Besides New Year’s, there is no other time of the year that provokes dieting quite like April.
The multibillion dollar industry knows this. Warm weather, vacations, shorts. No more hiding behind bulky sweaters and leggings. Diet gurus want you to feel filled with anxiety and frantic for a solution.
I wish the diet industry would lose its luster. Diets do nothing but play on your fears of unworthiness, your shame that you can’t figure out how to lose weight, and perpetuate an unreasonable image of what a women should look like.
Here’s a truth bomb: if diets work, why are there still so many new diets being created? Whenever I think that there can’t possibly be another way to eat or another food group vilified, poof, it appears. Diets are exhaustive and soul killing and teach you to fear the very thing that we need to do every single day – eat food.
If you have been losing and gaining the same 20 pounds for half your life and diets have been right there with you, then it’s time to shift out of diet mindset and reset your thinking. Here are a couple of ways to get started so you can make peace with what you eat.
Quit Thinking in 30-Day Increments
“Lose 30 pounds in 30 days” screams the ad. Get those 30 pounds gone and then get back to business, your old way of eating. How’s that working for you? Drastic diets will allow you to lose a lot of weight at once. They will also allow you to gain every pound back, and then some. Once you start eating as you were before the diet, your wacked out metabolism will try to hold onto every calorie you consume. If you only ate in a way to feed your body so that it wasn’t thinking it was starving you could lose weight slowly, and steadily. No diet required.
Quit Punishing Yourself
Feel like you couldn’t possibly spur yourself into action unless you were reprimanding yourself? I know, I’ve been there. Diets know this too, and they play on your emotions so you feel like you have no choice but to follow yet another unreasonable way of eating. You can stop feeling like you need to earn your food or that you have to out exercise your food mistakes. The choices you make towards your health and weight should support you, mentally and physically.
Quit Thinking of Food as Good or Bad
I see women for 1-1 coaching, in cooking classes and on webinars and workshops. In almost every instance, the #1 questions I get are all about good/bad foods. Is fruit bad? What about grains? Should I eat even more protein? Is breakfast bad for me? I will never ever tell you that whole food groups or anything that is grown in the ground is bad for you. But diets will. Diets want you to believe that you can manipulate your brain and body into losing weight by eliminating certain foods. And, to note, when I say food, I am not talking about alcohol, soda and highly processed foods which I don’t consider foods at all. I am talking real food that you can recognize and has ingredients you can pronounce. There are no bad foods when it is real food.
Realize That Losing Weight Takes Consistency
Losing weight is a numbers game. Lower your calories, start losing weight. But wait, there’s more. Lower your calories too much and your brain thinks its starving. You might lose weight fast and then you will probably gain it all back. A slow, steady cut back on calories is the name of the game. And here’s a pro tip: while you are at, make those calories count. It is very possible to lose weight on a junk food diet, but that will only make you feel like the food you are putting into your body, junk. Real, healthy nourishing foods help your energy, your sleep, your moods and your hormones. Most, like those seemingly evil fruits and vegetables, are actually very low in calories, so you can eat more of them. Eat less calories, eat more real foods. Real food is good for you, body, mind and soul.
Focus on What You Can Achieve
If losing the diet mindset is new to you, it is to your benefit to take small steps towards getting healthy and losing weight. Diets use someone else’s rules, wishes and dreams and leave yours in the dust. When you begin to think about making changes to health and weight the motivation needs to come from you. When you learn the HOW behind doing this, you will realize that are things you need to do that diets just don’t care about. Meal planning, meal prep, and simply accepting and believing that you have it in YOU to make these changes are all keys to success.
Join Me!
If you have been bogged down with diets and are confused as to where to even start your own weight loss journey, I can help. This Spring I am starting another round of the The Healthy Midlife Reset. Let me be clear, this is not a diet. For two weeks you and I will gather with a likeminded great group of women and dive deep into what it means to eat without someone else’s rules. I give you structure through recipes, meal plans, prep guides and shopping lists to show you how to put healthy foods into action. We will have calls and even a private FB group to gather daily. I hope you can join us this spring. Click HERE for all the information and to sign up for the early bird price.
