Dieticians are awful!

None of that sounds legit, imo of course.

My (USA) dietician was wonderful.

I didn’t expect her to provide weight loss counseling. I went in armed with a list of questions about nutrition, snacks, substitutions, every darn thing I could think of. She answered all my questions clearly and provided (pardon) food for thought, as well.

She also referred me to MFP.

I only had three visits with her. That time spent was worth its (pardon 😂) weight in gold, but it was sorta up to me to determine what I needed to know, or ask for help sending me down certain rabbit holes.

Reading these boards here religiously also helped me formulate more questions for the follow up visits, so I could get more out of them.

I think she appreciate a patient coming in with a menu of questions that challenged her, versus sitting there slack jawed and complaining about something she certainly couldn’t fix without me willing to have skin in the game.

Btw, I still learn new stuff here all the time. Like when my husband crowed about the “lower cal” tuna on the shelf yesterday, I was able to quote @ninerbuff ’s gobsmacking post about seasonal differences in canned tuna calories. He just looked at me like “shut your mouth!!!!” before putting several multipacks of the lower calorie cans in the basket.

In short, my dietician visits were A#1
and I’ve recommended them to others here every opportunity I’ve had. Not nutritionists, dieticians, mind you.

OP posted in another thread that she was losing successfully, and thought a dietician could help her continue. This one came highly recommended but was a strong proponent of “intuitive eating”.

For me, if I ate “intuitively”, my butt cheeks would merge with the sofa foam. Apparently, though, that’s the coming thing. I’m seeing all kinds of articles about it all over my Apple News feed.

And apparently, if you combine semiglutides with intuitive eating, you’ll be a marvel of shapeliness in no time at all. According to these articles.

It’s like any other medical profession. Sometimes you have to tilt your head like the dog and say “what did I just hear?”

AnnPT77 wrote: »

I've encountered the "intuitive eating" approach in some dietitian-driven contexts, too . . . but in the cases I've seen, it's been paired with a pretty strong recommendation to focus on lots of veggies, fruits, whole grains, lean meat/fish; limit added sugars; increase protein; limit ultra-processed foods; and that sort of thing.

For example, the eating side of AARP's current weight management recommendations for seniors is structured that way. (There's a book and a web site.)

"Intuitive eating" coupled with "fill your cupboards/freezer with junk food" is a variation I hadn't seen, at least not attributed to dietitians, until just now.

One if the steps of intuitive eating is that you must keep at least one of your "trigger" foods in your house and available at all times, and give yourself unfettered access and permission to eat it.

1. Reject the Diet Mentality
Throw out the diet books and magazine articles that offer you the false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently. Get angry at diet culture that promotes weight loss and the lies that have led you to feel as if you were a failure every time a new diet stopped working and you gained back all of the weight. If you allow even one small hope to linger that a new and better diet or food plan might be lurking around the corner, it will prevent you from being free to rediscover Intuitive Eating.

2. Honor Your Hunger
Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates. Otherwise you can trigger a primal drive to overeat. Once you reach the moment of excessive hunger, all intentions of moderate, conscious eating are fleeting and irrelevant. Learning to honor this first biological signal sets the stage for rebuilding trust in yourself and in food.

3. Make Peace with Food
Call a truce; stop the food fight! Give yourself unconditional permission to eat. If you tell yourself that you can’t or shouldn’t have a particular food, it can lead to intense feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings and, often, bingeing. When you finally “give in” to your forbidden foods, eating will be experienced with such intensity it usually results in Last Supper overeating and overwhelming guilt.

4. Challenge the Food Police
Scream a loud no to thoughts in your head that declare you’re “good” for eating minimal calories or “bad” because you ate a piece of chocolate cake. The food police monitor the unreasonable rules that diet culture has created. The police station is housed deep in your psyche, and its loudspeaker shouts negative barbs, hopeless phrases, and guilt-provoking indictments. Chasing the food police away is a critical step in returning to Intuitive Eating.

5. Discover the Satisfaction Factor
The Japanese have the wisdom to keep pleasure as one of their goals of healthy living. In our compulsion to comply with diet culture, we often overlook one of the most basic gifts of existence—the pleasure and satisfaction that can be found in the eating experience. When you eat what you really want, in an environment that is inviting, the pleasure you derive will be a powerful force in helping you feel satisfied and content. By providing this experience for yourself, you will find that it takes just the right amount of food for you to decide you’ve had “enough.”

6. Feel Your Fullness
In order to honor your fullness, you need to trust that you will give yourself the foods that you desire. Listen for the body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry. Observe the signs that show that you’re comfortably full. Pause in the middle of eating and ask yourself how the food tastes, and what your current hunger level is.

7. Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness
First, recognize that food restriction, both physically and mentally, can, in and of itself, trigger loss of control, which can feel like emotional eating. Find kind ways to comfort, nurture, distract, and resolve your issues. Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, and anger are emotions we all experience throughout life. Each has its own trigger, and each has its own appeasement. Food won’t fix any of these feelings. It may comfort for the short term, distract from the pain, or even numb you. But food won’t solve the problem. If anything, eating for an emotional hunger may only make you feel worse in the long run. You’ll ultimately have to deal with the source of the emotion.

8. Respect Your Body
Accept your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect to realistically squeeze into a size six, it is equally futile (and uncomfortable) to have a similar expectation about body size. But mostly, respect your body so you can feel better about who you are. It’s hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly critical of your body size or shape. All bodies deserve dignity.

9. Movement—Feel the Difference
Forget militant exercise. Just get active and feelthe difference. Shift your focus to how it feels to move your body, rather than the calorie-burning effect of exercise. If you focus on how you feel from working out, such as energized, it can make the difference between rolling out of bed for a brisk morning walk or hitting the snooze alarm.

10. Honor Your Health—Gentle Nutrition
Make food choices that honor your health and taste buds while making you feel good. Remember that you don’t have to eat perfectly to be healthy. You will not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency or become unhealthy, from one snack, one meal, or one day of eating. It’s what you eat consistently over time that matters. Progress, not perfection, is what counts.

tishie1 wrote: »

SuzySunshine99 wrote: »

You encounter ONE bad dietitian and they are ALL awful?

I'm not sure in Canada, but in the US, if someone is a Registered Dietitian, they have significant training.
A "nutritionist" is a murkier term, and no specific training is required.

Considering that you lost weight on your own, evaluate whether or not you need help from someone. If you do, just try someone else and check their credentials.

I saw one of the top dieticians in Canada---apparently she teaches other dieticians at universities. They are all being trained in "intuitive eating" which means following your intuition and not calorie counting or weighing yourself.

It was my intuition that got me to 262 pounds with an increasingly bad HA1c. If that is what they are teaching, it sounds like they have bought in wholeheartedly to the extreme fat acceptance thinking that will only lead to people having worse health markers and being medicated and hospitalised more and more.

I think when it comes to doctors, dieticians, fitness coaches.. etc everyone had to be vetted and even after that —it has to be a good fit between practitioner and client.

If they aren’t serving your purpose or helping you achieve your goals. Time to move on to someone who does support your health goals.

I’ve had some wonderful top rate doctors , 1 an unethical traumatic disaster and another practitioner that made me chase her down for communication. I keep close to the cream of the crop and have to ditch the rest immediately.

This coming from someone who is in a family of doctors and who has access to world class facilities.

The only thing intuitive about human's consumption of food for millennia has been, there isn't much of it, it's hard to get and requires a lot of energy for that endeavor, so you better eat all you can find which subsequently we've adapted a way to store a lot of energy because of simple needs like, survival of the species.

The basic fundamentals have changed and now we actually don't need to leave the house and have all the food we want with the beautiful and colorful packaging and all that tasty goodness that we humans through many years of research have figured out what foods go right to our primitive little brain and give us that warm and fuzzy feeling but have turned most into little mac men devouring everything in sight, except the food on the exterior of the house, ironic really. Yes, I'm exaggerating somewhat and no we're not actually pac men.

Those diseases we associate with this behavior are not actually diseases but are the consequences of that abuse with the body trying to mitigate that damage over decades in some cases by all means possible, to extend our health span. Unfortunately children are now the arbitrators of our fate, which isn't giving that warm and fuzzy feeling at all imo. Cheers

kshama2001 wrote: »

sollyn23l2 wrote: »

AnnPT77 wrote: »

I've encountered the "intuitive eating" approach in some dietitian-driven contexts, too . . . but in the cases I've seen, it's been paired with a pretty strong recommendation to focus on lots of veggies, fruits, whole grains, lean meat/fish; limit added sugars; increase protein; limit ultra-processed foods; and that sort of thing.

For example, the eating side of AARP's current weight management recommendations for seniors is structured that way. (There's a book and a web site.)

"Intuitive eating" coupled with "fill your cupboards/freezer with junk food" is a variation I hadn't seen, at least not attributed to dietitians, until just now.

One if the steps of intuitive eating is that you must keep at least one of your "trigger" foods in your house and available at all times, and give yourself unfettered access and permission to eat it.

[snip]

I'm finally able to eat dark chocolate mint M&Ms in moderation, but it took me thousands of calories to get there, so I'm not sure I can count this as a win.

Absolutely. I wouldn't say intuitive eating is good, bad, or indifferent. As with any approach, it depends on one's personality and goals.

Any medical professional that doesn't align with your health goals warrants seeking a second opinion.

You are also not under some sort of spell, I presume. You didn't have to eat the food you knew was unhealthy. I saw your other post. You know what junk food is.