Dating diets are the only diets that work.
Diets don’t work. For anyone. I know because I’ve been navigating my relationship to food since I was about 14 years old. It was the first time I started interrupting old patterns of eating and tried an actual diet. That diet led to a full-blown eating disorder that took months and years to recover from.
I lost 20 pounds in a few months and lots of muscle mass and it probably changed my metabolism ever since.
That “diet” didn’t work to keep the weight off because eating disorders are hardly ever about actually losing weight. Whatever fueled that need to control my food still hung around and swung back in my early 20s when I gained everything I had lost back and then some.
And things stayed like this until I became a health coach in 2009. Then, over the course of the next decade, I learned intimate truths about myself and my relationship to food and patterns around eating and self-care that is an ongoing process, with something new to learn and practice each day.
That’s why diets don’t work. They come from a place of lack and deprivation. They come from “this body of mine isn’t ok as it is so I’ll restrict what I give it.”
If we’ve learned anything from psychology and sociology, we know humans never thrive in deprivation of our physical and emotional needs.
Which brings me to discuss dating. And why I think a dating diet is the only thing that works.
At first, you may feel confused. If I’m not dating, and on a dating diet, aren’t I depriving myself of emotional needs that I’d get in a relationship?
Nope.
The paradox of a dating diet, as I see it (and have experienced it), is that it’s an opportunity for you to receive MORE than you ever have in any relationship you’ve ever experienced.
In an age where we constantly seek others to change their behaviors to make life more meaningful and safe for us, taking the responsibility to change our own. just look at all the “activism” out there—which is really people pleading with others to do something FOR them to feel relief of some kind.