My New Year's Resolution to Never Diet Again

Rebecca Sigala: [00:00:00] Hello everyone and happy New Year. I'm glad you're here again and listening to the fifth episode of the Body Image Revolution, I've gotten so much positive feedback from so many of you about the podcast, and honestly, it really means a lot to me. It's not super easy to put yourself out there all the time, but when I know it's helping people, it makes everything worthwhile.

So if you're loving this podcast, please share it with your friends, family, or coworkers, or drop a rating or review for me. I totally wanna hear from all of you, and it will give me an idea of what you guys are resonating with and which topics to cover in the future. So I just wanna give you a little bit of a personal update.

I feel like I'm still recovering from December. It was an absolutely crazy month, but the best things that came out of it were, of course, this podcast, my new group coaching program, and some quality family time over Hanukkah. I did start my launch [00:01:00] with a bad viral eye infection, but it just shows that there's really never a perfect time for anything, and taking action is way more important than everything being perfect.

I'm learning that more and more as the years go on, and I love that I'm able to embrace the messiness of life because that's just how life is. . So my new group program, The New Sexy, began on January 1st, which was just a few days ago, but there have been huge shifts for the women who are in this program.

One of the participants sent this text message after the first meeting, and I just have to read it to you. She, of course, gave me permission. "Thank you all for creating such a safe space to make vulnerability possible. I resonated with so much of what was shared and I felt so seen. We are truly not alone". That was really just like the vibe of the night.

There was laughter and tears, and I'm just so grateful to embark on this journey for the next 12 weeks with these [00:02:00] incredible women. We have a WhatsApp group for the group to help each other stay accountable for our goals. Like for instance, one of the first things I give them is a self-love checklist with things to focus on for each day of the program.

So number one is getting two liters of water daily. We're keeping each other accountable on the WhatsApp group, posting pictures of our water bottles and supporting each other along the way. If you're wondering how two liters of water has to do with anything, you'll just have to trust me on this one.

Drinking enough water is truly life-changing. I'm not kidding. And I believe that feeling good in your body, helps you feel better about your body. When you give your body what it needs and feel better, you cultivate love and respect for the body that you have. This body that carries you and it really deepens your relationship with it.

Today I wanna talk about why my New Year's resolution is never to diet again for weight loss. Over the past several [00:03:00] years, my thoughts about dieting and weight loss have evolved. A lot. It was about five or six years ago when I was going on 30-day healthy eating diets, posting before and afters, and calling it body positivity. That's just diet culture in heels, my friends. The only thing worse than diet culture is diet culture disguised as body positivity. It gets even more people to go down the restrictive shame rabbit hole without them even realizing they are embarking on a journey that will make them feel worse about themselves.

And the information is out there. If you don't believe me, do your research. 95% of diets fail, meaning that only 5% of people who begin a diet for weight loss will keep the weight off. And of course, yo-yo dieting and losing weight and gaining weight over time is absolutely terrible for our health.

Dieting itself isn't good for our health, And oftentimes when [00:04:00] we're restricting, we're not getting the nutrients and calories that we need to thrive. I mean, I used to think that 1200 calories a day was normal, and it is so not. If you're listening to this, 1200 calories is not enough, don't fall for it.

Of course, we know that restrictive dieting can lead to eating disorders like anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder. I remember when I was younger, I would diet and restrict myself only to find myself binging on six bowls of cereal and raiding the pantry, and then trying to throw it all up afterwards.

Although the throwing up didn't really work for me. Thank God. The point is when we restrict certain foods, that's what our brains become fixated on. Dieting also leads to disordered eating, like fasting or skipping meals. For so many, it leads to a general obsession with food, the scale and thinness.

It gets us into our perfectionist zone, and of course, the [00:05:00] cycle of shame that I mentioned before. As we continue to fail at these diets, again and again, thinking that it's our fault, thinking that we just don't have enough discipline thinking that there's something wrong with us or our bodies for not being able to lose the weight we want.

Fuck that. Literally, just fuck that. I don't want to hear about what about health again, but I know that I'm going to, it's kind of unavoidable when you're preaching body positivity to a world of thin, obsessed people. I need to mention that B M I is a completely outdated and inaccurate measure of health.

Here's a fact, there are people of all body sizes that are healthy, and there are people of all body sizes that are not healthy. Can't we just focus on our own health? Why are we so concerned about fat people being healthy? Yes, specifically fat people. We never think about the health of anyone else.

Let's just be honest with ourselves. [00:06:00] It's because we live in a fat-phobic society that can't imagine how anyone could be happy, healthy, and fulfilled, living in a larger body. It's insanity. I mean, I know I'm kind of going on a rant here, but as you can see, there are so many reasons why I'm never dieting again for weight loss. And I know the objections.

I've had them myself. I just feel heavy. I wanna feel lighter. I just wanna have more strength and endurance. I just want more energy. I just wanna be healthy. I just want to feel beautiful and confident. I just wanna fit into my clothing. And you know what I realized?

I could literally have every single one of those things without losing weight, and so can you. I'm all about personal health, getting in movement, treating my body with love and respect it deserves, listening to my hunger and fullness cues. Do you know what is the coolest thing about not dieting anymore? I'm really [00:07:00] fucking in tune with my body.

I know my hunger cues. I can literally take three bites of a delicious pastry and be satisfied. I'm oftentimes reaching for vegetables and fruits instead of cakes and cookies and things like that, and it's not because those things are bad in any way, but it's because I know my body and I know what I need, what makes me feel good, and what I will actually enjoy,

at a certain moment in time. And of course, I eat full portions of foods that have less nutritional value too. And of course, sometimes I overdo it or don't listen to my body. I'm a human, but our bodies know how to process it and we'll be okay. The problem was never that we over-ate or ate something outside of our diets.

Our bodies know what to do with that. The problem we created when we were in this diet mentality is that we'd feel shame and guilt for hours and hours afterwards. We'd restrict and we'd even starve ourselves after or use exercise to punish ourselves. That [00:08:00] is not in the name of health, that is in the name of thinness and it doesn't work and I'm over it.

I don't want this for myself. I don't want this for my children. I want them to have a healthy relationship with their bodies and food and exercise. We come from a generation where parents were literally bringing their kids to Weight Watchers at nine years old. Where super thinness was worshiped and it didn't do us any good.

It actually kills people. In America. There are 10,200 deaths per year due to eating disorders, that's one death every 52 minutes. Eating disorders are among the deadliest of mental illnesses.

I'm not just talking about body positivity as a cutesy little thing so people feel good about themselves. This is important. When we love our bodies more and work towards changing the landscape of diet culture, [00:09:00] and the conversations around beauty, we actually save lives. I just wanna throw out that less than 6% of people who are diagnosed with eating disorders are classified underweight according to BMI.

And a larger body size is considered a risk factor for eating disorders. So yes, people in larger bodies have eating disorders. I've heard that misconception before. And it's just assumed that people in larger bodies are eating all day, have no self-discipline, never work out, et cetera, et cetera.

Again, that's fat-phobia, and it's not even close to what I experience with women in larger bodies. It's so fucked up that we're taught to think.

It's fucked up, but it's also normal. It's also normal if you're listening to this and agree, but just can't imagine not dieting or wanting to lose weight. I was there for so long and I actually had a lot of resistance to this way of thinking. I would see people talking about body [00:10:00] positivity in this way, like the way I'm talking about right now, and I thought it was extreme.

I thought you could love your body and still wanna lose weight for appearance reasons. Okay, that's true, to a certain extent, but you can't have radical acceptance and love for it and think that there is something wrong with your body or that it needs to be fixed. And if this episode is hard for you, I get it.

I really do.

I just want you to start thinking about these things and even if you can take something small on, like not labeling foods good or bad anymore, or asking your body what it needs and start listening to what your body really wants. Or stop restricting entire food groups or even just stop talking about diets socially.

Like anything you can take on will dramatically help society move away from diet culture and inspire the next generation to have more acceptance and love for their bodies. 

I wrote this post [00:11:00] around New Year's last year, and I really wanna share it with you all because it still holds so true today. Okay, here's the post. Here's my weight loss plan for 2022. I am no longer bearing the weight of other people's thoughts, opinions, or expectations of me. I am letting go of that little fear inside of me that I am not good enough.

I am finally shedding all of the limiting beliefs that have held me back from being my highest self. I will continue to tone the muscles of my mind and reprogram my thoughts for positivity, abundance, and inner peace. After all the yoyo-ing, I will lose the perfectionism and embrace the messiness of authentic living.

I will make some major gains by creating [00:12:00] healthy boundaries, doing acts of kindness, meeting new people, and discovering more about myself.

I will suppress my appetite for comparing myself to others and not being satisfied with what I have or who I am. I will step into my power and share my light with the world, 100% guilt-free. Take that diet culture. For many years, every new year was an opportunity to decide how much weight I wanted to lose, how much I wanted to tone up, how quote-unquote clean I was going to eat.

And I will not do that anymore. And for those who say that accepting your body is laziness. That it's giving up, that if only you just tried harder. Have them look at these new year's resolutions. Evolving and becoming your highest self is not easy, but this is where I want to put my efforts this year and forever really. This is what lights me up. [00:13:00] Knowing that in a year from now, I will be unrecognizable, not because of how much smaller I am, but because of how big I will become. How much my inner light will shine and help other women do the same. Join me and let go of all the emotional weight that no longer serves you.

So, with that, I think you kind of got an idea about how I feel about dieting. I'm really not big into resolutions anyways. Instead of resolutions, I decided to have a Word of the year for 2023, and I wanted it to be something that I was going to invite into my life more.

And that word is presence. I am inviting presence in, and I'm letting go of fear. This can actually be a really powerful exercise. Write down all the things that you wanna invite in for 2023 and all of the things that you wanna let go of, and then just intuitively [00:14:00] choose one of them from each so that you can keep recommitting to that concept all year long.

Because that's just the truth. We will always need to keep recommitting to ourselves. That's the beauty of being a human. All right, beautiful humans. I'm out. Talk to you next week.