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In the first post of this series, I discussed my thoughts around food and its role in healing, as well as my thoughts on why I feel that a ketogenic diet is not right for me (at least, at the present time). Here, I am considering other options that are open to me.
'How To Have Your Cake And Your Skinny Jeans Too' by Josie Spinardi
My thoughts around food, and my relationship to it, really changed when I read this book. At the time, I was looking for some way just to drop the weight and live happily ever after. What this book gave me was a new perspective. It showed me the importance of valuing all aspects of eating – from the place setting to the appearance of the food on my plate – as well as the importance of truly listening to what my body needs and wants. This book is fabulous for teaching you how to understand what your body is asking for. It is also very good and getting you to listen to how your body reacts to different foods.
I really liked this book and started implementing the principles with vigour. However, I ran into problems. Firstly, Josie Spinardi eloquently argues for the importance of not letting your blood sugars drop, since this pushes you into a place where uncontained (or uncontrolled) eating takes place. Go figure! As a person currently experiencing Type 1 Diabetes, low blood sugars sometimes happen for me. When this occurs, I want to eat everything edible and inedible within a five-mile radius!! I had no hope of eating ‘only what I need’. This is where the second problem came in for me.
When I did therefore overeat as a result of low blood sugars, I then felt guilty and berated myself heavily. I realised that I had turned Josie Spinardi’s guidelines into another diet, with rules to follow and therefore rules to break (which, as Josie points out, nearly always leads to bingeing). Josie did point out that you should not turn this into a set of diet rules because it goes completely against the principles in her book. However, once I had, I couldn’t understand how to get back out of that mindset. I was stuck.
'The 4-Day Win' by Martha Beck
The next book I tried to aid my food relationship was Martha Beck’s ‘The 4 Day Win’. Let me first start by saying that, whilst the book highlights how you can change your relationship with food in just four days, what they actually mean is that you can change your relationship with food by doing a series of exercises, each of which takes four (or more!) days to complete. This is not a quick fix book.
Having put that disappointment to one side, I actually found this book really helpful. Martha Beck explains in detail the mental aspects of food and eating. She explains how restricting food in any way leads to your body pushing you to eat more and that you will never be able to out-will it! Instead, she shows you how to get your body onside so that you are not in a never-ending battle with it, trying to suppress it into submission. She uses a lot of behaviour change research and psychological principles to really amp up the impact of this book. It is a truly empowering read.
This book is divided into five main sections, which are based on the cycle of change: pre-contemplation; contemplation; preparation; action; maintenance; relapse; celebration. I worked through the exercises in this book until I got to the preparation phase… But then just stopped! I don’t really know why that happened. Was I just not ready to change my relationship with food and my weight? I thought that I would have thoroughly explored and revised all my limiting beliefs around food by this point so that I could have easily transitioned. After all, wasn’t that Martha Beck’s aim in the early chapters of this book?!
I’m not really sure why this book didn’t work out for me. I think I might return to this at some point to see if, as I continue on my healing journey, whether I might get more out of this at a different point in time. However, at this time, I pushed on to find something else that might help instead.
'The F*ck It Diet' by Caroline Dooner
It was at this time that I came across ‘The F*ck It Diet’ by Caroline Dooner. Caroline, like both Martha Beck and Josie Spinardi, really explores your relationship to food and hunger and your body. She utilises a fair amount of scientific literature to demonstrate to show how the amount you weigh is not as important as you may think it is for health. She discusses the issues with diet culture and the highly-profitable diet industry.
Caroline Dooner promotes the idea of just letting yourself eat whatever you want whenever you want (hence the name of her book!). I don’t know about you but this just filled me with terror…. Surely. if I ate whatever I wanted whenever I wanted, I would turn into the size of a house and die of diabetic complications?!
At the time I was reading this book, a friend of mine came over for dinner. He categorically told me that I wasn’t eating enough. That the amount of food on my plate wasn’t sufficient. My initial thought was ‘Well, at three stone overweight, you’ve got it wrong!!’. But I couldn’t ignore the synchronicity of him randomly delivering this message to me at the same time that I was reading it in my book, made me sit up and pay attention. So, I gulped hard and tried it out!
Do you know what I found…? I actually lost weight by eating more… MUCH more!!! I realised that all those extra ‘naughty’ snacks, were actually just my body finding a way to take in the calories that it desperately needed due to my too-small meal portions. So, by eating more at meal times, I was eating more nutritionally dense food, which was usually also lower in sugar.
I have not quite finished this book yet but I can already see improvements in the way I am eating, how much energy I have and how I’m rebuilding a connection with my body. I’m learning to trust my body again.
Caroline Dooner runs a course on her website called ‘The Fuck It Diet Club’, which will next be available in 2022. I don’t wanna wait that long (impatient, moi?!) so I’m going to sign up to her self-study package in the meantime. This basically has the same content as the course but without the live sessions. I’ll let you know how I get on with it!
Natalie is a blogger with Type 1 Diabetes. Natalie's special gifts are questioning the status quo and being a rebel. She is using these gifts to question medical 'knowledge' and find a true cure for Type 1 Diabetes.
