Do you live in the continuous polarity of whether you’re on a diet or not?Do you feel like you’re living a half-life and you’re not feeling well?Do you start a restrictive diet and quickly realize that negative feelings like guilt and frustration?are they flooding you?
Here are some tools to understand what lies behind diet culture and how to distinguish popular miracle diets from healthy lifestyles. Saying goodbye to restrictive diets and choosing to take care of yourself is the first step in breaking this endless cycle.
- Etymologically.
- The meaning of the word?Diet? It comes from the Greek dayta and can be defined as “the set of foods that a person eats regularly”.
Over the years, this word has gone much further: it has become a concept not only related to our diet, but to a lifestyle that sometimes takes us away from a healthy life and has a negative impact on the physical and mental health.
Is it easy to see how the word works?directly influences our emotional state. Culturally, its meaning was built in the form of polarity: “If I am on a diet, I control, otherwise, how I feel. “
This polarity, although imposed by the media and food culture, can have a negative impact on our emotions and quality of life, preventing us from changing and maintaining good eating habits as well as a healthy lifestyle, but why?
Taking care of yourself is not only choosing healthy foods, but also involves integrity, harmony and the inability to separate physical and emotional aspects as independent elements, both in general and in changing eating habits.
For example, when a person is overweight and wants to lose weight, instinctively, the first thing they do is restrict their diet, because they think the smaller the amount, the faster they reach their 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.
Several current studies show that, in the case of weight loss, better results are achieved when psychological elements are incorporated into a diet than when working exclusively and exclusively on a restrictive diet.
Thus, the combined programs show an improvement not only in self-esteem, but also in the perception of body image and self-efficacy (Villalba, 2016), also improving the levels of motivation and adherence to the process of change.
To end this misconception that reduces weight loss to dietary restriction, the first thing we need to know is how diet culture works, as well as all the negative thoughts and emotions it can provoke, that is, what the characteristics of the diet are. mentality Here are the most general:
The concept of health is no longer considered an absence of disease and has become a global state of well-being, both physical and psychological, following this line we can define a healthy habit as a pattern of behavior that we assume as ours. Own.
In addition, if repeated over time, it has a positive effect on our health, so the main characteristics that define healthy eating habits are:
After reviewing the main differences between the characteristics of diet culture and changes in eating habits, it is common for doubts to arise about timing and immediacy, it is important to note that changing habits take time.
For this reason, before the rush gets worse and the person starts over with any restrictive diet, it is helpful to think about how many years we have invested in this cycle to start, stop and stop. Restart.
Is it possible to take care of yourself, focusing only on what we see, punishing us with prohibitions and endless cycles of restrictive regimes that cannot be maintained over time and affect our self-esteem?The answer is clear: no, at least not in a healthy way.
Now, how about changing direction? And if we invest in something different, how can we learn to take care of ourselves without a diet?