What is the Non-Diet Approach, and how could it benefit you?
Eat For Life Dietetics
The non-diet approach essentially removes the pressure to eat for weight loss, and instead focuses the goals on eating to improve other health outcomes – including your mental and social wellbeing.
Non-diet Dietitians help guide people to a more gentle, natural approach to eating and movement with sustainable strategies that will last for the long-term. It often involves helping clients to respond to internal eating cues (regain an internal sense of appetite regulation), focus on self-care and adopt a non-judgmental and nurturing attitude toward oneself; to develop more positive relationships with food and eating patterns.
The Non-Diet approach is based on the principles of the Health at Every Size® (HAES®) paradigm:
- Accepting and respecting the diversity of body shapes and sizes.
- Recognising that health and well-being are multi-disciplinary and that they include physical, social, spiritual, occupational, emotional and intellectual aspects.
- Promoting all aspects of health and wellbeing for people of all sizes equally.
- Promoting eating in a manner which balances individual nutritional needs, hunger, satiety, appetite, and pleasure.
- Promoting individually appropriate, enjoyable, life-enhancing physical activity, rather than exercise that is focused on a goal of weight loss.
Why was the non-diet approach developed?
While the description of a ‘diet’ technically refers to the food and fluids that a person or group consumes, the term we are referring to is the action of manipulating food and energy intake to reach a desired body weight, shape or size. `
The non diet approach was developed in response to evidence indicating the harmful effects of dieting and weight-driven focuses, including:
- Increased morbidity and mortality risk
- Reduced bone mass
- Increased cortisol production (‘stress’ hormone)
- Weight regain or strong driver of weight gain overtime
- Disordered eating and eating disorders
- Depression and anxiety
- Reduced awareness of internal body cues, like hunger and fullness
- Exacerbated problems with body image – lowered satisfaction with body and appearance and over-evaluation of body/appearance on self worth.
- Repeated cycles of yo-yo dieting leading to inadequate energy/nutrient intake, metabolic issues like high cholesterol, hormonal dysregulation, nutrient deficiencies and more.
The team at Eat for Life dietetics are passionate about providing inclusive care and supporting clients to reach their goals and improve their health regardless of their body weight, shape or size. We respect body diversity and empower clients with the skills, knowledge and confidence they need to nourish their body, find freedom with food and let go of diets and unhelpful food beliefs.
While the non-diet approach is beneficial for all, we particularly recommend this approach for clients who:
- Want to improve their relationship with food
- Want to learn more about eating based on internal body cues, rather than external, rigid plans
- Have a history with dieting, weight cycling or focus on weight control
- Have particular health conditions (e.g. diabetes, high cholesterol, PCOS, IBS, heart disease)
- Need support implementing and maintaining long term nutrition and health goals
- Experience body image concerns
- Are sick of diets!
Why is a focus on weight so normalised in our society?
Not to mention the ‘thin ideal’ and immense pressure on body image and appearance in today’s society, an added layer to the normalisation of weight-focus is that ‘health’ has been widely attributed to someone’s body weight, shape and size and there is a common notion that weight is the problem when it comes to resolving health issues. As a society, we are bombarded with this oversimplified message which can lead to a societal drive to change our body weight, shape or size. Non-diet research has proven that this message of ‘weight = health’ fails to acknowledge the factors that truly impact someone’s health, including diet quality, fitness and activity levels, genetics, medical conditions, stress and mental health or socioeconomic status (a person’s level of income, education and occupation status).
Many people are shocked to hear that when we look at the evidence properly – we are unable to show that the cause of health concerns is directly related to weight status. In fact, research highlights that the cause of health concerns are more likely driven by the non-weight related factors like diet quality, smoking, sleep, fitness levels and so on. Some of these factors may be in our control and others are not. Evidently, when studies properly account for these factors – the risk of disease due to weight alone disappears or is significantly reduced.
So, what does this tell us?
That health status is due to many contributing factors and not just weight status alone. Studies in the non-diet area have shown very promising results for the non-diet approach leading to improved biochemical markers (e.g. cholesterol), quality of life, psychological outcomes and reduced weight-cycling.
Why would we want to veer away from traditional weight-focused approaches?
- Because diets don’t work. Research shows that 95-98% of people who lose weight through dieting will regain the weight at the same level or higher than their original weight within 2 – 5 years. Dieting can lead to a reduced awareness of internal body cues, increased dissatisfaction with body/appearance and repeated cycles of yo-yo dieting leading to negative health consequences including but not limited to: weight cycling, inadequate nutrient and energy intake, resulting in metabolic and hormonal dysregulation, nutrient deficiencies and decreased self-confidence and self-worth.
- Dieting behaviours are the biggest risk factor for the onset of an eating disorder (and, disordered eating). Diets often involve restriction of food intake beyond physiological needs, causing malnutrition, undernutrition or starvation which can lead into patterns of binge eating or other serious disordered eating behaviours.
- Weight cycling or ‘yo-yo’ dieting can be dangerous to our health. Research has discovered that repeated cycles of weight loss followed by regain may be more detrimental to our health risk then body size alone, as weight cycling has shown to increase the risk of diabetes, High blood pressure, high cholesterol and heart disease.
- Weight-focused treatments contribute toward weight stigma. Weight stigma involves social devaluation of people because of their weight and size. A common example is labelling someone as ‘unhealthy’ purely based on their body appearance. Weight stigma can be internalised by individuals, meaning the individual also feels that way themselves. This leads to feelings of guilt, shame, body dissatisfaction and low self-worth leading to decreased likelihood of adopting health- behaviours. Weight stigma can also be experienced externally by people in larger bodies, for example not being offered the same level of medical care, inaccessible medical equipment, non-inclusive movement classes, spaces and clothing (just to name a few). Weight stigma has been shown to increase the risk of negative health outcomes including metabolic syndrome, diabetes, high cholesterol and eating disorders.
Alternatively, Non-diet treatment promotes self-care, body acceptance and non-judgemental approaches which has shown to be more empowering and lead to longer-term maintenance of health behaviours.
