Food is one of my favorite things in life. I like talking about it, eating it, creating delicious meals with it, and buying it. I’ve always had a healthy appetite, even as a kid, meaning that I never starved myself. What I didn’t always have was a healthy relationship with food.
What I’ve learned over the past decade is that if you don’t have a healthy relationship with food, you’ll never lose weight or be able to maintain a healthy weight for your body type.
Let’s do a deeper dive into diet versus lifestyle eating.
We all need food to survive, right? Your body uses the calories from the food you eat as energy to fuel the systems it has in place to keep you alive and surviving. Without food your body will simply stop working. It sounds pretty simple, right? Eat food (any food) and you’ll stay alive.
However, eating can be a bit of an emotional process for many people, especially women. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you’re eating whole, nutrient-dense foods that help you thrive and not just survive. The challenge comes in being surrounded by junk food that does more harm than good.
To paint you a picture, I’ll share a quick story about my emotional eating journey over the past few decades.
When I was in high school, I ate fast food almost every day for lunch. My girlfriends and I would hop in one of their cars and head down the street to the cluster of fast food joints. Cheap tacos and hanging out with my girlfriends are some of my favorite memories from my high school days.
I ran track and lifted weights in high school so I didn’t gain any weight from the tacos I was stuffing my face with on school days. Heading into my college years and later on in my 20’s was when I would start to see a difference. When I was in my mid-twenties I noticed my clothes were a little snug. I thought I just needed to workout harder and I’d be able to exercise my way out my bad diet. Or I’ll just go on a “diet” and lose the weight. Super easy, right?
I was totally wrong about this.
I hear women say all the time “When I turned 30 the weight just started piling on.” The reality is it wasn’t because of turning 30, it was because your body was very slowly storing extra calories that it wasn’t able to burn immediately as fat. It doesn’t happen overnight regardless of how it might feel.
The same is true about weight loss. Your body knows exactly how to burn any excess weight it doesn’t need over an extended period of time when you give it the tools it needs to make this happen (proper nutrition, sleep, and movement). It’s a slow and efficient process. Trust your body. It knows what it’s doing.
I have tried just about everything to lose weight: counting calories, low fat, no fat, intermittent fasting, keto, etc. While some of these methods do actually help you lose weight (keto is great for menopausal and post menopausal women due to the lack of estrogen), it’s all about how you think about it.
If you tell yourself “I’m on a diet” this could cause your emotions to go all over the place. The thing about “being on a diet” is it comes across as being restrictive and depriving yourself of foods you enjoy eating. This could make you miserable and unhappy which is the exact opposite of how you want to feel when you’re on a weight loss journey.
You deserve to feel excited, energetic, and happy when you’re doing what you need to do to lose weight and maintain it. To be perfectly clear, I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, especially at first. There will be challenges that may take some critical thinking to overcome. This is to be expected.
When you feel happy and energized, you’re keeping your stress at a healthy level that will actually support your weight loss efforts rather than inhibit them.
One thing I tell all my clients is that you should enjoy the food you eat on a daily basis. You shouldn’t force yourself to eat food that you really don’t like the taste of just because it’s nutritious. This does not sound fun to me and I’m sure it doesn’t sound fun to you.
When I learned how to create an eating style for myself that was made up of whole, nutrient-dense foods that I actually enjoyed eating, the weight started to fall off on it’s own. Now it’s easy for me to make food choices that help me not just survive but also thrive. It’s lifestyle eating that’s helped me to maintain a healthy weight and give me the freedom to live a life I love and deserve.
You have the power to create an eating style that you enjoy, gives you energy, and helps you be the healthiest version of yourself.