Food is meant to provide us with sustenance, as well as enjoyment!
Food is tradition, culture, pleasure, and joy and it’s okay to celebrate the many roles food plays in our lives!
But unfortunately so many diets are really strict, rigid, and completely ignore this. They remove joy from the eating experience and can make you feel as if cooking is a chore or that your meals are unsatisfying.
Diets take the joy and pleasure out of the food experience
Diets can cause you to view food only as a means to an end, and constantly leave you looking forward to the next time you ‘can’ eat that food item you really want to have, but ‘can’t’, causing a lot of stress as a result of focusing on what you should or shouldn’t eat.
Yet, we can break free from diet culture by making peace with food and rejecting the diet mentality. Food is not ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and should not be labelled as such. Food is morally neutral. Instead, food can be fun, pleasurable, enticing, symbolic, delicious and mouth-watering. The language we use around food matters.
We need a flexible approach to eating as opposed to following rigid food rules and restrictive diets
Eating should feel effortless and enjoyable. Making friends with food can make for a fulfilling and lifelong partnership.
Try focusing on creating a positive, joyful experience around your meals. This could involve finding recipes that excite you or even simply eating at the table without any devices or distractions. It could be turning on music while you cook a meal for yourself or inviting a friend over for a night in. Reframing food in this way can help you create a whole new appreciation for fuelling your body with nourishment, love, and joy.
Remember, it is not just a source of calories and nutrients. Reflecting on food customs and traditions, cooking and enjoying meals with loved ones and eating mindfully without distraction to really appreciate each morsel are all habits we can adopt to strengthen our relationship with food.
So, I encourage you to fall in love with food, rediscover the pleasure of eating, and kick diets to the curb.
Food should never be boring or stressful, and eating should delight all the senses.
Try to get away from the mentality of having a ‘plan’ or being on a ‘diet’. Instead, start thinking about the way you want to live!
RTH works with lot of clients – face to face and online – who start initially to get away from diets but end up transforming their lives in more profound ways than they ever expected. If you want this to be you, check out the RTH programs.
