Eat Like You Like It

When Was the Last Time You Sat Down and Really Enjoyed Your Food, Without Guilt or Second-guessing? Can’t Remember? Maybe It’s Time to Try Intuitive Eating.

- Christine Byrne

EIGHT YEARS AGO NICOLE LANG, 35, BEGAN following a low-carb diet to get ready for her wedding. She didn’t love the food but lost weight fast— until she didn’t. Her weight plateaued, and then, when she didn’t stick with the diet, she regained. Every now and then she’d go back to the plan, gaining and losing the same 15 to 20 pounds over and over. In March of last year, Lang had finally had enough: “I just started thinking, There has to be a better way; there has to be something else—I’ve been doing this on and off for years.” So when a dietitian friend, Alissa Rumsey, R.D., posted on Instagram that she was leading a Ditch the Diet Challenge, Lang signed up. Over the course of a week, she learned about the principles of intuitive eating, and a light bulb went off. “It was like, I’m not crazy; I’m not a failure for not being able to stay on alow-carb diet and lose weight,” she says. This new approach, as she describes it, was a feeling of freedom—from cravings, from restrictive food choices, from guilt.