Ten Ways to Celebrate International No Diet Day

Friday May 6 is International No Diet Day.

As a woman who used to diet, and speaks all the time to other women who used to diet or who are still dieting, or thinking that they should be dieting, it’s worth giving a few minutes of attention to what the day’s about.

Wikipedia says:

The International No Diet Day (INDD) is an annual celebration of body acceptance and diversity. This day is also dedicated to promoting a healthy life style and raise awareness of the dangers and futility of dieting.

The first time people hear about INDD they laugh and say something like “chocolate here I come!” And I did that too, almost a kind of twin-fingered defiance towards anyone who thinks I *should* diet.

There’s also the knowledge that while we can eat, drink and be merry on INDD, tomorrow we may diet, again.

When Mary Evans Young started INDD in 1992, she was reacting to the usual office conversation about what diet works, don’t you look great you’re so disciplined I wish I had your willpower, I’m so bad I ate chocolate, my thighs are so huge in this skirt -  you know that convo. Mary joined in the conversation with “Imagine how great our careers would be if we put as time much and energy into them, as we do into all this diet talk”.

Those aims expanded to become:

• Celebrate the beauty and diversity of ALL our natural sizes & shapes
• Declare a personal one-day moratorium on diet/weight obsession
• Learn the facts about weight-loss dieting, health, and body size
• Recognize how dieting perpetuates violence against women
• Honor the victims of eating disorders and weight-loss surgery
• Help end weight discrimination, sizism and fatphobia

So – what are some ways we can give a nod to International No Diet Day, without it becoming an all in, hands-out, messy Chocolate Rebellion and the post-party sugar hangover?

• Send an e-card to your girlfriends
• Pay real attention the conversations around you today, and if you can, introduce the idea of INDD and a couple of the aims of the day
• Make a pledge to read a book or a blog about body and size acceptance that you’ve not read before
• Print off my Love Your Body tips poster and put it up in your lunchroom, bathroom, or your own mirror
• Wear a blue ribbon – you’ll have to make one yourself though, you’ll not find them on sale anywhere! And when people ask what it’s for, tell them
• Grab the blue ribbon from this page and put it on your own website
• Join Radiating Body Bliss on facebook, and put the INDD blue ribbon as your facebook status for the day
• Notice the abundance of truly luscious, delicious fresh food that we around us, on demand, and take a few minutes to really appreciate it
• Look your body up and down and allow yourself to feel love for even one small part of it – and then let that feeling trickle over into the cells next to it, and then the ones next to those, and the ones next to those, until every cell in your body has your own love energy flowing through them….. you deserve a love bath every minute of every day, start with this one
• And yes, eat some chocolate if that’s what you want – make it lovely chocolate, stuff you really enjoy

THIS GOES AWAY TOMORROW: SAVE $10 on my ebook, Power Tap: Loving Your Body. – use the coupon code INDD when you check out and voila – $10 to invest in chocolate

Most of all, remember that you are unique and beautiful just the way you are, and just for today (and as long as you want), turn off the ‘not good enough’ buy-our-stuff messages from the diet and fashion industries.

I hope you have a loving-you day

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