Since sharing my CFF blog on my journey to finding acceptance with my Trikafta weight gain, I’ve had quite a few people reach out to me with questions about Intuitive Eating. 

(TW: If you are going through an eating disorder, this post may be triggering as it goes into dieting behaviors.)

For the next 10 days I am going to go through each of the 10 principles and share how I’ve implemented them in my life! I hope my story inspires you to learn more about it, or at the very least answers some of your questions. 

Principle 1: Reject the Diet Mentality

Throw out the diet books and magazine articles that offer you the false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently. Get angry at diet culture that promotes weight loss and the lies that have led you to feel as if you were a failure every time a new diet stopped working and you gained back all of the weight. If you allow even one small hope to linger that a new and better diet or food plan might be lurking around the corner, it will prevent you from being free to rediscover Intuitive Eating.

(From Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch)

The biggest lesson I’ve learned by reading Intuitive Eating is that 95% of diets fail and result in you gaining back the weight or gaining more than you lost. There are countless studies showing this effect, yet diet culture doesn’t want you to know that… how else would they make money with tons of repeat customers? Your body is programmed to avoid famine, so when you intentionally deprive it of food, it lowers your metabolism and stores fat once you start eating again. In 2/3 of dieters, they even gain back MORE weight than they lost. Not to mention, weight cycling or “yo-yo” dieting comes with many health risks that are outlined in the book.

After gaining weight from starting Trikafta, I started noticing fat in places I never had it. This FREAKED me out, as someone with cystic fibrosis who was constantly trying to gain weight and who never had an ounce of fat on her body.

Panicked, over the course of 9 or so months, I tried 3 different ways of losing weight (Noom, 21 Day Fix, and tracking calories with a calorie tracking app to dangerously low levels). All of these plans severely restricted my calories regardless of how much they called it a “lifestyle change” and “not a diet.” I was also working out pretty heavily while training for a marathon and incorporating weight lifting and HIIT training. I used exercise as a way to “earn” my food. I took embarrassing “before” photos each time I embarked on a new plan, and obsessed over others before and after photos. I followed influencers with six pack abs and dreamt about the day I’d look like them.

I still remember the sinking feeling when I logged a meal in my calorie tracker and saw the progress bar turn red for going over my calories for the day. Or how much I beat myself up when the scale went up or stayed the same despite how “good” I was being.

Though I lost a few pounds with each plan, after only a month or so I was left hungry and miserable. I craved the foods I was restricting and ultimately decided each plan wasn’t worth the headache, stopped for a while, and then picked up a new plan when the scale went back up.

Rejecting the diet mentality for me has meant coming to terms with the fact that they don’t work long term, and it’s not worth it when they leave you feeling miserable. I’m lucky I came to this realization before I invested additional time in trying to lose weight, some people spend YEARS weight cycling and jumping from diet to diet before they discover intuitive eating. One thing is for sure, this girl HATES being hungry and LOVES her ice cream and chocolate. 

Once I read Intuitive Eating, I deleted my calorie trackers, recycled food measuring containers, and unfollowed anyone on Instagram or TikTok that talks about weight loss (following these influencers became a momentary obsession). I stopped contributing to conversations about losing weight. And the book taught me to recognize what diets were unsafe despite their claims that they weren’t a diet (Noom is one of the worst offenders!!).

By incorporating the other 9 principles of Intuitive Eating, it has been so freeing to eat what I want, what makes me feel good, and I no longer find myself bingeing on entire bags of chips because my body isn’t in a constant state of deprivation! I’ve developed a more neutral relationship with my body, and though I still struggle with throwing away my scale and completely loving my new size, I recognize the dangerous path I was heading down. Now I’m 20 pounds heavier than I was when I started Trikafta and I now know that this new body represents health!

If this sounds awesome to you, I encourage you to read Intuitive Eating for a how to guide to get started!