I’m observing calories, not counting them. After losing over 20 pounds three times and gaining them back a few years later, I realized I needed a new plan for maintaining my weight. I don’t want to weigh, measure, and track what I eat for the rest of my life. I’m sick of “moralizing” my food and would rather eat whatever I want in modest quantities.

I’m not orthorexic as Robert Golding describes in Orthorexia: obsession with healthy foods. I only want to eat mostly nutritious foods in the quantities I desire and sweet treats in much smaller portions than I’m accustomed to.

I learned that there are “diets” that claim not to be diets when I started looking for a non-diet lifestyle where I could maintain my weight loss permanently. Gillian Hood’s article Diets in Disguise: Beware of Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing lists the characteristics of the dieting life. In “My Very Last Diet”, she tells us:

Diet culture has convinced us that we can control our weight or size. Victims of diet culture are beginning to realize this isn’t the case. Not to mention the research over the last couple of decades backing up the idea that we don’t get to pick the size jeans we wear or our number on the scale.

Stephanie Dodier busts the myths surrounding intuitive eating in 13 Intuitive Eating Myths You Shouldn’t Believe where she explains the difference between intuitive eating and diets.

Note that this is an eating framework, not a diet program. Unlike diets that dull your sensitivity to your body’s eating cues, intuitive eating encourages you to listen to…