You start a diet. You restrict your food intake. You lose weight. After a short time, you get over the diet. Your body rebels. You overeat or binge. Your body protects you from going back into starvation mode by holding onto fat. You gain the weight back, and more. You decide to go on a diet again – usually on a Monday! And the vicious cycle begins again.
If there were a diet that worked perfectly, we would all be on it, right? And weight wouldn’t be such a huge issue like it is for so many of us. But there isn’t.
The diet mentality needs to stop. The constant restriction and deprivation of dieting causes your body to go into a stress response. It may cause short-term weight loss but most of the time, your body backfires. Being on a diet requires a huge amount of dedication, focus, energy, stress and control. It is quite a gruelling situation. It isn’t the way our bodies were designed to function.
There comes a time when your body just can’t take it anymore. You start to think about how much better or easier life would be with all those delicious things you have deprived yourself of for so long: wine and cheese, ice-cream, chocolate, a piece of cake with your tea… And then what happens? Most people succumb – they eat as much as you can of all those foods they’ve been missing. They can’t help themselves. This is bingeing, and disordering eating to a degree. (My emotional eating guide can help you with this too).
The best diet for your weight is a balanced, wholefood diet eaten with mindfulness and moderation.
Don’t put so much pressure on yourself to be on the perfect diet – just make a decision to eat a wholefood diet for life. It will pay off massively. Every time you eat, think balance and moderation. Your weight should balance out over time.
Plus, yoyoing weight is not a sign of good health.
I am yet to meet anyone who has actually stuck to a diet for life. They don’t last. The benefits don’t last, either.
You can find out more in my second book and learn to heal your relationship with food in my online program – your 8 week plan to give up diets forever and live the healthy life.
