No Apologies: Ditch Diet Culture and Rebuild Your Relationship with Food

Preface

How did we get here? How did I come to feel the need to write a book called No Apologies? Well, let me ask you. How is your relationship with food? Is it easy, effortless, and stress-free or is it stress-inducing and difficult? If you picked up this book, I’m guessing the latter. We live in a world that prioritises thinness over all else, for all genders, but especially for women. We grow up with media that paint a picture that in order to be happy you need to be thin. If you’re not thin, you should be actively pursuing thinness. And if you are thin, you must desperately maintain it at all costs. What is this all about and where did it come from? A male friend asked me one day, ‘Why do women wear fake tan?’ I answered, ‘Do you want the short answer or the long answer?’ The same applies here. There are many socio-cultural and historical reasons why we find ourselves in this world obsessed with thinness and it has a lot to do with diet culture. If we are taught we need to be thin, and we’re not thin, then there’s a perceived problem that requires a solution. Diet culture provides us with that solution. It doesn’t just sell diets, it sells a dream. Happiness, success, love, desirability – apparently thinness gets you all of these things and more! But at what cost? If my clients’ stories are anything to go by, I’d say a lot. I’m sure you know people who have been dieting for decades but are larger than they’ve ever been. Perhaps you’re one of those people. If so, I’m here to tell you this is not your fault, despite what you’ve been told or led to believe. Diet culture is at fault. It teaches us to feel as though we are not enough, that we have to apologize for ourselves or that we need to make ourselves smaller.

Before you can pursue true health, you need to have a healthy relationship with food, which, unfortunately, for many people, is not the case. To begin rebuilding a healthy relationship with food and body image, we must first understand why so many of us have an unhealthy relationship with food in the first place. You weren’t born hating your body or worrying about food. It’s a learnt behaviour. You will need to dissect the beliefs that maintain these behaviours and remove those that do not serve you. Only then will you be free to pursue health and treat your body like the magnificent container that it is. The one that carries you through life and allows you to experience the great moments and the small moments. I want that so much for you, so you can live a healthy, happy and fulfilled life for as long as possible. None of us has complete control over our health, no matter our size, but reading this book and implementing the steps outlined within will support you in accepting and nourishing the body that you have right now.

Every word written in this book has been inspired by the incredible people I have counselled over the years toward healthier relationships with food and their bodies. The stories I have heard have sometimes broken my heart, but the breakthroughs I have witnessed have made me cry with pride at the incredible resilience and strength of the human spirit. I am so honoured and privileged to do this work every day, and I am so grateful to everyone who has put their trust in me to guide them. I don’t take even one client for granted and am consistently fascinated by every person sitting in front of me, who has shared their stories, innermost thoughts, emotions, doubts, wins, and challenges with me. It may be a cliché, but this book would not exist without you. Thank you to you all, and thank you, dear reader, for picking up this book. I hope it allows you and as many people as possible, no matter your difficulties or privileges, to experience your own version of food freedom and live your life unapologetically. I am cheering you on always.

Introduction

‘Raise your hand if you’ve never been on a diet.’

It was 2021. I was standing at the front of a room, about to give a presentation to a crowd of people on intuitive eating and our relationship with food. This was the first request I made of them, the words in capital letters on a large screen in front. Can you guess how many people raised their hands?

Two. Just two.

Dieting, in some form, is so normalised that in a large crowd of people a minuscule percentage of them had never embarked on one. The urge to diet usually comes from a place of lack. From a feeling that you are not good enough as you are and that you need to fix or change some part of yourself. And it’s not without cost for a lot of people who follow that urge. That cost is a healthy relationship with food. If you were to explain your relationship with food in one word, what would it be? If you’ve picked up this book, I’m guessing that it’s none of the following:

box image Free

box image Easy

box image Effortless

box image Non-consuming

The relationship you have with food and your body is one of the most intimate relationships you will ever have. It has the power to dictate whether you survive or thrive in life. The health of this relationship can affect all other relationships in your life and it needs to be nurtured, just like any other relationship.

Humans are fragile creatures; we need to be fed and watered multiple times a day just to stay alive. Every day, we make an estimated 200 food-related decisions. [1] How crazy is that when you think about it? Those decisions can be easy and effortless, or they can be hard work. There’s no way around it: you will have to feed yourself daily for the rest of your life. There is so much information out there about what we ‘should’ and ‘should not’ eat, but most of these conversations don’t include the importance of how we feel around food and the impact this can have on our health and well-being. The relationship you have with food and your body can be positive, free, and easy, or it can be damaging, restrained, and complex. If you’d like to have the former, then you’re in the right place. I work with people every day who feel the latter. Their relationship with food and body image often feels:

box image Controlled

box image Uneasy

box image Difficult

box image All-consuming

You might be thinking, ‘Am I bad enough to need this book?’ but we have all been affected, to some degree or another, by the messages from diet culture that encourage us to abandon our bodies. To prioritise external cues over internal ones and to disconnect from our inner wisdom. To constantly feel that our bodies are not good enough and that they need to be fixed or changed. Your body is your home. It’s the only home you’ll ever have and one to which only you can gain access. You are the expert of your own body. Only you know what you are feeling at any given moment. Only you know how hungry or full you are. Only you know what foods will satisfy you and what won’t. This means that only you can know what exactly it is you need at any given moment. What a gift to know that you have everything you need within.

But sometimes we just need a little help and guidance to unlock it. That’s where this book comes in. No matter how little or how much you struggle with your relationship with food, this book aims to help you. My hope is that it will support you in learning how to look after yourself from a compassionate non-diet lens, free from the constraints of diet culture. It takes into account your emotional and mental health, not just your physical health. Let’s get started.

Who Is This Book For?

Is your relationship with food or body image holding you back from fully living your ‘one wild and precious life’? Does it take up more time and energy than you’d like it to? What if I told you that eating could be easy and effortless? That it’s possible to create a life full of health and free from food or body image obsession?

You might not believe me if you’ve struggled with food, weight, or implementing sustainable, healthy habits. Disordered eating rates in women are estimated to be between 50 per cent and 75 per cent. [2] If you’re a man, thank you for picking up this book and please don’t stop reading: this book is for you too. Unfortunately, male data is lacking, but that doesn’t mean that men don’t struggle.

Given that high number, I guarantee there are more than a few people you know who struggle with this too. The problem? They may not know it. Disordered eating is often disguised because it’s seen as normal. That family member who’s always on a diet and struggles with yo-yoing weight, that conversation over dinner with a friend that turned to feelings of guilt after having three courses, or meeting a buddy in the gym on a Monday evening who said they have to ‘work off’ their overindulgence at the weekend. Despite their problematic nature, these are all examples of disordered eating that are often encouraged in our culture. In a world where we are overstimulated and have, one might say, too much information at the tips of our fingers, we still struggle to implement healthy habits and stick to them. We are a world obsessed with weight, yet the ‘obesity epidemic’ rages on. Many people believe it’s their fault and blame themselves. But more information is often not what’s needed – a connection to our own body and inner wisdom is. This book aims to change that by guiding you back to your inherent inner wisdom so that you can live a life full of health and free from food and body obsession. This book is for you, your mother, father, sister, brother, friends, and work colleagues. It’s for anyone who would like to improve their health and get back into the driver’s seat of their own life, reuniting with the expert within.

What Is (and Isn’t) a Healthy Relationship with Food?

We all have a relationship with food and it has developed throughout our lives. Like any relationship in life, sometimes it can take a bashing and you might need to work on it to allow it to flourish and enhance your life, rather than take energy away from you.

Imagine your brain is a pie chart. Think about how much of your brain space each day is taken up thinking about food or your body. Can you put a percentage on it? What would that be? We all think about food on a daily basis. We have to – I mean, it keeps us alive, right? Some normal thoughts are:

box image What’s in the fridge?

box image Do I need to go shopping?

box image Do I need to prepare food this week to support a busy schedule?

box image Would I like to try a new recipe?

box image Do I need to add anything to my diet to make my body feel better – fibre, carbs, vegetables, water, and so on?

This, of course, will take up some space, and if you’re working on a health goal and using nutrition to get there, the amount of space allocated to it may fluctuate, but in general, it shouldn’t take up any more than 10 to 30 per cent. When I ask my clients this question, the average answer I receive is anywhere from 50 to 90 per cent. It’s seen as normal to think and talk about food and your weight all of the time. This is precisely the issue. Since conversations around food and weight are so common, many people have an unhealthy relationship with food but don’t realise it. Why would you when how you feel and behave around food is emulated by your family, your friends, and your colleagues? However, it’s completely possible to get this percentage down. A client I recently finished up working with originally answered 90 per cent to this question. Now, her answer is 30 per cent. So if you feel preoccupied with food and your body image, I hope this gives you hope for the future.

It’s important to note that having an unhealthy relationship with food doesn’t mean that you have an eating disorder, but for some people, it may progress into an eating disorder if it’s not treated. This book is not explicitly written for people with an eating disorder (although it should help, alongside treatment). It’s written for anyone who identifies with the below components of an unhealthy relationship with food:

box image Do you wake up thinking about food and go to bed thinking about food?

box image Do you feel guilt or shame around food?

box image Do you feel like you have to cut certain foods out of your diet?

box image Is your diet inflexible, rather than flexible?

box image Is your diet lacking in a wide variety of foods?

box image Do you feel out of control around food, or do you binge or overeat when you get access to restricted foods or foods you think are bad?

box image Do you feel addicted to food?

box image Are you always on some kind of diet or lifestyle plan that dictates what, when, and how much to eat?

box image Do you feel like you need to micromanage your diet and lifestyle to control your weight?

If you identify with any of these things, please know that it’s completely possible to rebuild your relationship with food. I know because I’ve helped and seen hundreds of people do it. You are not a lost cause.

Ellyn Satter is a highly influential dietician and psychotherapist who has had a clinical career in this area for over forty years and is considered an internationally recognized authority on eating and feeding. She coined the components of ‘normal eating’ in 1983, which still ring true today. Here are some examples of a healthy relationship with food, taken from her work, to give you an idea of what you can look forward to. [3]

Normal eating is going to the table hungry and eating until you are satisfied.

It is being able to choose the food you like and eat it and truly get enough of it – not just stopping eating because you think you should.

It is being able to give some thought to your food selection so you get nutritious food, but not being so wary and restrictive that you miss out on enjoyable food.

It is giving yourself permission to eat sometimes because you are happy, sad, or bored, or just because it feels good.

It is mostly three meals a day, or four or five, or it can be choosing to munch along the way.

It is leaving some cookies on the plate because you know you can have some again tomorrow, or it is eating more now because they taste so wonderful.

It is overeating at times, feeling stuffed and uncomfortable.

And it can be undereating at times and wishing you had more.

It is trusting your body to make up for your mistakes in eating.

It takes up some of your time and attention, but keeps its place as only one important area of your life.

In short, normal eating is flexible. It varies in response to your hunger, your schedule, your proximity to food, and your feelings. External rules often govern an unhealthy relationship with food. A healthy relationship with food relies on your internal cues. You drive the bus, not diet culture. It is trusting your body’s wisdom and allowing it to be your guide. You have everything you need within. But most people are in some way disconnected from this inner wisdom. Rebuilding your relationship with food is, in a way, a sort of coming home to your own body.

I have expanded on this in the free quiz and video training in the tools that accompany this book. Here, you’ll be able to assess your own eating behaviours, so make sure you navigate to my website nutritionwithniamh.com to delve a little deeper into your own relationship with food. Do it right now, before you forget – it will only take a few minutes to complete the quiz and will set you up nicely for the rest of the book.

What Is Disordered Eating?

Our eating behaviours lie on a continuum between intuitive eating and clinical eating disorders. Between these two lies disordered eating. Disordered eating is a term used to describe a range of irregular eating behaviours that may not warrant a diagnosis of a specific eating disorder. It is a descriptive phrase, not a diagnosis. If someone is struggling with disordered eating, it doesn’t mean they automatically have an eating disorder. For some people it may, but they are usually in the minority. Most of the people that I work with in my practice typically lie somewhere in the middle of this continuum. The place you find yourself on the spectrum is not static, it is fluid, and it’s possible to flow up and down this spectrum. This means that it’s possible to move back towards intuitive eating, otherwise known as normal or healthy eating, or towards clinical eating disorders. I work with people to bring them closer to their intuitive eater and to prevent them from progressing on to a clinical eating disorder.

Having a healthy relationship with food is something we all deserve, but the eating patterns that we may consider normal are anything but. These behaviours may actually be promoted in order to lose weight or maintain a certain shape – think restricting from Monday to Friday or abstaining from certain foods because they induce guilt or shame. Disordered eating behaviours can occur as a symptom of diet backlash – the cumulative side effects of dieting. These can be short term or chronic, depending on how long a person has been dieting. It may be just one side effect or several.

You may spend an awful lot of time each day thinking about the type of food you eat or experience a lot of guilt and shame when you eat certain foods, but because these behaviours don’t meet the criteria for an eating disorder, you’re left feeling like it’s not a problem. And sure, everyone thinks like this, right? That might be the case, but it doesn’t mean that it’s a healthy way to approach food. If it’s distressing you, you deserve to seek help. Period. Disordered eating behaviours deserve attention and treatment, as they may turn into more problematic eating disorders if they don’t receive some TLC. Unlike eating disorders, there isn’t a classification of symptoms that warrant a diagnosis; however, there are many behaviours that can fall into this category. Some of these are taken from the Eat Right website, run by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics in the US. [4]

Signs and symptoms of disordered eating may include, but are not limited to:

box image Frequent dieting

box image Anxiety associated with specific foods or meal skipping

box image Chronic weight fluctuations

box image Rigid rituals and routines surrounding food and exercise

box image Feelings of guilt and shame associated with eating

box image Preoccupation with food, weight, and body image that negatively impacts quality of life

box image A feeling of loss of control around food, including compulsive eating habits

box image Using exercise, food restriction, fasting, or purging to ‘make up for bad foods’ consumed

box image Not being in tune with hunger or fullness cues or ignoring internal regulation cues in favour of external cues

box image Food choices are strongly influenced by the desire to maintain a certain body size or shape

box image Often eating to regulate emotions

box image All-or-nothing approach with food

How many of these resonate with you? How many people in your life show signs of these, to some degree or another? Disordered eating is widespread – it doesn’t just affect people who have eating disorders. Recognizing this is an important part of understanding the damage that diet culture has done to our relationship with food so that we can move towards something better.

What Is Intuitive Eating?

Intuitive eating is an evidence-based approach to food and eating developed in 1995 by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, two dieticians who were completely disheartened by using the traditional weight-loss model with their clients. Studies show that 80 per cent of weight is often regained within five years after being lost through a diet (see Chapter 1), so intuitive eating and a non-diet approach are focused on rejecting all forms of diet culture, as it often harms us more than it helps us. [5] Evelyn and Elyse define intuitive eating as a

dynamic mind-body integration of instinct, emotion, and rational thought. It is a self-care eating framework – a personal process of honouring your physical and emotional needs by paying attention to the messages of your body. It is an inner journey of discovery that puts you front and centre; you are the expert of your own body. After all, only you know your thoughts, feelings and experiences. Only you know how hungry you are and what food or meal will satisfy you. No diet plan or guru could possibly know these things.

The intuitive eating model comprises ten principles:

1. Reject the diet mentality

2. Honour your hunger

3. Make peace with food

4. Challenge the food police

5. Feel your fullness

6. Discover the satisfaction factor

7. Cope with your emotions with kindness

8. Respect your body

9. Movement – feel the difference

10. Honour your health with gentle nutrition

Intuitive eating is a non-diet approach to health and well-being that helps you tune into your body’s signals, break the cycle of chronic dieting (if it is present), and heal your relationship with food. It focuses on food freedom rather than food fear and is a powerful tool that helps to achieve health and well-being without the obsession. This approach gives you your power back over food. It empowers you to know that you, and you alone, have control over your own body and what makes you feel at your best. It focuses on internal, rather than external cues. It reconnects you with yourself and your needs. In short, it helps you unlock your inner wisdom. On a basic level, intuitive eating helps you to reprogram your relationship with food.

A non-diet approach takes the focus off weight loss and instead focuses on promoting health-enhancing behaviours, better body image, and a healthier relationship with food. To help guide eating choices, intuitive eating helps you get back in touch with internal cues, like hunger, fullness, and satisfaction. It also helps chip away at diet rules, like what, when, and how much to eat, so that you’re better able to respond to your internal cues. A guideline that comes from inside the body is an internal cue, whereas one from outside the body is an external cue.

Intuitive eating helps to improve your interoceptive awareness or to remove barriers to your interoceptive awareness. In other words, it helps you to cultivate attunement to physical sensations that arise from within your body in order to get both your biological and psychological needs met, or it removes the obstacles and disruptors to attunement, which usually come from the mind in the form of rules, beliefs, and thoughts. Interoceptive awareness is the ability to listen to physical signals from inside the body in the present moment and thus be able to respond to them.

For example, a physical cue could be hunger; a response to this is eating something. Another one could be feeling cold; a response would be to put on a jacket. Without being able to listen to these bodily cues, you will struggle to determine your needs and the correct response to those needs. Unfortunately, because of diet culture and many other reasons, it’s really common to be completely disconnected from these signals, which is why my private practice (and this book) focuses on helping you reconnect with your body and these important cues. We’re all born intuitive eaters, so even if you can’t remember a time when you were connected to these cues, you definitely were. You just need to rediscover it.

How Is This Book Different?

This book draws heavily on intuitive eating, and I am indebted to Evelyn and Elyse for their trailblazing work. They are incredibly inspiring, and I’ve trained with them both – without them, I