7 Reasons to Stop Dieting
When you want to lose weight usually your first thought is to turn to dieting and really, why not, right? This is what pretty much everyone does so most don’t think there’s any other way to lose weight. But the problem is, what ends up happening in the end? Have you been able to keep the weight off after you lose it?
If you’re struggling with emotional eating has dieting ever helped to stop your emotional eating?
What about binge eating? If you’re battling the binge have you noticed that dieting hasn’t healed your binge eating, and might have even made it worse?
Mindset Is More Important than Dieting
Here’s a secret that hardly anyone else knows: your mindset is more important than dieting.
Yes! This is true. In fact, your mindset is 92.8% of what will determine how successful (or unsuccessful) you will ultimately be with your weight loss efforts.
I’m not saying that you can lose weight without changing your eating habits. What I’m saying is that you must change your mind to change your body if you want to successfully lose weight and keep it off.
You must shift your mindset about food, about your body, about yourself, about your weight loss journey, and about the overall topic of change, so that you can lose that weight and fit into your favorite pair of jeans and look your best.
Make It a Weight Loss Mindset
If you don’t change your mindset and get a weight loss mindset then you can end up feeling restricted, resentful, and restless with constant thoughts of making a run for the nearest grocery store to get all of your comfort foods and sugar binge besties you miss while dieting.
If you change your mindset, heal your relationship with food, and especially address your emotional connections with food and yourself, then you can sail through the healthy lifestyle changes you need to make to get the weight off and get in shape and do this struggle-free.
This hinges on getting the right mindset though, otherwise dieting can feel like a drag and it won’t be sustainable.
With all of that being said, let’s take a look at my list of 7 reasons to stop dieting and break each of them down.
7 Reasons to Stop Dieting
1.) If you’re obsessed with food
If food is your whole life, if food is all you think about, and if food is your very best friend, it might be a good idea to stop dieting until you work on your relationship with yourself and with food. Dieting will likely turn up the dial on your food obsessions, which will make it even harder to unravel the web of the hold that food has on your day-to-day life.
Of course we need to eat to fuel our body but unhealthy eating behaviors like binge eating and emotional eating are not about physical hunger. Dieting can intensify your obsession with food if instead of eating for fuel, you eat to try to “fill up” something in your life besides your stomach.
For example, if you’re obsessed with food because you’re trying to get love from food, then taking that away with dieting will make your food obsessions worse than they already are.
2.) If you don’t have a weight loss mindset
If you don’t have a weight loss mindset and force yourself to diet then this can be another reason to stop dieting. Without a weight loss mindset you’re pretty much guaranteed to feel restricted in your eating.
If you work on your mindset and shift into the space of choice instead of struggle, then you will be consciously choosing your healthy eating habits instead of feeling “victimized” by dieting.
3.) If your definition of dieting is starvation
As a mind-body weight loss coach I’ve been coaching smart, successful women who want to stop binge eating, stop emotional eating, compulsive overeating and yo-yo dieting. These issues are not about starving yourself to lose weight but there are definitely eating disorders that are about starving to lose weight or more specifically, starving to feel in control.
Interestingly enough, this is also a problem that starts in the mind but I only coach clients who are eating too much, not those who are starving themselves.
With that being said, if your definition of dieting is starvation then this would be a reason to stop dieting. Speaking only of the topic of weight loss and dieting to lose weight, if you don’t eat when your body is physically hungry, this can really disrupt your metabolism and end up causing more weight gain. Eat and eat often to lose weight but it’s about eating whole, unprocessed foods using portion control and only when physically hungry, but you do need to eat when physically hungry.
Dieting is not about starvation so if this is your definition of dieting it would be healthier to stop dieting.
4.) If you’re a last supper eater
Are you a last supper eater? If you are then it would be healthier to stop dieting because the new diet on Monday that’s looming in a few days will intensify last supper eating on Sunday.
If you haven’t heard of last supper eating this is binge eating on Sunday, the day before you plan to “start over” on Monday. The last supper eating binge is all about trying to eat all of the food everywhere that you might miss or want while dieting.
Last supper eating is very deceptive because it actually contributes to weight gain and it feeds the cycle that never ends: that cycle that keeps rolling with a “start over Monday” every week. It can last years if you don’t take action to get coached and break free of it.
5.) If dieting is making you fat
Believe it or not, dieting can make you fat (ack!). After years of cycles of dieting followed by overeating, binge eating, comfort eating followed by more dieting and boomeranging back, this can cause your metabolism to slow down to a crawl, which can pack on even more pounds as the cycle continues on.
This can all be very frustrating, especially if you don’t realize that a slow metabolism makes weight loss even harder.
It’s also frustrating because you (like millions out there) think that if you do a diet (a healthy diet!) that you’ll lose weight. That’s the whole point, right? But if you stay in the cycle I outlined above, it turns into a cycle of endless frustration.
The problem is that if you haven’t healed your relationship with food and you try to take the white-knuckle weight loss way of dieting, you can only stick with that for so long until you hit that emotional way and bounce back hard into your regular eating habits, the eating habits that bring the weight back, plus an extra 10 pounds.
While you do need to change your eating habits and incorporate healthy exercise routines these steps need to be a lifestyle rather than a diet and until you work on your relationship with food you may want to stop dieting so that the whole problem doesn’t get worse.
Change your mind and you can change your body.
6.) If you’ve never addressed the real problem
If you’ve been following along so far, is it making sense that there’s much more to weight loss than dieting if you want to lose weight and keep it off? You see, if you want to lose weight for good you can do it, but this will only work if you change your lifestyle habits to support your best body ever.
If you struggle with emotional eating, binge eating, compulsive overeating, mindless eating, sneak eating, sugar addiction or other overeating habits, these behaviors don’t support a fit, slender body. Does this make sense?
Based on your experience, does it also make sense that dieting does not fix these overeating problems?
All of this creates quite the conundrum because a) you want to lose weight (yes?) but b) if you’re struggling with overeating behaviors these will sabotage your weight loss and c) dieting won’t fix your unhealthy eating behaviors and can even make them worse (and pack on more pounds).
The only way to fix your overeating is to address the real problem, which is what drives your unhealthy eating behaviors. What exactly drives your overeating behaviors? I would need to speak with you to learn more about your personal situation but in general, a shared problem that affected all of my coaching clients I’ve worked with since 2009, is limiting beliefs.
This is one part of the real problem that drives the disordered eating behaviors and dieting does not help fix this. This is another reason to stop dieting, if you’ve never addressed the real problem(s) that drive your unhealthy eating behaviors.
7.) If you haven’t made peace with food
If you make peace with food this will release the negativity you may have built up in your relationship with food over the years. Dieting does not do this for you and dieting can contribute to even more struggle than you already experience with food.
Additional struggle can compound with interest over time, making weight loss harder and harder the more time that passes while you struggle. A large amount of this struggle can be released relatively quickly if you work on getting a weight loss mindset which will definitely help you make peace with food at the same time.
If you haven’t taken any action to make peace with food though, then this would be another reason to stop dieting, just because dieting can increase your struggle with food and with yourself, and your weight.
Heal Your Relationship with Food to Lose Weight for Good
We all agree that we must change our eating and exercise habits in order to lose weight but these changes must become lifestyle habits rather than being a short term diet just to lose weight.
In this article I’ve outlined 7 reasons to stop dieting but what if you identify with any (or all) of my list of seven? What do you do then, especially if you do want to lose weight?
If you take a different route than the dieting you’ve done up until now, there is another way to change your unhealthy eating behaviors. If you go within and heal your relationship with food you can go to the root of the problem and effectively lose weight “from the inside out”.
This is the part that mainstream diets do not address and you need to “go there” if you really want to break free of the cycle of dieting followed by regaining the weight followed by dieting and yo-yo’ing back.
When you get a weight loss mindset you heal your relationship with yourself, with food, and with your body, which helps you release the ongoing struggle with the whole subject. This is possible to do if you are willing to do something different to lose weight, something you’ve never done before.
If you’re fed up with the old way and instead want to break free and heal so that you can finally lose weight for good then go ahead and apply for a complimentary weight loss discovery session with me so that we can have a two-way conversation over the phone and find out what’s been stopping you personally from reaching your weight loss goals.
If you’re committed to change and you’d love to end the struggle with overeating and overweight then click here and apply. Why not right? After all, what do you have to lose except for struggle, food obsession, overeating and overweight?!
