During my dietetic internship I was placed at a rotation under 2 dietitians at a long term care facility who liked to say that the people we were meeting with, “had no self-control with food.” I spent most of my dietetic internship pretty conflicted because the mentalities of the RDs I was working under just felt wrong. One of the RDs was on Weight Watchers and counted the number of grapes she ate at a snack. (Like, what?) I have a lot of empathy for that RD now because she was around menopause age and I’m sure her body had changed (as it does when you hit menopause) and it sucks she felt the need to have to be on Weight Watchers, instead of pursuing a more life-giving and self compassionate approach like Intuitive Eating.
At this time I had never heard about intuitive eating or HAES but I was putting it together that 1) restricting (aka dieting) only helped me overeat, 2) having a list of good and bad foods left me overly full of foods I had labeled as bad and 3) having to exercise so much wasn’t going to be sustainable for much longer and I needed to figure out a way to be okay with the body size I was meant to be. At the time I was still figuring out what being truly healthy meant, but I knew counting the number of grapes you ate was neurotic and not what healthy meant for me.
