You know how every culture has its own swear words? People think pretty negatively about them in formal settings and they are not considered “nice”. I think that the word “diet” has come close to being at the level of a swear word. When people talk about dieting they immediately think things like this:
I don’t want to give up my favorite foods.
Diets are terrible.
Diets are hard.
I hate dieting.
This diet is only temporary. Then I can go back to what I was doing.
I won’t fit in with my friends who are in good shape when I am on a diet.
This is sad. The dieting culture has shaped this perspective for you with really restrictive diets that are hard to follow and only deliver short term results because they don’t fit your typical food preferences and they have unrealistic guidelines for long term use. Diets are designed to be temporary. So, I don’t blame you for hating them. I hate them too. But what can we do differently?
If you have every considered going on a diet, then there is something about your life that has made you get out of shape and you want to change that. If you go on a diet, then you may get the results you want, but if you return to exactly what you were doing before the diet, then you will return to the same shape you were before the diet or worse. So, it would make sense to work on long term habits and nutritional disciplines rather than extreme diets with heavy restrictions right? Exactly.
This is why habit-based approaches to nutrition work so amazingly well. I love coaching people in this way because it develops people holistically and give them the power to choose whatever food they want as long as they try to get better every day at choosing better foods at the right portions. I try to avoid the use of the word diet, so that negative thoughts never trigger in your mind. Let’s throw the word out entirely and adopt a lifestyle of health and nutrition!