KAWARTHA LAKES-Diet culture is pervasive, it sets unrealistic expectations, and it sells a dream that to achieve the “perfect body” one must restrict, count calories, and diligently abstain from all things tasty.
In North America today, there are a lot of people carrying around excess weight and the diets they turn to only leave them more hungry and out of touch with their bodies.While I know we have a legitimate obesity epidemic happening around us, I don’t believe that anyone needs to be on a certain diet to achieve long lasting weight management and happiness.
Here’s what dieting does to you: it causes you to think in a restrictive mindset or a sense of scarcity, it encourages you to leave out certain food groups or macro nutrients, and it forces you to count everything. If you’ve tried a diet, you know that you put all your efforts into “sticking with it”, only to get a sense of failure when you “fall off the wagon”. Diets are extremely difficult to maintain in the long term.
Of course, there must be a solution to our Western weight issues and below I am sharing with you what to do instead of trying to control every morsel you put on your plate.
- Consider Your Relationship With Food:
We all know that eating makes us feel good, it’s comforting, and it can even hijack your brain to give you a dose of happy hormones. It is an overused anti-depressant.
How good is your relationship with food and your body?
When you eat, are you in a rush? Do you sit down and enjoy? Is everything take-out or do you spend the time preparing and cooking meals? Do you enjoy what you are eating or do you just eat mindlessly?
Get to the root of your habits, and you’ll soon see where you can create more mindful ones.
2.) Don’t Take Away, Crowd Out Instead:
Take a look down at your plate. It is all one bland brown colour? Or is it a variety of colours? If your plate is not colourful, let’s work on adding some colour into your lifestyle.
Rather than thinking from a restrictive place, like “I can only eat ‘xx’ calories”, think about “crowding out” the poorer food choices with better ones. Pack lots of fruit in your lunch (more than you can eat is what I recommend!), have a big salad before your main course (you’ll eat 50% less), and fill yourself up with water before any other drink.
Consider adding more healthy options in, and you’ll be so full of good stuff, you won’t be reaching for anything else.
3.) Practice Self Care
We all lead busy lives. Make yourself a priority and spend some time each day on self-care. This could mean a 10 minute meditation, a bath, setting the dinner table with cloth napkins and candles, or curling up with a good book. If you de-code your food choices and look to the root of them, you may find you are just looking for self-care through food. Maybe you’ve had an insane day and want to veg out on the couch and by eating something that makes you feel heavy, you allow yourself rest. We all crave nourishment, so set aside time for self-care each day and you might find other cravings going away.
In today’s world, there are so many diet messages coming at us constantly, it’s hard to navigate a path that leaves us fulfilled, and food choices have really never been more complicated.
I really think it’s important to address how and why we eat rather than getting super picky over what we eat. While your food choices are important, diets are only looking at it from one side of the coin. They teach us to calculate every morsel, but they don’t teach us to really feel it out. They force you to have an allowance and work on calorically budgeting, but they take away trust.
Ditch the diet and just listen to your body. Your body will always let you know if you are hungry or full, it wants to be healthy, and it wants to consume nutrient dense, whole foods rather than sugar all day.
Look into all the other ways you can fill yourself up outside of food, and I promise you will never have to diet again.
For more great information, or to see if one of my coaching programs is right for you, please visit, www.sweathappywellness.com
