It’s exhausting to be a chronic dieter. It leads to always thinking about food and planning your next meal to align with your meal plan. And the worst part, it usually won’t even create the results you want.
You’re going to eat for the rest of your life, so you might as well learn to stop dieting and create food freedom.
Why yo-yo dieting needs to stop
You deserve better than chronically dieting for the rest of your life. It’s rare that dieting produces the long term results you’re hoping for. Most people simply fall into Yo-Yo dieting where they do good for a while, maybe lose some weight and then gain it all back (and some extra).
Dieting isn’t adding value to your life. It just stresses you out without the long term benefits it claims. And it’s really not necessary.
You can have better health plus a positive relationship with your body and food once you stop dieting.
I know you might be thinking that you just need to find the right plan and really commit then it will work. I used to think that too.
It’s why I became a registered dietitian. I wanted to figure this eating thing out and then help other people manage their weight. I thought I was just missing some secret and once I learned it everything would fall into place.
But here’s what really happened. With every diet, my relationship with food got worse. I kept trying to control myself more and more around food. And with every attempt, I got worse at following the rules and would constantly rebel against my diet. Then I’d make a promise to start again tomorrow.
I thought with the right plan I’d be able to form the habit and essentially become robotic about my eating habits. But we aren’t robots and our bodies need a wide range of nutrients. We don’t need the same amount of nutrients everyday. Some days we may need more or less based on our activity, hormones, weather, and everything we’ve been doing leading up to that day. It’s why some days you may not feel very hungry and other days feel like a bottomless pit.
Dieting can’t predict what our bodies need that day, but your body will tell you. It will give you hunger and fullness cues. It will give you cravings for the foods you need, like getting a craving for red meat when your iron is low.
You don’t need self control. What you need is to learn to interpret your hunger cues and types of hunger while rebuilding self-trust.
How to stop dieting
Here are some steps and tips to stop dieting:
Align with your priorities
If you want to stop dieting, you need to embrace the reason why you want to stop. We live in a culture where dieting and making healthy lifestyle changes are the norm. So if you’re not clear on why you want to stop dieting, the temptation to go back to dieting will probably pull you back in.
I mean the marketing is great for dieting. I thought if I dieted correctly I’d love my body all the time and feel amazing. But I never experienced that even when I was successfully dieting.
How we feel will always ebb and flow with good and bad days. When healing my relationship with food, I decided my priority was building a consistently kind relationship with my body and food. That drives me to give my body whatever it needs that day, which could be rest, movement, extra self-care, or any number of things.
When dieting my priority was following the rules, which didn’t allow space for what I actually needed that day. So to stop dieting, start playing around with different priorities that matter to you and begin aligning yourself with them.
Start healing your relationship with food
Instead of trying to use self-control to follow dieting rules, start learning to trust yourself around food again with intuitive eating. You can have freedom around food where you don’t need rules while honoring your hunger, fullness, and satisfaction cues.
A useful place to start healing your relationship with food is to really deeply understand the nuances of your hunger and fullness cues. A helpful starting place is giving yourself permission to eat anything, whenever while paying attention to how different foods and amounts of food impact your body.
That approach will get you in touch with your hunger cues while starting to create food freedom.
Embrace joyful movement
Dieting can create a terrible relationship with exercise and movement. I remember at the end of my dieting journey I viewed exercise solely as the impact it would have on my daily count and total calories burned.
I lost all of the fun I used to have with moving my body. It became a chore that I hated doing and I never felt like I was doing enough.
I’ve had the conversation over and over again with clients about how they may even like exercising, but can’t get themselves to do it consistently. And they simply dread doing it.
It’s so easy to lose how good movement makes our body feel when we’re just focused on how it’s going to impact a weight loss journey. Movement feels amazing for our bodies and we need it to feel our best to whatever level our ability allows.
Focus on movements you enjoy and the impact it has on your body feeling good to bring more joy back into your everyday movement. And just a note, no amount of exercise is too little. It all counts. Cleaning your house, gardening, walking, dancing, and anything that gets you moving is exercise.
Appreciate it all to bring more joy to your day and create a better relationship with food, your body, and exercise.