Letting go of diets plans is such a beautiful first part of reclaiming balance with the way a person should nourish themself, creating a positive food experience, and caring for your wellbeing.
But in order to find and keep a more balanced approach to your eating routine, you not only have to stop dieting, however, you also have to reframe your thoughts about meals.
These key changes to how you think about nutrition can help prevent you from feeling pulled back to diet plans and allow you to replace those previous habits with new supportive plus sustainable habits.
The Shifts to Make When You’ re Ready to Stop Dieting Permanently
To create uniformity with your eating habits, you not only have to cease dieting and following restrictive foods rules, but you also have to shift how you build your eating habits so they best give you support for the long-term.
1. Focus on Long-term Change Instead of Immediate Results
The very first change that needs to happen is NOT focusing on immediate results and focusing on long-term.
When you go on a diet plan, in most cases it’s because you’re wanting to achieve a specific goal in a particular period of time.
However , whenever you’re ready to stop dieting, you need to be willing to let go of thinking about achieving a particular result in a specific amount of days. Rather, your goal needs to be forming ways of eating that are supportive and sustainable to suit your needs on a daily basis and can last for the long lasting.
When you are able to look at nutrition information plus EDUCATE yourself — with attention to your body, lifestyle, — you’ll be able to go down an infinitely more intentional, healthy, and long-lasting route where you feel empowered and self-confident in your inner “knowing” that you are taking the right actions for you!
This aligns well with the second shift that must happen and that is shifting from trying to be perfect with your eating habits, in order to allowing for flexibility and focusing on exercising the habit.
2 . Permit Flexibility Rather Than Trying to Eat “ Perfectly”
When you are on a diet, use these rules and follow them properly in order to see the results you’re searching for.
But this attitude around eating perfectly actually can make it more difficult for you to simply eat nicely because it often puts you within the all-or-nothing mindset, where you’re possibly all-in and focused on eating very well, or you’re all-out where you think if you’re not being perfect, there is no point and you’ll have to restart another day.
This particular all-or-nothing mentality can be incredibly depleting on your physical and mental wellness.
It can appear counterintuitive, but the best way to create a lot more consistency with the way you nurture yourself is to have more flexibility to relish all the foods you like in a conscious way, rather than being more limited.
When you have this particular flexibility, food that once made you feel out of control no longer holds any kind of power over you.
It’s flexibility, not control or even rigidness, that invites in a lot more ease around your food choices.
3. Tune Into Your Personal Body Rather Than Following Food Guidelines
The third big change that needs to happen is releasing the meals rules you may be holding onto from diet plans — like you can’t eat sugar or carbohydrates , you can only eat a specific amount or at a certain time, you have to count your own calories , or anything similar to that — and instead learn how to pay attention to your own body to guide you.
All the food rules you were following, labels of “good” foods and “bad” foods, and the focus on short-term outcomes versus long-term wellbeing all impact your mindset around food and your own eating behaviors.
Even if you’ve decided to stop dieting, these types of old beliefs and habits tend to be more often than not still lurking in the back of your mind and can pull a person towards that all-in or all out mentality and old habits, instead of that middle, balanced space.
You’ll likely notice that you might have these old habits that are leading your eating behaviors and stopping you from having the trust plus confidence in your own body to guide what is best for you.
It is so much easier for you to make food choices that support you because you are confident in why something really does or does not work for you, rather than sensation like you need to follow specific meals rules because a diet, plan, or even influencer told you to.
This is where you experience such a strong sense of peace around meals. You’re no longer hopping from diet plan to diet or trend to trend trying to find something that you can stay with or that’s some ideal edition of health.
Rather, you have this inner knowing associated with what you need to do for yourself and you do not get distracted by short-term repairs or being overwhelmed by keeping up with the most recent trends.
This heavy understanding of what works for you keeps a person focused on the long-term and on producing changes that are truly going to give you support for life.
Find out the Practices That Will Support You to Stop Going on a diet and Find Balance
These three reframes around the way you think about food and the role associated with nutrition in your life are key to a long-lasting, supportive, and well balanced way of nourishing yourself.
If you’re ready to let go of diets, you might also need to focus on integrating new practices into your life that support you with adding nourishment to yourself and finding the right balance.