Intuitive Eating + Body Image Throughout Motherhood

The topics of body image and dieting speak to every person and every part of their life. However, I know body image insecurities can be high in the postpartum period because your body is completely changed and will never be the same again. Learn how intuitive eating can support your body where it’s at and throughout the changes that happen throughout life.

Dana Barron the Co-Founder of Wellness Lately, and her business partner Bridget Shannon help women stop feeling crazy around food. They help women heal their body image and learn to take care of themselves in a way that isn’t dieting and binging and emotional eating right. This is a summary of our conversation about toxic diet culture, intuitive eating, and body image.

The Reality of Women’s Bodies: Constantly Changing Throughout Life

We shouldn’t feel this emotionally charged around food. Yet we don’t understand why we can’t just be the woman who can eat when she’s hungry and stop when she’s full and food is just not an issue. That’s such a foreign concept for most women.

There are all these narratives in our lives as women that we believe are supposed to live by. And we don’t realize that they are the things disrupting our relationship with ourselves. If we had a culture where when women got their periods, it was celebrated instead of like hidden and taboo to talk about, right, if the postpartum period we had actual support.

We should not subscribe to the idea that we are supposed to look the same way our entire lives as women. In our culture, the media, what we see is a very narrow version of what women are supposed to look like. So when we’re exposed to this constantly, and when we have tabloids and Goop and Women’s Health telling us how to bounce back after childbirth, we believe that there’s something wrong with us when our bodies don’t. And for some women, just do, some will just look exactly the same. Seven days after giving birth, I was not one of them. Truly, I believe that’s the majority of women’s experiences. 

The reality is that women’s bodies constantly change our entire lives. That’s the only constant thing in life, the change of our bodies. Yet, our culture leads us to believe that we’re supposed to be: 

• white
• thin
• able-bodied
• cis-gendered
• blonde
• perky 
• healthy

So when we fall short of that visually, we get really upset, and we beat ourselves up. Then, we turn to things like the toxic diet cycle to try to fix this perceived problem that isn’t actually a problem if we zoomed out. 

The Postpartum Period: Navigating Body Image and Dieting

The particularly difficult piece of the postpartum time is that not only do we have very few resources in which to actually take care of ourselves. When we’re feeling burnt out, overwhelmed, run down, stressed, exhausted. Feeling physically worse in our bodies makes it more difficult to feel good about our bodies. Our body image and how we physically feel are connected. So we’re very vulnerable at this time. So it makes sense that body image would take a nosedive. 

Then on top of that, we’re inundated with these messages that we should be able to just hit the gym, bounce back start running at six weeks. So we’re just constantly comparing ourselves to this bullshit imaginary arbitrary standards that are not true for any of us. That’s why the postpartum period is so difficult.

It is the nature of having a human body it’s always changing every single day.

If we can allow ourselves just to be human and recognize that our bodies are just going to change throughout our lives, it takes away this level of resistance we have to it and makes it wrong. But if you never subscribe to that narrative, because you just don’t believe in it, because it’s just not biology that gets easier to accept the natural fluctuations in your body throughout your life.

The amount of brain space that is taken up by 

• Counting almonds 
• Calculating macros 
• Filling out my fitness pal 
• Downloading meal plans 
• Standing in front of the mirror, beating yourself up

Think about just the sheer amount of time and energy and resources that we waste in our lives, trying to force our bodies to be something they never want it to be. It is an enormous amount of work.

Dieting gives false hope about body image

We tell ourselves:

• if you just cut these things out
• if you just do what I do

You’re going to look like Jillian Michaels, and then your whole life is going to be better, you’re going to be confident and successful and worthy of love and pleasure and resources. Like, if I could just get this one thing right, then the rest of my life will fall into place.

The truth is, 97% of diets fail 95% of dieters gain the weight back, and then more. We’re not showing up fully in our lives. We’re dreading going to dinner with girlfriends because either it’s going to make us break our diet, or we’re afraid and worried that people are going to judge us for having gained weight. We socially isolate. We don’t feel confident enough to show up fully in our lives because we’ve been taught to hate our bodies and spend all of our attention on trying to fix that.

Are all spaces focused on working out exercising and diet, toxic? Or do you think that there can be good things found in the culture?

While the majority still are, I think it’s changing. If you look at a company like Peloton who is prolific at this point, it’s very clear to me having used their app and done their classes and stuff that they understand the research of maintaining engagement. 

Breaking Free from Toxic Diet Culture Narratives About Body Image

Most people understand how it feels when people are talking about blasting fat and burning off dinner, or whatever it is like that toxic relationship with exercise is a diet culture perspective on exercise. This doesn’t make us want to do it. We don’t want to punish ourselves. We don’t want to compensate. We don’t want to use exercise like that. 

So I think if these gyms were smart, they would realize that empowering language, anything that takes you from objectifying your body, meaning like burn off the calories, tone up your ass, whatever it is, to being a human in your body, experiencing life and like being in your body. That’s what is always going to make us want to go back and do more because it’s life affirming. It feels good. You feel empowered when you’re done, as opposed to feeling like you just got punished. Nobody wants to feel that way.

We can love fruits and vegetables. We can love exercise. We can love taking care of ourselves. But my firm belief is that dieting and battling food and your body every day is the opposite of taking care of yourself. We can’t just go from dieting to like free; we have to actually heal all of this stuff from years and years of dieting and battling ourselves. And then we can build actual health affirming habits that feel good and are about taking care of ourselves, but they can’t focus on weight loss.

What are the effects of chronic dieting?

So one of the biggest eye-openers for me was when I was trying to heal my relationship with food because I also was an emotional eater and a binge eater. I was wildly fluctuating from organic raw vegan to like just binge-eating pizza and doughnuts and ice cream and stuff right like there was never any chill space in between. I was either militant or going crazy. And one of the key things for me was that I also had crushing anxiety in my mid-20s and this was when I was most disordered with food.

Weight Watchers told me in my mid-20s, that I should be eating very little. And immediately I began to obsess about food, I was apathetic, and I became moody and extremely emotional. My entire personality changed. If you look at a list of actually studied effects of a semi starvation diet, which again, is more than most women eat when they’re dieting. It’s literally mind-blowing, because it’s like, oh, there’s nothing wrong with me. I’m just literally not eating enough.

What does it mean to hit diet rock bottom?

So diet rock bottom is where you just like know, deep in your soul that you can’t muster the energy to go on one more diet. Symptoms of diet rock bottom include 

• Even just the thought of starting a diet has you like eating everything in your cupboard. You find yourself sort of we call it last supper syndrome, where you’re like, binging the night before starting a diet
• The amount of time that you’re able to actually stick to the plan is getting shorter and shorter
• You find it increasingly difficult even to lose just a few pounds
• You don’t have a lot of energy 
• Loss of your ability to focus. 
• Feeling that urge to socially withdraw

These kinds of symptoms that start to impact the rest of your life. You’re obsessed with food; you think about it all the time. You feel like you can’t keep certain foods in the house because you can’t trust yourself around them. So you’ve eroded your trust around food, things like you know, the cookies are screaming my name from the kitchen. It’s just like this rock bottom of just knowing deep down that you just can’t do it. Like if it were going to work, it would have worked by now. So those are all the symptoms of diet rock bottom.

How dieting food restriction impacts your metabolism 

Your body is fighting back like that first diet, it’s so easy to lose weight because your body is not prepared to fight for your survival. However, every time you do it, your body’s like, oh, yeah, I know. Yep, famine, here we go. We know how to deal with this. We know how to survive famine. We have to slow down the metabolism and make sure they don’t have any energy to exercise or go about their day or focus clearly. Then as soon as the food is available, we have to eat as much as possible. So let’s numb your fullness queue so that you eat way past the point of being comfortably full because we have to pack it in when food is available.

The biological effects of dieting 

We internalize a lack of character on our part like we don’t have the willpower, we don’t have the motivation. There’s something wrong with us, when in reality, this is just our bodies fighting back, our bodies could care less if we gain weight, if it’s not dangerous for survival, but like you can’t lose a lot of weight drastically, your body will freak out as it just it’s more important to keep weight on your body for survival than it is to lose it.

During the postpartum period, parents will ask if it’s okay to exercise while breastfeeding. They often wonder if it will impact their milk supply. They’ll ask the same questions about dieting too. 

These are questions you want to ask your doctor as far as when it’s okay for you to start exercising. Also, they need to remember, if you start cutting calories, especially if you’re cutting carbs, your milk supply will tank because you need carbs to make milk and you need calories to make milk. If you’re going to cut calories and starve yourself deliberately, you know, your body’s not going to have the energy your body needs to heal and keep that little baby going.

Let’s talk about the toxic diet culture narratives around body image

We should start this by saying, if we’d never been exposed to the idea that you should be thin and in the best shape of your life a month postpartum, we wouldn’t be doing this to ourselves. If there was more support and a more honestly humane transition into motherhood, we wouldn’t be doing this to ourselves.

Focusing on weight is a really great distraction and dissociation tool.

It’s like a neat and tidy solution to focus on, where we think, Well, if I just lose this weight, if I just get back in shape, then I’ll feel better, when in reality, it’s just a shitshow. When you have a newborn and you‘re trying to recover and handle everything you need to handle. So it’s important to remember that dieting itself, the focus on our bodies itself, is a coping skill. It’s a coping skill we learn because we get to not worry about all of these overwhelming things that don’t have tidy answers and just focus on calculating our macros to distract ourselves.

What is intuitive eating?

The point of intuitive eating is to just eat normally again. Intuitive eating is reconnecting to your body and having food be a non-issue. I teach the framework of intuitive eating created by Evelyn Tripoli and Elise rash. And it’s really just a combination of instinct and emotion and rational thought, where you can listen to your body’s cues to take care of yourself versus diet rules.

There are four areas of assessment in intuitive eating.

1. Unconditional permission: most people don’t give themselves unconditional permission to eat. Where they’re literally allowed to eat anything, anytime, in whatever amount whenever they want.
2. Eating based on internal cues versus external cues, dieting over years and decades, you’re so disconnected from your body, you don’t even know you’re hungry until you’re ravenously hungry and you don’t even know you’re full until you’re absolutely stuffed. A lot of times you don’t even know what you like to eat. This is because the food you do like to eat you’re so terrified of. We’re mostly eating in response to physical cues, like I’m hungry, what do I want to eat I’m gonna eat until I’m satisfied.
3. Emotional Eating, eating in response to emotions, not that emotional eating is a negative thing. In our view, we actually think it’s neutral or positive. 
4. Body food choice congruence, which essentially means you eat to feel good, like how you eat, supports the way you want to feel in life.

So most dieters think in black-and-white, all-or-nothing terms.

The idea is to try to eat to match how you want to feel that day. And you’re empowered. So if you’re conscious of blood sugar, and you’re conscious of the way that pasta makes you feel, you get to choose, do I want to feel like shit? Maybe an amazing bowl of pasta and a really good Italian restaurant is worth it. And you’re gonna go home and you’re just gonna kind of lay down and watch TV and go to bed anyway. So like, okay, I can have some, but I can choose how I want if I’m an adult. 

Intuitive Eating: Reconnecting with Your Body and Eating Normally Again

Another example is, for instance, say you’re celiac, right, and you are allergic to gluten; you’re not going to eat gluten because you’re taking care of yourself by not eating gluten. However, that is a very different mindset than cutting gluten out because you are desperately trying to lose weight and hate your body. So we have to get back in touch with our bodies and say like, how does this make me feel? And then I get to decide because I’m in control, not the food. 

Ask yourself, am I restricting food for arbitrary diet rules, or am I in tune with my body and practicing body respect? Because it’s respectful to your body to eat in a way that feels good. Am I cutting carbs? Because I want to look good in a bathing suit? Or am I mostly avoiding a big bowl of pasta because I want to feel good? And I know that that doesn’t feel good to my body.

It’s important to know that restriction itself messes with our guts. It wasn’t until I sort of healed from dieting, and I was like, oh, no, like, I really cannot drink milk, like, I cannot have a bowl of cereal. I mean I can, but if I do I’m going to sprint to the bathroom three hours later, and like doubled over with cramps and so sick.

I love cereal. And sometimes I really want to eat it when my kids are eating it. But I’m just like; I don’t really want to deal with that later I’m not going to eat it versus I used to binge on cereal at night. Because I’d be dieting all day and cereal wasn’t allowed. And so I would binge on it. And then I feel like shit anyway. The difference there is, I’m not avoiding it because I’m not allowed to have cereal. I’m avoiding it because I want to feel good. And I know that it repeatedly has taken me down. So I’m just going to avoid that food because I want to feel good.

If you were talking to a new mom, who’s in the postpartum period, what recommendations would you make to start down that path of learning to eat intuitively?

First of all, depending on where you are postpartum, like maybe just give yourself a break. Maybe this is not the time to dive in. Maybe just noticing how you feel around food, a lot of the beginning of this process is just collecting data, we call it putting on the anthropologist’s hat. Just noticing feelings and trying to practice non judgment around them, just to see what’s going on for you with food. 

The absolute first step is to take a hard look at dieting and get honest with yourself because we have to reject this diet mentality, we have to recognize that dieting has been a huge scam. All of these decades, it’s all the same shit dressed up differently. And if it were going to work, it would have worked by now. A diet history exercise can also be really helpful. So that’s the first step, we just have to get to that place of diet rock bottom, or find a new way to relate to food in our bodies.

The second step is just to start honoring your physical hunger. Like when you get hungry, instead of the first instinct being, how can I make it another hour? Or how can I make sure I don’t eat too much? Or, how do I trick myself out of eating at this time? Starting to look for your hunger and honor it. The more we eat, the more full and satisfied we get. The more we relax around food, the more food is not a big deal. So we have to honor that physical hunger first.

We think we’re crazy about food. We think we have a binge eating problem. We think we’re emotional eaters. But really, we’re just hungry. And we’ve never been told that it’s okay just to eat when you’re hungry. It’s like a radical thing for women.

What are the four types of hunger?

1. Primal hunger – you’re actually physically hungry.
2. Emotional hunger – humans are naturally emotional eaters, right? Like we celebrate. We take care of each other through food.
3. Taste hunger – eating food just because you enjoy it.
4. Practical hunger – think in terms of what you need in the house, and plan around your hunger from a practical sense as a form of self-care.

It’s okay to eat when you’re not hungry to take care of yourself and manage your energy and self-care throughout the day.

Body confidence and body positivity – tips for new parents

First, commenting on people’s bodies in any way is NOT okay. I think is hard for people to wrap their brains around, like don’t complement weight loss, because what you’re saying is that your body smaller is better than it was larger. We’ve all done it, because we’re all trained to do that. What we don’t realize are the beliefs these comments are reinforcing.The fact that women’s bodies are up for discussion in the first place should be an issue.

I went on my first diet at like, 14 and was praised for the weight loss, it’s like, oh, I guess my body was wrong. Now my body’s good, right? Everybody’s praising me for this.

It’s a social justice issue if you look at it as a form of oppression, which is what it is. We have anti-fat bias, it’s weight stigma in our culture.That weight stigma gets internalized in all of us, regardless of our size. It’s certainly a harder experience for people with larger bodies because they face oppression, but we all internalize it as fat is bad. Thin is good, when in reality, that is a neutral description for a body type, just like thin or tall or brunette. We see this because our culture teaches us this, there is something wrong with being in a larger body, when in reality, body diversity is just a thing. There have always been people in larger bodies. Why do we think people can be naturally thin, but they can’t naturally be fat? Why do we want to fit in our friend’s jeans when we wouldn’t necessarily have shame about not fitting into their shoes?

The Problem with Toxic Diet Culture Narratives

You can be physically fit in any size body and you can be physically unfit in any size body.

That’s the issue, and that’s the issue, with correlating health with weight, because now we have this, moral implication, a character implication, that because our culture puts health on a pedestal. So it’s this system of oppression that we’ve all internalized. And this is it’s tangled up in our body image, regardless of what size body you’re in. Body image comes from the fact that our beliefs that we are deriving a disproportionate amount of our worth as human beings from what our bodies look like.

We need to heal our body image to see ourselves as more than a body and for women, that’s difficult to do. Because from the womb, we’re taught that being thin and beautiful and kind and accommodating is what women need to be. We can’t be loud, we can’t be angry, we can’t be big, these are things women shouldn’t be. We all internalize that regardless of our size, regardless of what our body looks like.

Food issues can heal pretty quickly you can feel normal around food pretty quickly. But the underlying body image is what’s been driving our weight obsession is what’s been driving the dysfunction with food, to begin with. The food issue is just the manifestation of this internalization that our bodies are wrong, and that our bodies need to look different. And we have to control food to control our outcomes in life. We think…

• thin = loved 
• thin = confidence
• thin = worthy, 
• thin = resources
• thin = partners
• thin = friends
• thin = happiness 

When in reality, we can experience all of those things in anybody that we’re in.

Body image comes down to…

Am I in my body? Am I connected to my body? And my appreciating my body? Or am I objectifying my body? Am I viewing my body as if someone else from the outside is viewing it as an object? Think about the message we are sending our children when they see their parents are constantly dieting.

I’m hoping our generation is going to be the one that breaks this cycle. Because the caregivers around us like their relationship with food and body will have the biggest impact on us. Media is always going to be there, social media is going to be there, and diet culture is going to be there. But if those messages and beliefs aren’t being reinforced at home, you’re gonna have a much better shot at clearing through adolescence without food issues.

The best way to protect your kid from food and body image issues is to heal your own. 

If you’re confident and at peace with food and have a joyful relationship with food and movement. If you’re not talking about other people’s bodies. If you’re not making comments about worth and bodies, then your kids aren’t going to pick up on that, and your kids won’t believe it. And you can have open conversations about media that you’re exposed to and talk about these things. On the flip side, if you’re ripping your own body apart in the mirror, if you’re calling yourself fat as an insult in a bathing suit in front of your little girl, if you’re weighing your food at a restaurant in front of a little girl or and I mean, it affects boys too. But I’m comfortable saying it disproportionately affects women and girls. They’re going to pick up on that and learn that that’s the truth. This is not what we want to pass down. Healing your own stuff is really the most important thing.

Empowering Yourself to Change Your Beliefs and Take Control of Your Life

This doesn’t have to be your story, it has never been about your body. It’s been about the stories and beliefs you hold about your body. That should feel empowering because those are the things we can change. If we were under the conscious control of our weight, would any of us be dieting? No, it just wouldn’t be a thing. This wouldn’t be an issue if human beings were consciously in control of their weight. But that’s not the truth. This is the grand illusion we’re all living under. 

However, what we can control is… 

• How we take care of our bodies
• How we speak to ourselves
• The beliefs that we hold about bodies
• The beliefs that we hold about our worth 

It doesn’t have to be like this, if you’re binging; if you’re emotionally eating; if you’re feeling exhausted and crazy around food; you can heal this. And so many women are doing it, like our whole generation is waking up to this. Intuitive Eating is a great framework to help you heal. It gives you a step by step guidance to feel normal around food again and to move on and take care of yourself and not stress about food anymore. And you get your life back.