From Restrictive Diet To Healthy Habits

Do you live in the continuous polarity of being on a diet or not? Do you feel like you’ve spent half your life like this and you can’t feel good? Do you start a restrictive diet and in a short time you perceive that negative feelings such as guilt or frustration flood you?

Here are some tools to help you understand what’s behind diet culture and how you can distinguish popular miracle diets from healthy lifestyle habits. Saying goodbye to restrictive diets and choosing to take care of yourself is the first step in breaking this endless cycle. 

What’s behind diet culture?

Etymologically, the meaning of the word ” diet “ comes from the Greek dayta and can be defined as ‘the set of foods that a person eats on a regular basis’.

Over the years, this word has gone much further: it has become a concept not only linked to our diet, but to a way of life that, at times, moves away from a healthy life and negatively impacts both in physical and mental health.

It is easy to see how the word “diet” directly influences our emotional state. On a cultural level, its meaning has been constructed in the form of polarity: ” if I’m on a diet I prohibit myself and if I’m not, as I please .”

This polarity, although it has been imposed by the media and diet culture, can have a negative impact on our emotions and quality of life, preventing us from being able to change and maintain good eating habits, as well as a healthy lifestyle. Now why?

Taking care of yourself is much more than choosing healthy foods

Taking care of yourself is not only choosing healthy foods, it also implies integrity, harmony and the impossibility of separating the physical and emotional aspects as independent elements both at a general level and when changing our eating habits.

For example, when a person is overweight and wants to lose weight, instinctively the first thing he will do is restrict food because he thinks that the less quantity, the faster he will achieve his goal. However, following a restrictive diet, in addition to being harmful to health, does not take into account important aspects of oneself such as emotions.

However, various current studies show that, in cases of weight loss, better results are obtained when psychological elements are integrated with a dietary pattern than when working solely and exclusively with a restrictive diet.

Thus, in the combined programs an improvement is observed not only in the level of self-esteem, but also in the perception of body image and self-efficacy (Villalba, 2016), also improving levels of motivation and adherence to the change process.

Characteristics of the diet mindset

To put an end to that mistaken belief that weight loss reduces to food restriction, the first thing we must know is how diet culture works, as well as the set of negative thoughts and emotions that it can cause, that is, what are the characteristics of the diet mindset. Here are the most general:

• It presents start and end dates.
• It involves restricting, eliminating or prohibiting the consumption of certain foods, which leads to generating states of anxiety and negative feelings such as guilt or frustration.

• Incompatibility with social events. The human being is a social being. Any eating plan that is not compatible with social life will act as a patch and cannot be sustained in the long term.
• It promotes rapid weight loss, not equivalent to body fat but to other aspects of the body such as muscle mass.
• It has short-term efficacy.
• On many occasions, the diet that is carried out has a rebound effect.
• Body weight is the only indicator of progress.
• It causes negative feelings and low self-efficacy by not being able to reach the imposed goal, generally a certain weight in a short time interval.

From restrictive diet to healthy habits

A long time ago, the concept of health ceased to be considered as the absence of disease and became a global state of well-being both physically and psychologically. Following this line, we can define a healthy habit as that pattern of behaviors that we assume as our own and that repeated over time produces a positive effect on our health.

Thus, the main characteristics that define healthy habits in the food sector are the following:

• They are guided by real objectives that help to assess the small achievements achieved.
• They involve gradual changes in diet and lifestyle.
• They involve a progressive weight loss, this being one more consequence and not the only objective.
• There are no restrictions or impositions of food, but it is through learning itself that, little by little, the criteria when choosing food increases.
• They allow you to achieve beneficial health goals that are maintained over time.
• The levels of physical and psychological well-being are increased.
• Feelings of guilt or frustration are not predominant.
• They are compatible with social life.

Once the main differences between the characteristics of the diet culture and the change in eating habits have been reviewed, it is common for doubts to arise about time and immediacy. It is important to bear in mind that changing habits takes time; Therefore, before the rush gains strength and any restrictive diet begins again, it is convenient that we reflect on how many years we have been investing in that cycle of starting, stopping or ending and starting again.

Is it possible to take care of ourselves by focusing only on what we see, punishing ourselves with prohibitions and infinite cycles of restrictive diets that cannot be maintained over time and that affect our self-esteem? The answer is clear: no, at least not in a healthy way. Now, how about we change the focus? What if we invest in something different like learning to take care of ourselves without dieting?