Why Your Diet is So Hard to Stick To
If you’re like many of us, then you may have experienced the up and down, repetitive nature of trying to lose weight.
It can leave us feeling hopeless, seeing some good progress initially, followed by an eventual rebound and the emotions that come with it.
“Failed again…”
“I’ll never be successful with this…”
“There must be something wrong with me…”
Fortunately, there is a way out of this. It all starts with paying attention to the causes of your eating habits.
The reason most diets are so hard to stick to is that we exercise willpower over certain foods or over food in general.
If you have found yourself staring at a delicious selection of tray bakes at lunchtime for far too long, then you will have experienced a similar feeling.
Whilst it seems like the obvious thing to do, it can actually lead to the short term, repetitive nature of dieting by being overly restrictive in our food choices.
If we focus too much on willpower and denying ourselves certain foods, we can sometimes neglect the underlying causes of our eating habits.
Making a change to your nutrition that lasts, begins with a key skill that we focus on with all of our new clients; paying attention.
If you have ever clocked yourself having to really exercise willpower to control certain cravings for foods, then congratulations!
You actually already have this key skill locked down, you’re able to listen to what your body is telling you.
When you listen to your body sending these signals, there are 2 crucial questions to ask yourself at this time:
Why are we craving this particular food right now?
What problem is this food trying to solve for us?
When we start with these two questions, we get answers that point to the underlying causes of our eating habits.
This is a crucial step in making changes.
Instead of focussing our efforts on restricting, demonising or ignoring certain foods, we can focus on addressing these causes first.
Some examples of this include:
Craving foods when in certain locations
Craving certain foods in response to a stressful situation
Craving food at a particular time of day
Once we begin to notice the stimulus or trigger behind our cravings, then we can take steps to address these causes.
Say you notice you get hungry around 15:00-16:00 in the afternoon, you might notice that work tends to drag or dry up for you at this point. Perhaps the change of pace causes you to use food to fill a gap created by boredom.
Identifying this need can help you to take action.
Instead of heading to the work kitchen and raiding the biscuit tin, you can head out for a 10-20 min walk around the office, or chat to a colleague.
Boom. You’ve just implemented a change.
Notice how it felt to take action on something? Did it change your cravings or reduce them entirely?
The key to making nutrition changes that stick, is to address the causes of your eating, rather than blaming or shaming yourself for failing to exert enough willpower.
Try out some of these strategies for yourself.
Start paying attention to the causes of your habits and take action to prevent them in the future.
If you need help figuring out the right strategy for you, or understanding the causes of your eating habits more, then a 30 min Nutrition Discovery Call could be exactly what you need.
It’s totally free and can help give you a clear plan on how best to make lasting nutritional changes that work for you.
If you’re interested, click here and see what it could do for you.