{"id":2701,"date":"2019-12-04T10:21:27","date_gmt":"2019-12-04T15:21:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.syracusewomanmag.com\/?p=2701"},"modified":"2019-11-26T10:37:51","modified_gmt":"2019-11-26T15:37:51","slug":"fitness-forum-weight-diet-and-maintaining-your-sanity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.syracusewomanmag.com\/?p=2701","title":{"rendered":"FITNESS FORUM: Weight, diet and maintaining your sanity"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Christie Donato<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

December is my favorite month of the year. It has Christmas, my birthday and New Year\u2019s Eve all rolled into one week, with a whole month of holiday music, decorations and sweets leading up to it. This time of year is all about indulgence, which makes sense considering we follow the holidays up with January, a time when we\u2019re all expected to make an abrupt u-turn and give up all the candies, cookies and rich foods we\u2019ve been binging on for weeks. That\u2019s why this month I wanted to tackle a very complicated subject: dieting.<\/p>\n

In recent years, diets have become way more involved than simply cutting carbs and fats. There\u2019s the ketogenic diet, Whole 30, paleo, and intermittent fasting. You can do a three-day juice cleanse or detox your body by fasting for an entire day. There are so many options and so much information (or misinformation) floating around places like Instagram and Facebook that it\u2019s become increasingly hard to parse out the true from the false. Even when losing weight isn\u2019t the primary goal, everyone wants to make the right choices to keep their bodies as strong and healthy as possible. I think we can all agree that this is mostly a good thing. It\u2019s important for us to care about our health and take care of our bodies, but what happens when the diets we hope will make us thinner, healthier, and more \u201cfit\u201d are actually doing the opposite?<\/p>\n

The evidence against dieting has been piling on in recent years, with multiple different studies showing that \u201cone third to two thirds of dieters regain <\/a>more<\/em><\/a> weight than they lost on their diets.\u201d<\/a> We\u2019re also learning that what we commonly refer to as \u201cyo-yo dieting\u201d – rapid cycling of weight loss and gain – might be the true culprit behind an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes, and high blood pressure,<\/a> all health issues thought to be caused by obesity. When it comes to long-term weight loss, diets are not it.<\/p>\n

A November 2012 study<\/a> out of the Oregon Research Institute showed that restricting calories actually caused the reward centers in research participants\u2019 brains to spike when looking at images of yummy foods or just thinking about eating something delicious. This is in line with what proponents of Intuitive Eating<\/a> (the anti-diet diet) preach. That telling yourself you can\u2019t have cheesy fries only makes you want cheesy fries even more than if you\u2019d just allowed yourself to eat a few cheesy fries from the beginning. The restriction is what causes the binge.<\/p>\n

For some, intuitive eating is a healthy approach to overcoming an obsession with food. When we\u2019re dieting, food becomes the most important thing in our life. We label ourselves as \u201cgood\u201d or \u201cbad,\u201d depending on what we\u2019ve consumed. It\u2019s a terrible way to live. When we allow ourselves to eat what we want, as the practice of intuitive eating asks us to do, then we stop putting chocolate cake on a pedestal and start paying attention to what we really enjoy. Maybe we\u2019ll discover that a few bites of chocolate cake is all we really wanted, but what we really love are some fresh strawberries.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy for me to sit here and write about how dieting is bad and we should all love our bodies just the way they are, and it\u2019s just as easy for you to nod along as you read this. What\u2019s much harder is putting that kind of radical self-love into practice. In Taffy Brodesser-Akner\u2019s brilliant NYT<\/em> article, \u201cLosing It in the Anti-Dieting Age\u201d<\/a>, she writes, \u201cWeight isn\u2019t neutral. A woman\u2019s body isn\u2019t neutral. A woman\u2019s body is everyone\u2019s business but her own…It is terrible to tell people to try to be thinner; it is also terrible to tell them that wanting to lose weight is hopeless and wrong.\u201d Everyone\u2019s relationship with their body is different, and everyone has their own journey to go on when it comes to health and wellness. Let\u2019s all agree to keep in mind this holiday season that eating cookies doesn\u2019t make us \u201cbad\u201d or \u201cweak,\u201d but yelling at the cashier when things don\u2019t go our way during the shopping rush does.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Christie Donato   December is my favorite month of the year. It has Christmas, my birthday and New Year\u2019s Eve all rolled into one week, with a whole month of holiday music, decorations and sweets leading up to it. This time of year is all about indulgence, which makes sense considering we follow the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2702,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[126],"tags":[912,712,1017],"class_list":["post-2701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health","tag-fitness-forum","tag-holiday","tag-weight"],"gutentor_comment":0,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.syracusewomanmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/food.jpg?fit=1920%2C1280&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2595,"url":"https:\/\/www.syracusewomanmag.com\/?p=2595","url_meta":{"origin":2701,"position":0},"title":"FITNESS FORUM: The truth about sugar","author":"Staff","date":"October 3, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"By Christie Donato \u00a0 October is the month of apple pies, cider donuts, fancy seasonal lattes (you know the one) and lots of candy, which is why this month I\u2019m writing about sugar. For those of us who struggle to reign in our sweet tooth under normal conditions, the next\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Features"","block_context":{"text":"Features","link":"https:\/\/www.syracusewomanmag.com\/?cat=101"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.syracusewomanmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/sugar-1514247_1920.jpg?fit=1200%2C728&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.syracusewomanmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/sugar-1514247_1920.jpg?fit=1200%2C728&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.syracusewomanmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/sugar-1514247_1920.jpg?fit=1200%2C728&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.syracusewomanmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/sugar-1514247_1920.jpg?fit=1200%2C728&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.syracusewomanmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/sugar-1514247_1920.jpg?fit=1200%2C728&ssl=1&resize=1050%2C600 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":526,"url":"https:\/\/www.syracusewomanmag.com\/?p=526","url_meta":{"origin":2701,"position":1},"title":"Escaping the Diet Culture","author":"Staff","date":"February 27, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"Dropping Thin Aspirations By Holly Lowery\u00a0 Have you ever wondered when your desire to lose weight began? 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