HAES Resources

 When a person first starts to consider leaving diet culture behind, the hardest part can be trusting that their hunger could ever really be satiated. For someone who may have endured dieting on and off for most of their life, and the idea of just eating when they are hungry can seem so foreign.

This is because dieting and diet culture is often based on the premise that we are not to be trusted with our own bodies. That we are too weak, too undisciplined, to make the “right” choices when it comes to food. So, we look to an external authority – be it a diet book, an Instagram account, an app, or a doctor – to tell us what to eat, how much to eat, and when to stop. This reliance on an external authority can lead to a disconnection from our own bodies. We no longer trust our own hunger and satiation cues, instead relying on someone else to tell us when we’ve had enough. 

It is important to remember that our bodies are designed to self-regulate. We have built-in mechanisms, like hunger and satiation cues, that help us to know when to eat and when to stop. When we diet, we are effectively ignoring these cues, and instead trusting someone else to tell us what to do. It is possible to break free from the diet mentality, and to start trusting our bodies again – to return to an internal authority. It means intuitively listening to our hunger and satiation cues, and eating in response to them. It means giving our bodies the nourishment they need, when they need it.

These HAES/Body Positive resources are designed to help in this process of ditching diet culture to embrace an intuitive, body positive approach to health. From informative sketchnotes to comic-style images, to coloring pages – explore these printable PDF’s and download them for yourself (or your friend, client, etc.)!