WHY A DIET MINDSET NEEDS A MAKEOVER

 WHY A DIET MINDSET NEEDS A MAKEOVER 

I am so thrilled you've taken such a pivotal step toward rchairing your relationship with food . If you're reading this, you most likely have been 'around the diet block' a few times. Whether you dieted to lose weight, to prevent gaining weight, to improve your general health, or to improve your athletic performance, somewhere along the way you started to pay attention to what you were eating. That is a wonderful thing! Valuing your health and taking steps to take care of your body by feeding it well is something to be deeply proud of. Bringing a level of awareness and mindfulness to our eating is a powerful way to promote health. I just want to be sure that a critical point is brought front and center from the beginning: There is a difference between healthy eating and dieting us.

Dieting Versus Healthy Eating

 Dieting us is typically done to lose weight. Of course, you can follow a specific diet for other reasons, like a medically restricted diet, or one which excludes allergens that could kill you. But by and large, most people start diets to lose weight or prevent gaining it. Dieting is a method to manipulate and control weight, regardless ofyour actual beaah. Healthy eating, on the other hand, is something completely separate from the scale. It's a broader, more all-encompassing goal of wellness. It's about nourishing your body and caring for yourself, no matter what you weigh or how your food affects your weight. There are many benefits to improving your way of eating, besides the potential to lose excess weight. Focusing on healthy eating means we focus on all those health benefits, rather than on a scale number. For most of us, diets were our introduction to changing our eating patterns. But most diets have some negative side effects: 

• They reduce eating down into calories, macros (percentages of protein, carbohydrate, and fat), and points, essentially turning it into a math equation.

 • They give you rules to follow, foods that are good or bad, allowed or forbidden.

 • They cause you to worry about all the things that are bad for you and how everything you've done before has been 'wrong.'

 • They make your weight the sole determination of progress. 

• They call anything you do outside of the diet a 'cheat' or a 

failure. 

There is so much mental anguish that comes along for the ride when we diet, and it ends up ruining our relationship with food. 

Constantly dieting us also keeps you in a perpetual state of working on your weight, rather than actually living life. It becomes all-consuming. Every food choice we make gets overanalyzed in terms of how it impacts your body or your compliance with the diet. There is no wiggle room, no flexibility for the fluidity that is real life. There is just rigidity. And rules. And fear-mongering. And guilt. And constantly starting over again and again. It's a vicious cycle. The people selling us diets don't have our best interests (like our health) in mind. They just want to sell more diet shakes, protein bars, and restrictive meal plans. It's an entire industry built around making us feel bad about ourselves and our health so they can keep raking in billions of dollars in our perpetual pursuit of thinness. They know that most diets fail and that theirs eventually will too. But they keep pushing it, because they know well continue getting frustrated and keep coming back to try again and again. They know that once we start dieting us, we'll end up stuck in a diet cycle of being constantly on-again and off-again with diets. 

The Diet Cycle Affects Us and Our Kids When we have kids, the mental anguish and damaged food relationship we've built up over the years manifests into how we feed them. As parents, we want the best for our kids in pretty much every way. That, of course, includes doing our best to feed them well. We try to do so in a way that nourishes them, helps them to grow up healthy and strong, and fuels their nonstop activity level, all while making sure that we do what we can to prevent them from becoming overweight 

We are truly afraid of raising an overweight child. And that makes sense. Childhood obesity rates have skyrocketed. Health issues that were once considered adult-only problems such as high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol, and type 2 diabetes are now presenting in younger and younger children. We want to spare our kids these health problems. But it's not just that. If we have ever been overweight ourselves, we know first-hand how cruel other people can be about weight. We know the comments and judgments that are given freely by others. We know how hard being large in a society that values thinness can be. For many of us, it's why we went on our own first diet in the first place! 

Having gone through the diet cycle ourselves, we want to do everything in our power to prevent our kids from ever having (or wanting) to diet We want to help them grow up with healthy habits and already having a healthy and happy relationship with food. We want them to enjoy eating like we used to, and not have to worry about their size or shape. 

The Goal of This Makeover

 In essence, we want for our kids what we didn't have. Somewhere along the way, we started to dislike our bodies and feel some level of shame for our size or shape. We decided we wanted to change ourselves, and that we were okay putting ourselves through miserable rules in the name of eating better. We figured it made sense to micro-manage our food and take the joy out of eating.