me. What’s so interesting is a comment that sent me into a spiral six months ago had so little impact now.

And that’s because I’ve been stable in my weight for months and I’ve reached a level of acceptance with myself and my body that I’ve never had before. I’m no longer worrying that I’ll never stop eating. I’m not worried that I’m going to grow to the size of a blimp. I’m not hung up on food, my food choices, and what I can or can’t have. When I occasionally get too full, it isn’t a sign of failure. It’s a reflection of a decision I made in the moment to enjoy something knowing it would make me uncomfortable later.

The experts were right. My weight has less influence over my life than it ever has. Now granted, it’s not the weight I would have dreamed of and, frankly, I do still struggle with it at times. Of all the issues I’ve tackled with in intuitive eating, my weight is the most difficult and the one I’m still grappling with the most. But it’s no longer the big unknown that it was. My body has settled into the place it’s meant to be in this moment, and whether I always like it or not, I am in a much better place of acceptance with it. 

I’ve learned to cultivate appreciation for my body. Over and over, I’ve found the most effective way for me to be OK with my body is to give praise for the awesome things it does for me. Every time I go out mountain biking, I give thanks for its awesome strength. When my husband, daughter and I climbed our way down a sheer, 75-foot cliff in Maui to a hidden black-sand beach, I was truly grateful for it. All of the collective, seemingly small actions I’ve taken to work toward weight neutrality are working. My reaction to the 300-pound comment is a sign of how far I’ve come.

So let’s savor the small victories and signs of progress.

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Calling All Diet Rejectors! I’d Like to Share Your Story

I am starting a regular feature where I share people's stories about what led them to quit dieting. Do you know someone—maybe it's you!—who would like to share their story? I will feature it here, along with bio and relevant links. Please email me at kristik @ substack.com.

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