A Series of Failed Diets: A Traffic Light Dictating My Food Choices

Content Warning: This post talks about diets, diet culture, and includes numbers associated with weight.

Earlier this year or maybe late last year (all time B.C.–before Coronavirus–seems like a blur right now), I met with my wonderful nutritionist for a check-in appointment. During that appointment, I first came to the realization that I had not been listening to what my body needed. Instead, I had been eating based on rules created by others. For 18 years, I had ignored my hunger cues and had eaten certain foods, at certain times, because a diet said so. A diet created by people who did not know me, my body, or what my body needed.

The big question was, how did I get started with these rules in the first place? About three weeks ago, I was completing the “Dieting History Worksheet” from The Intuitive Eating Workbook, a workbook that I began working on while reading Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. While completing the Worksheet, I remembered my very first diet–a diet where the traffic light dictated what I ate.

I am not talking about a traffic light on the street, but the Traffic Light Diet which my doctor advised me to follow when I was ten years old. In this diet, foods were assigned a traffic light color based on how “good” or “bad” they were. Low calorie foods were “green light foods,” meaning I could eat them daily; moderate calorie foods were “yellow light foods,” meaning I should be cautious in eating them; and high calorie foods were “red light foods” meaning I should avoid them and only eat them sparingly.

Whenever I ate “green light foods,” I was told how good I was doing. And when I ate “yellow light foods” or “red light foods,” I was being bad. Being good or bad had become associated with the foods that I ate. If I ate “yellow” or “red light foods,” I felt like a failure. With this diet, I started assigning moral values to foods.

It was this diet that started my cycles of restriction with food. This was the diet that led me to “choose” foods based on external rules, and encouraged me to completely ignore my own body, to the point that I am now learning how to eat again. It was this diet that started my toxic relationship with diet culture. You can read more about the issues with this Traffic Light Diet approach here.

Since then, I have tried probably dozens of different diets.  I have tried low carb, Keto, Whole30, WeightWatchers/WW, some crazy Albanian diets (including one that guaranteed losing 10 kilograms (22 pounds) in 24 days), the cabbage and lemon diet, and many many more. I have done more diets than I could fit in the Dieting History Worksheet. Some of the diets seemed to “work” for a little while. However, without a fail, every single diet ultimately left me in a worse place at the end.

In the next few blogs, I will talk about a few of the diets that impacted me the most. I will then talk about how I came to realize that intuitive eating and listening to the needs of my body is the right approach for me. Figuring out my past is part of my current journey to learning to love my body.

Is this something you can relate to? Drop a comment below and let’s start a conversation.

Also, check out my new Resources page, which has links to the two books referred to above and other resources (like positive Instagram accounts) that I found, and continue to find helpful in this journey.

Please note that some links to products are affiliate links. You can learn more about affiliate links in my Disclaimers page. Essentially, this means that I may receive a small commission if you purchase something using the link. There is no additional cost to you.