Diets are Dangerous

Risks of Dieting:

Trash those diets   Dieting can make you afraid of food. Dieting can lead to eating disorders. Dieting can steal your energy. Dieting does not work. Diets are expensive.   Download the "What's a Body Need" presentation in one of these three formats: Flash with index page (1.2 MB), Flash without index page (1.2 MB) or the Original PowerPoint Presentation (1.5 MB)

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Goals & Prescriptions: (So, what’s a person supposed to do?)

Prescription One: Mechanical Eating

• Eat 3 meals a day
• Eat meals at regular times
• Include small snacks between meals
• Follow the Canada Food Guide

Prescription Two: Non-Dieting

• Stop dieting!!
• End food preoccupation
• Enjoy eating
• Eat “normal” amounts of food
• Eat a wide variety of foods including treats

Healthy Goal: Normal Eating

• Enjoy a healthy & balanced relationship with food
• Eat food to meet your nutritional needs
• Eat according to hunger signals & finish eating in response to full signals
• Keep a good balanced of all kinds of food

Body Image: where it all starts

• How you feel about yourself affects how you view your body
• Media images of women represent a body type that only 1% of women have
• Dieting myths teach us that we can change our bodies
• Our best defence is to like ourselves and to challenge unfair stereotypes of women
• Tune into www.bodysense.ca and www.somethingfishy.org for more stuff on body image
• Teachers & Coaches tune into our bibliography on ways to teach self-acceptance to prevent eating disorders
• Click here to view The ten Body Sense Basics:

Teachers & Coaches Bibliography:

Teaching Prevention of Eating Disorders versus Teaching Eating Disorders

Teachers & coaches are important people in the lives of young girls. As role models they can help girls to understand healthy ideas about food, weight and body image issues. Often they are the first people to spot an eating disorder.
We encourage you to read the following annotated bibliography. Research is demonstrating that there are right ways and wrong ways to teach about Eating Disorders. We have included some of the research citations to give you direction. Also we recommend EveryBODY is a Somebody Manual for teaching the right way.

Fat is not a feeling. (...then how come sometimes I feel fat?)

1. Sometimes people get to a place where they see fat as a feeling. How this happens is complicated and connected to something that is called a trigger or triggers
2. A trigger is an event that promotes a thought process that results in a feeling
3. Triggers come in a variety of forms....from media images of women to conflict in relationships
4. Thinking
   • Thinking I am no good
   • Thinking I am not attractive
   • Thinking I am not normal
   • Thinking bad thoughts about me
   • Thinking I am fat
5. Our thinking responses to trigger events lead to feelings about our very selves and how we fit in the world.
6. Bad feelings about ourselves and our bodies come from negative thoughts.
7. So what’s a person to do?
   • become aware of potential negative triggers
   • challenge those negative thoughts
   • get in touch with WHO you are not WHAT you are
   • hang out with people who like you for WHO you are