At Ruder Nutrition, we take a non-diet approach to nutrition and health. This approach promotes long-term, sustainable improvements to physical, emotional and psychological wellbeing.
A non-diet approach aims to get back in touch with the body’s innate signals to help us decide what to eat. By innate signals I mean: hunger, fullness, satisfaction and pleasure. We are often taught to ignore these signals by our culture of dieting.
Diets can be incredibly appealing, however, most diets are unsustainable and lead to an unhealthy relationship with food and worse health outcomes in the long-term. Diets use external rules to tell us what, when and how much to eat. They move us away from trusting our bodies. Trust is an important part of a healthy relationship with food and our bodies.
Even if we are not on an official diet, a lot of us still avoid food that we enjoy or do not eat enough food to feel satisfied. This can lead us to feel anxious around food or lead to a restriction and binge cycle. We spend a lot of time in our heads thinking about food and what we should eat. This takes up a lot of brain space and can leave us with less time and energy to focus on the things that are truly important to us.
When we trust our bodies, decisions about what to eat become more simple. Food choices come from a place of self-care, rather than guilt. This allows evidence-based nutrition knowledge to be part of your decisions around what to eat (if you choose to do so), without restriction and without it affecting your relationship with food.
Food can often be used to cope with difficult emotions. A non-diet approach allows space to explore these coping mechanisms and find additional coping skills that may be more beneficial.
The main non-diet approach I use with clients is a framework called Intuitive Eating. Intuitive Eating is backed by scientific research. It helps us move away from the harms of dieting and has been shown to improve important physical and psychological health markers. It helps to reduce disordered eating, binge eating, emotional eating and body dissatisfaction. It has been shown to improve blood triglyceride levels, blood pressure and cholesterol levels; along with improved self esteem, optimism, pleasure from eating and overall life satisfaction.
If this sounds like something you would like to explore, get in contact by emailing me at millieruderrd@gmail.com
A note on eating disorders:
Not all aspects of this non-diet approach will be appropriate for someone with an eating disorder. For example, hunger and fullness signals are often not reliable. Please seek advice from a registered health professional if you have an eating disorder.