Again, yes, really. After years of yo-yo dieting, binge eating, calorie-counting and constantly thinking about food, “I finally hit my low point,” Roup said. “The mental space and thought that’s going into everything I’m eating and how to burn off everything, I just got to that point where it’s like, I don’t want to do this anymore.”
So she stopped. “I scrapped all of the quote unquote labels that you put on food being good or bad,” she explained, “and just really allowed myself to look at food as food and to have nothing off limits.”
With a diet culture mindset already firmly engrained in her mind, it was a bit of a struggle at first. “You’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m just going to have, like, Snickers all day long and I’m going to eat all the things that I can’t have,'” said Roup. “But after a week or two, that gets really boring.”
She’s spent the past decade getting in touch with her body’s cues, “Like, when am I actually hungry? What am I craving? What foods are giving me energy? What foods are making me crash and not feeling good?” she said. “And when you start to lean into that, it really simplifies food.”
Granted, she acknowledged, it wasn’t an overnight shift into intuitive eating. “It took me a really long time to unravel that,” she said. “But I was just at my breaking point, like, I’m sick of following a stupid diet and feeling s–tty.”
