Diet Culture dictates that we need to use diets to achieve a set of body measurements or a specific appearance to be “healthy”.  But what if these criteria feel impossible to achieve?  If diet culture is not in your best interest, how do you know the way to true health for your body?  Encoded in your DNA are all the answers;  all you have to do is follow your own data, cues and natural cycles to know what is best for your unique body which begs the question, why do we continue to rely so heavily on diet culture standards that sabotage long term health?

Why Diets and BMI Sabotage Your Health

Diets are popular because they lead us to believe that they’ve discovered what is best for health along with ways we can achieve a health standard that they’ve set.  Most diet standards are centered around the scale and BMI, but BMI was never was meant to accurately measure health.  

According to NPR.org, BMI was created “using a small sampling of the size and measurements of white, male Scottish and French soldiers”.  Across the world, beauty standards change and reflect the current culture, but BMI remains and the meaning of health never changes. This discrepancy perpetrated by diet culture is what creates anxiety, depression, guilt, and worst of all, a bad relationship with food.

Diets sabotage your ability to listen to your body by keeping you too busy counting calories and macros, skipping meals, removing WHOLE food groups, or following meaningless rules.  Sure diets may work but only temporarily and at the expense of your true health.  You don’t need all that drama!  What you do need is good nutrition defined and simplified.

Here’s How Experts Define Good Nutrition  

Let’s remove the ideas that diets promote and simplify what good personalized nutrition really means.   Spoiler Alert: this isn’t just related to eating less sugary foods or more veggies.  According to Fitness Nutrition by John Berardi PhD in exercise physiology and nutritional biochemistry and Ryan Andrews MS/MA,  Good nutrition allows for the following:

1. properly controls energy balance

2. provides nutrient density

3. achieves health, body composition, and performance goals

4. is honest and outcome-based

To simplify, Good Nutrition is based on YOU and what your body needs to function correctly.  Good nutrition should educate you on what foods provide substantial amounts of nutrients with only the necessary calories.  Win-win right? Let’s dive a little deeper into the four points of Good Nutrition. 

#1: To properly control your body’s energy balance, the energy put into your body must be the same as the energy expended, which is evidenced by stable body weight which includes your body’s natural weight fluctuations!

#2 and #3: Good nutrition focuses on your goals in health, body composition (relationship between lean muscle, bone, and fat mass), and performance with nutrient-dense foods. Remember, your health should be assessed through medical tests, such as blood and cardiovascular tests, and not BMI.

#4: Outcome-based means “basing your nutritional decisions on specific, measurable outcomes rather than nebulous definitions of what’s correct”.

Ultimately what good nutrition does is eliminate the need for random diet rules.  Good nutrition opens the door for your own body's guidance system to steer you towards your best health and body.  

From personal experience, my lifestyle became manageable when I gave up counting calories and became mindful enough to eat when I was hungry, stop when I was full, consume foods that benefited my goals, and indulge when my body allowed. After a few years, my body and cravings became stable with the natural weight fluctuations and an enjoyable amount of exercise, but that is a story for another blog post.