Treatment approach

A non-diet approach sits within the HAES (R) paradigm with a weight-neutral approach to eating. It is optimising physical and emotional health and well being through improving your relationship with food, eating, your body, nutrition, movement, rest and self care.

It empowers you to connect with the needs of your own body. It can help you move away from unsustainable or unworkable eating behaviours, based on the rules or judgements that you may currently have around food, eating and exercise. Instead moving towards values based behaviours that help to really take care of yourself in a sustainable way. 

It is not prescriptive and its very indivdualised as it is based on the theory that you already know what your body needs are (intuitive eating) and bringing awareness to these needs (mindful eating - see below).

A non-diet approach to eating is flexible, accepting, intuitive, natural and welcomes all foods. It's kind, nurturing, pleasurable, comfortable, forgiving and nourishing. It provides confidence, a sense of calm and freedom around eating. 

We are all born as natural intuitive eaters. Babies cry, they eat, when they are full, they stop, until they feel hungry again and the process repeats. But food isn't just fuel, they are also soothed and comforted while breastfeeding and bonding with their mothers.

As children grow up as intuitive eaters they are innately able to balance out their food and energy intake throughout the week. Some weeks, they may have a ravenous appetite while others they barely eat at all. They also experience pleasure and social connection through food.

It isn't until rules and restrictions are set around food that we lose our inner intuitive eater. We learn to finish the entire plate. We learn that dessert has to be earned, or can be taken away if we misbehave. We learn that we have to eat our vegetables before eating cookies. We may even place rules around eating on ourselves with the goal of losing a few kilos.

For many chronic dieters, they have forgotten how to eat, how to really care for themselves. The good news is that we can reconnect with this inner wisdom, but  in order to do that we need to reject the diet mentality.

Mindfulness is not a new approach, in fact it has been around for centuries stemming from the Buddhist culture. Today, however, with our busy lifestyles, where multitasking seems to play such an important role, for most of us, it seems to have fallen off our radar. 

Mindfulness is the act of deliberately paying attention to the present moment, and here's the most important bit....without judgement! 

For most of us, we have an inner critic that is very quick to pass judgement on everything we do based on either past events or future dreams, or even comparing it to somebody else. And being a critic, it very rarely gives us positive feedback, rather expressing judgement, criticism, frustration or disproval about our actions. Mindfulness calls for the opposite of this, and uses only descriptive language as you describe it as though you are looking at for the first time, thus have no preconceived judgements about it. 

Mindfulness can be a very useful tool when it comes to eating. Too often we disconnect from the experience of eating, eat out of habit, perhaps in front of the TV were our mind pays attention to the show not the food. We are left with the taste in our mouths without having properly experienced the process of eating, so we go back for more.

Mindful eating can assist with reducing overeating simply by pating attention to the process of eating. By eating mindfully, you are more aware of your hunger and fullness signals, and are more likely to stop eating before you reach that stage of feeling extremely uncomfortable. You may also find that foods you used to love don't taste as great as you remember when you start really paying attention to them.