Letting go of diets and plans is such a beautiful first step in reclaiming balance with the way you nourish yourself, creating a positive food experience, and caring for your wellbeing.
But in order to find and maintain a more balanced approach to your eating habits, you not only have to stop dieting, but you also have to reframe your thoughts about food.
These key shifts with how you think about nutrition will help prevent you from feeling pulled back to diets and allow you to replace those old habits with new supportive and sustainable habits.
1. Focus on Long-term Change Instead of Short-term Results
The very first shift that needs to happen is focusing on short-term results and focusing on long-term change.
When you go on a diet, in most cases it’s because you’re seeking to achieve a specific goal in a specific period of time.
However, when you’re ready to stop dieting, you have to be willing to let go of thinking about achieving a specific result in a specific amount of days. Instead, your goal needs to be forming eating habits that are supportive and sustainable for you on a daily basis and can last for the long-term.
When you’re able to look at nutrition information and advice through this lens and ask yourself — will this support my body, my lifestyle, and the vision I have for myself in the long-term — you’ll be able to go down a much more intentional, healthy, and long-lasting path where you feel empowered and confident in your inner “knowing” that you’re taking the right actions for you!
This aligns so well with the second shift that needs to happen and that is shifting from striving to be perfect with your eating habits, to allowing for flexibility and focusing on practicing the habit.
2. Allow for Flexibility Rather Than Trying to Eat “Perfectly”
When you’re on a diet, it provides you with all of these rules you have to follow and say that you have to follow them perfectly in order to see the results you’re looking for.
But this mindset around eating perfectly actually makes it more difficult for you to simply eat well because it often puts you in the all-or-nothing mindset, where you’re either all-in and focused on eating really well, or you’re all-out where you believe if you’re not being perfect, there’s no point and you’ll have to restart another day.
This all-or-nothing mentality can be incredibly draining on your physical and mental wellbeing.
It can seem counterintuitive, but the best way to create more consistency with the way you nourish yourself is to have more flexibility to enjoy all the foods you like in a mindful way, rather than being more restrictive.
When you have this flexibility, food that once made you feel out of control no longer holds any power over you.
It’s flexibility, not control or rigidness, that invites in so much more ease around your food choices.
3. Tune Into Your Own Body Rather Than Following Food Rules
The third big shift that needs to happen is releasing the food rules you may be holding onto from diets — like you can’t eat sugar or carbs, you can only eat a certain amount or at a certain time, you need to count your calories, or anything along those lines — and instead learn how to listen to your own body to guide you.
All of the food rules you were following, the labels of “good” foods and “bad” foods, and the focus on short-term results versus long-term wellbeing all influence your mindset around food and your eating behaviors.
Even when you’ve decided to stop dieting, these old beliefs and habits are more often than not still lingering in the back of your mind and can pull you towards that all-in or all-out mentality and old habits, rather than that middle, balanced space.
You’ll likely notice that you have these old habits that are guiding your eating behaviors and preventing you from having the trust and confidence in your own body to guide what’s best for you.
It becomes so much easier for you to make food choices that support you because you’re confident in why something does or does not work for you, rather than feeling like you need to follow specific food rules because a diet, plan, or influencer told you to.
This is where you experience such a deep sense of peace around food. You’re no longer hopping from diet to diet or trend to trend trying to find something that you can stick to or that’s some ideal version of health.
Instead, you have this inner knowing of what you need to do for yourself and you don’t get distracted by short-term fixes or overwhelmed by keeping up with the latest trends.
This deep understanding of what works for you keeps you focused on the long-term and on making changes that are truly going to support you for life.
Discover the Practices That Will Support You to Stop Dieting and Find Balance
These three reframes around how you think about food and the role of nutrition in your life are key to creating a long-lasting, supportive, and balanced way of nourishing yourself.
If you’re ready to let go of diets, you also have to focus on integrating new practices into your life that support you with nourishing yourself and finding the right balance.
And that’s exactly what I cover during my free workshop, so sign up if you’re ready to explore what that looks like.
In the workshop, I share the three important pillars to focus on in order to reclaim balance with the way you nourish yourself. You’ll walk away knowing what those pillars are and why they’re so important if you want to have this balance with your eating habits that gives you the flexibility you need to feel at peace and ease with food for life.