Learning to live aligned with my values

When I first learned about intuitive eating and the non-diet approach, I had a lot of questions. After reading and listening more and more, I began to hear a lot of therapists and dietitians talk about “living out your values” when they mentioned implementing behaviors from these approaches. That made me curious — because I do want to live out my values, not just talk about them.

I quickly realized I had to define my values if I was going to live them out. While that may seem super self-explanatory to some people, I realized I hadn’t really sat down to think and write out what I believed in. After some thought, this what I came up with:

• Love
• Joy
• Faith
• Growth
• Authenticity

Once I was clear on those, it became a little more obvious whether or not a particular behavior in a particular situation was going to allow me to live out my values. If one of my values is to be grateful for my body and food, it felt disingenuous to constantly want to change my body. If one of my values is joy or authenticity, it felt incongruous to allow cyclical thoughts about my food choices take away from the present moment/time with family and friends. Similarly, it felt dishonest to try to help other people establish a healthy relationship with food while being preoccupied with how many steps I was walking each day.

As I began this process, this constant discord between thoughts brought me back to a term I had learned in a psychology class. The term is Cognitive Dissonance, which is the fancy way of explaining the discomfort experienced when we have two or more conflicting cognitions (or beliefs, attitudes, values, emotional reactions). This feeling of discomfort often leads to changes or alterations in one of our attitudes or beliefs (and often one of our behaviors because attitudes lead to behaviors) because we want to protect ourselves/feel harmony/reduce the discomfort we feel between the inconsistencies. An example of this in disordered eating recovery could be:

Two cognitions/values/etc:

1. I want to experience food freedom and recover from disordered eating
2. I have an ideal body size that I’m striving for

Here we have two cognitions that are in conflict with each other (because true food freedom involves letting go of preconceived ideas of our ideal body size) which causes discomfort. As humans, we strive for harmony and want to remove the discomfort as quickly as we can. According to this theory, there are four main ways we may try to alter one or more of them to reduce that discomfort:

• Alter the cognition or attitude (Ex: I can probably just follow the advice of my RD sometimes and I’ll still recover enough OR I think striving for an ideal body size is actually causing me more stress)
• Trivialize – make one or more cognition less important (I’m not actually suffering that much so it’s not that important for me to recover OR My body size actually is the least important thing about me so I should learn to give that up if I want to experience freedom)
• Add more cognitions
• Deny cognitions all together

All this to say that when I experience two conflicting thoughts (aka cognitive dissonance) like these, the first thing I try to do before altering/trivializing/etc one of the thoughts is figure out which of them is in line with my values.

Once I know which one is in line with the value I want to embody, I can work toward reframing/altering the one that is incongruent. It’s important to note that if you aren’t clear on your values the same can happen in reverse — in the past, if I had two incongruent cognitions (one that acknowledged the obsession with food/my body was unhealthy and one that perpetuated my obsession with my size), I would often alter the healthy one to conform to my disordered thoughts (and thus made it unhealthy).

The big takeaway here is that if you aren’t clear on your values, you can’t live them out. And even if you are clear on them, I’ve found that we experience discomfort if we have one or more cognitions that are in conflict with each other.

Note: I am a dietitian, not a therapist and, if applicable, you should follow the advice of your individual therapist/RD. This blog is not meant to substitute 1:1 care with your HCP.