Pictured Above: “It was so frustrating to be like ‘Oh I have this craving; I want to eat this, but I can’t because I will ruin my progress,’” said junior mass communications major Paula Hernandez. “It seemed so unpleasant, I would rather just eat what I want and be mindful about it.”
Patrick Tobin | The Crow’s Nest
By Lily Theisen
Two Florida women who learned how to say yes to food and no to diets said they can finally enjoy their lives the way they want to.
Registered dietitian Jamie Morgan and USF St. Petersburg student Paula Hernandez said they have found balance and happiness in their lives since they have stopped trying to restrict what foods they eat.
“In the end, if we choose to live our life differently because of restrictive eating or the foods we are avoiding, we are missing out on life,” Morgan said. “If we miss out on food, we miss out on life.”
In 2018, The Washington Post reported that 45 million Americans go on a diet each year. To add to that, an article in the Business Wire reported, the business of weight loss in America is a $72 billion industry.
Morgan said choosing to restrict calories or starve the body is detrimental when it comes to losing weight and living healthy.
She further explained that humans are innately made for “feast and famine” mode. This means that the human body cannot decipher between choosing starvation out of choice or actually starving. Because of this, the human body will lower its metabolic rate during starvation in order to not burn as many calories and prepare for prolonged starvation, she said.
On top of the science behind restricting calories, a story from UCLA Newsroom also reported that at least one-third to two-thirds of people on diets gained more weight than they initially lost.
However, many people are still stuck in the endless cycle of diet culture and yo-yoing from diet to diet.
Morgan has personally gone through the transition from a restrictive diet to a mindful and intuitive diet.
She said she wants to help others on their journey of not letting diets control their lives.
“Food is so much more than food. Food is emotional, food is family, and it’s social,” Morgan said. “Think of your grandma making you your favorite meal. She is making it with all this love and if it doesn’t fit into your diet, are you really not going to eat that food? Overall, restricting will affect you emotionally.”
Paula Hernandez, a junior mass communications major, said she has also struggled with eating healthy and has decided that dieting leads to more harm than good.
“It was so frustrating to be like ‘Oh I have this craving; I want to eat this, but I can’t because I will ruin my progress.’ It seemed so unpleasant, I would rather just eat what I want and be mindful about it,” Hernandez said.
An article by Food Insight said that mindful and intuitive eating are different forms of non- restrictive eating. Food Insight said that these forms are encouraged by dietitians as a different way of forming healthy relationships with food and balanced diets that are non-restrictive.
According to an article by Healthline, mindful eating is thinking about the food you are eating while you are eating it in order to bring full attention to your experiences, cravings and physical cues.
“Recognizing when you are hungry and making sure that you eat prior to getting excessively hungry is super important. (Along with) eating until you are satisfied versus eating until you are overly full,” Morgan said.
One thing that Hernandez said helped her to be mindful of how she was eating was by logging what she was eating.
“It was more of a journal or visualization of my eating decisions,” Hernandez said. “It wasn’t to keep myself under a calorie threshold, but I created a journal to be mindful of what the food I was eating had in it so that I could make more informed choices in the future.”
Morgan also addressed intuitive eating. Intuitive eating is not a concept but a way of eating. It is about following your cravings and allowing yourself to enjoy what you want to eat when you want to eat it. I think that a lot of people think that intuitive eating means you eat whatever you want despite health,” Morgan said. “But that is not what it is. It’s really about going back to the framework of; as kids we were intuitive eaters. If we weren’t impacted by an outside force, we ate when we were hungry and we stopped when we were full. We usually ate a balanced diet on our own without our parents telling us we had to.”
Morgan also said that changing your mindset around dieting and eating healthy is greatly impacted by knowing yourself and your body.
“Improving my relationship with myself through yoga is what propelled me into repairing my relationship with food,” Morgan said.
Switching from an unhealthy diet to a balanced and non-restrictive diet can be hard.
Hernandez and Morgan both said that researching and knowing yourself was the best thing they could recommend others to do if they wanted to make a switch.
“Whatever you are going to do, make sure you research it before,” Hernandez said. “Try it out; if it doesn’t work and isn’t a long-term or a sustainable thing, I suggest researching basic Google searches on nutrition and basic food science. Definitely make sure you know yourself and what you are getting into before you dive in.”
