“We don’t need ANOTHER diet:” 10 Techniques to Help You Eat Healthy in the New Year
*Trigger warning: discussion of disordered eating
Many of us plan to eat healthy in the New Year, but what does eating healthy really mean? Is it consuming specific foods in specific quantities? Eating only at certain times of day or in accordance with specific rules? Does it involve pleasure? Is the goal of healthy eating a healthy body? Healthy mind? What does that look like?
Maria Scrimenti is a Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor out of Nashville, TN, who promotes “treating our unique bodies with dignity and respect, leaving food guilt and body shame behind, and finding lasting empowerment, confidence, and freedom.” She specializes in "emotional eating,” body dissatisfaction, and disordered eating such as chronic dieting and binge eating. Maria holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Exercise Science and has been featured in articles for PsychologyToday, PopSugar, Yahoo, MSN, the National Wellness Institute Journal, and others. She worked in the fitness industry for nearly a decade and what she witnessed there was a lot of shame.
“I saw the same women coming to me repeatedly, disgusted with their bodies and themselves, feeling like they were failing. Dieting and exercise wasn’t working for lasting feelings of self-worth and confidence.” Maria also notes the damaging effects of diet culture, or “the belief system that worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue,” as defined by the Anti-Diet Dietician, Christy Harrison, MPH, RD, CEDS.
Before Maria discovered Intuitive Eating, she struggled with both binge eating and orthorexia, or “an obsession with proper or ‘healthful’ eating.” Maria says that identifying the damages of diet culture changed her life. “Learning more about what diet culture is —an oppressive system rooted in racism, sexism, white supremacy, and the patriarchy — made me lose all interest in participating.” She says that intuitive eating “healed my relationship with food. This model advocates for unbiased, weight-inclusive medical care, eating disorder prevention, and self- actualization. My world no longer revolves around food and my body. I can spend my time on more important things!”
Intuitive Eating is a “self-care eating framework” developed in 1995 by Registered Dietitian Nutritionists, Evelyn Tribole, MS, RDN, CEDRD-S and Elyse Resch, MS, RDN, CEDRD-S, Fiaedp, FADA, FAND. It is ‘an evidence-based model with a validated assessment scale and over 100 studies’ and they report that, “Intuitive Eaters tend to enjoy greater life satisfaction, have lower instances of binge eating, better body image, and a greater overall sense of well-being and self- esteem.”
Here are ten techniques for eating healthy in the New Year, from an Intuitive Eating Counselor
1. We don’t need ANOTHER diet. If diets haven’t worked by now, they aren’t going to work. We haven’t failed them, they’ve failed us. Diets contradict our biology and are unsustainable…and potentially dangerous. From the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry: “The best-known environmental contributor to the development of eating disorders is the sociocultural idealization of thinness.”
2. We accept that our bodies are as diverse as our lived experiences. Bodies come in all different shapes and sizes by design, and we can’t control our genetic blueprints. Presuming there is one right type of body is oppressive and discriminatory. Also, we need to understand that our health and perceived fitness are determined by more than just diet and exercise, but also elements like socioeconomic status, genetics, income, access to food, access to quality healthcare, weight stigma, trauma, employment status, social support, discrimination, education, stress, nutrition, sleep, and more.
3. We create our definition of health based on personal values and life and health circumstances. What feels healthy for one person might be totally out of the question for someone else, so no peeking at our neighbor’s plates! We are the experts of our own bodies.
4. We divorce the notion that thinness automatically = health and interrogate those systems that promote this belief — from social media to medical providers. We become more discerning, seeking only reliable evidence-based health recommendations.
5. We learn to trust our bodies to tell us what they need, just like we trust them to alert us to other biological clues, using our interoceptive awareness. We don’t argue with our body when they say we need to empty our bladders, so we won’t argue with them when tell us we need energy or that we’ve had enough for now. We strive to eat when our bodies tell us we’re hungry, to stop when we’re full, and to eat mindfully, enjoying the pleasure of eating. Body trust is key.
6. We don’t track what we eat because we trust our body/mind to make good choices together. Tracking is an obsessive and rigid way of relating to food and can lead to disordered eating.
7. We acknowledge that where we are physically and mentally on a given day will change how we eat. “Our bodies are not robots or machines,” Maria reminds us. “The amount of food our bodies need on a given day is not an exact science. Most people using “portion control” are under-eating, which eventually backfires because we can’t outsmart biology. We can only under-eat for so long before the body gets loud about what it needs, which looks like binge eating or constant preoccupation with food, fatigue, brain fog, irritability, bloating, headaches, constipation, gas, and acid reflux. Withholding and restricting food is self- punishment and the more we try it, the more power food will have over us.”
8. We don’t expect perfection. There will be days when we eat in ways that doesn’t support our physical and mental health, and we won’t beat ourselves up for it.
9. We’re conscientious of the ideas and images we consume, by avoiding advocates for diet culture or influencers who promote body idealism.
10. We eat healthy to honor our bodies, not to punish them. This means consuming avariety of foods from all food groups, staying well-hydrated, trusting our bodies to tell us what they need, and protecting them from shame.
Damaging ideas about “healthy eating” and “the perfect body” are fed to us starting early in life. It will take us time to un-learn, to heal, and to find peace with food. Here are some books and other resources that Maria recommends to get us started on our journeys, and we can follow her on Instagram for more Intuitive Eating insights.
Sarah Zimmerman is a freelance writer in Northern California and is working on her first novel. In past lives,, she has been a Physician Assistant in Women's Health and the owner of a vegan ice cream business. Sarah writes about marriage, sex, parenting, infertility, pregnancy loss, social justice, and women's mental and physical health, always with honesty and humor. She has written for Ravishly, Cafe Mom, Pregnant Chicken, and more and can be found at sarahzwriter.com and on Medium, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok at @sarahzwriter.