This One Phrase Is Ruining Your Diet
There’s a lot of negative self-talk out there - especially when it comes to weight loss and dieting. And although words can’t physically help or hurt your diet, they can definitely shift your mindset. And that mindset shift is a huge contributing factor as to whether you accomplish your health and wellness goals or whether they become yet another unconquered New Year’s Resolution. This is not me telling you that you need to be super positive and confident in order to achieve your goals. It’s me telling you that some really negative, unhelpful phrases and thoughts are creating a huge roadblock on your path to success.
And there’s many phrases I could write about but for me, this one really takes the cake. It’s using some version of the phrase “I ate so bad.” Besides pointing out that food technically has no morality (it can be neither good nor bad), it really doesn’t do much other than to acknowledge some level of guilt you feel for enjoying what you proclaim to be bad, unhealthy foods. And even if you did eat the most sugary, pre-packaged, artificial food substance on the planet, it doesn’t mean you did something wrong. In fact, it doesn’t even mean you ruined your diet. What it means is that you probably didn’t pick the most nourishing food item to eat…so what? Did this one isolated incident impact your health in any significant way?
You may be thinking but what if this isn’t an isolated incident? What if I engage in unhealthy eating all the time? Shouldn’t I feel bad about the choices I’m making? In my opinion, no, not really. Feeling bad about food choice is a waste of time. After all, it is, your choice. And my problem with using guilt or shame to alter these choices is that it leads to a mindset of restriction rather than allowance. Additionally, feeling remorseful for overeating or eating “badly” doesn’t go into the reasons why this happens (e.g., stress, sadness, lack of available healthy food options) and how to solve it – which could be a whole other article.
The truth is you could probably fit in a bunch of foods you previously deemed as “bad” in your diet more frequently if you started to look at your meal choices not as a form of punishment but rather as a form of fuel. And when I say fuel, I’m not even talking about energy, even though food provides us with that. What I’m talking about is fuel to conquer your health and wellness goals. And although this may sound like fluff, it totally changed my relationship with food. Once I started looking at my diet like a puzzle where I got to construct the ending picture, I started realizing that no one food was truly “bad” or off limits. For my ending puzzle picture to look and feel good, did I need to pick more nutrient dense, vitamin-rich options? Of course. But could my puzzle fit some of my favorite, unhealthy foods? Absolutely.
So let’s go through an example together of how this works:
1. Choose a realistic end goal with a realistic timeline. I’m going to use weight loss as an example because it’s the easiest to explain. If you decide your weight loss goal is 20 pounds, I’d challenge you to ask yourself: does that make sense for me and why did I choose it? This means doing some research on if your goal is feasible for your age, sex, weight, and height and some critical thinking on why this goal is important or necessary to achieve (even if it’s just from an appearance perspective). From there, choose when you want to accomplish this goal by. Many people think that it’s feasible to continuously lose 1-2 pounds each week and many people become discouraged when they realize this usually isn’t the case. The truth is, weight loss progress, like all progress, will be series of small wins and small bumps in the road, if done correctly and sustainably. If 20 pounds is your goal, I wouldn’t try to limit yourself to a 10-20 week timeline. Give yourself some wiggle room. My advice would be to tack on at least an additional 5-6 weeks to account for vacations, special events, and menstrual cycle.
2. Find a sustainable diet that you could 1) adhere to for a long period of time 2) allows you to eat your favorite foods 3) provides you with enough sustenance throughout the day. Meaning, if you love pasta and pizza, I wouldn’t try implement a ketogenic diet that restricts carbs to around less than 50 grams a day. If you don’t keep sustainability as a critical factor and just focus on results, you’ll soon end up right back where you started.
