The New Holy Grail
Millions of women around the world are searching for the perfect diet, but what is it that we’re really seeking? We want a diet that will fulfil us, support us, energize us, make us happy, make our skin glow and make the pounds drop off effortlessly.
Why is this perfect diet so damn hard to come across? And more to the point, why are we all so utterly useless at sticking to diets anyway? Wouldn’t life be so much better if we could just get our food sorted out and find the perfect set of rules to follow so we can focus on the more important stuff?
Our quest for the perfect diet is intertwined with our quest for the perfect physique, which has us looking to punish our body for not being good enough, so we start thinking… Maybe my food combining is all off? Maybe I’m eating too much healthy fat? Maybe I should cut out all sugar for three weeks? Maybe I’m eating too much fruit, or eating too late at night?
Your relationship with food and your relationship with your body are intertwined. But are you connected to either? Or have you abandoned both? Contrary to what the diet industry would have you think, food is not there for you to be at war with. It is not supposed to be the enemy.
You need food to nourish your body, to empower you, and to allow you to take care of yourself and your beautiful body, of which you only have one. The more you diet, the less connected you will feel to your body and your food. The further away from yourself you will be.
What Kind of Relationship Are You In?
If your relationship with food were a romantic relationship, what kind of a relationship would you be in? How would it look? How would it feel? (And would your girlfriends approve or tell you to stop calling him and delete his number?)
Would it be a loving, caring, two-sided relationship? A relationship fuelled by infatuation, greed and pleasure? An intense, controlling relationship, with rules and feelings of imprisonment? An abusive relationship? Would it be a highly addictive relationship – one that you know is bad for you – all your friends tell you it’s bad for you – but you keep coming back for more? (We’ve all dated that person!)
Or would it be a boring, monotonous relationship with no adventure or change from the ordinary? Would it be a stale, regimented relationship during the week, followed by naughty, indulgent flings on the weekends? Ooh… such a good question, right? Really makes you think…
Stop Tracking, Start Living
Counting or tracking calories is an extremely out-dated way to approach your lifestyle and can be incredibly damaging to your relationship with food. It is a complete myth that all calories are created equal
The diet industry, and to some extent the medical profession, has done this to us. It has taught us to live by calories in, calories out. Use the system and you can’t go wrong. If we eat a Big Mac with 500 calories, we’d better make sure we burn 500 calories on the treadmill at the end of the day, and then it’s like it never happened! Right? Wrong.
You don’t need me to tell you this because you’re a smart human, but the nutrition in that burger is, of course, next to zero. If one person ate a cheeseburger every day for the rest of her life and one person ate a superfood salad every day for the rest of her life, who do you think would be healthier? Who would lose weight and who would gain it? Who would live longer?
Yet so many of us are still holding on to the calories approach, thinking that they matter and, perhaps, tracking them relentlessly with apps – which only keeps us trapped in a world of judgement, restriction and punishment. If you eat 800 calories a day and that consists of a croissant and a chocolate bar, do you think you are going to have a healthy, lean body in the long run? How do you think your body is going to feel?
Why count calories when you could be being more present in your relationships, living your ideal life, following your dreams and nourishing your body with real foods?
Break Up with Your Scales, Too
Why do we try to validate ourselves with a number on the scales? That number doesn’t tell you how smart you are, how aligned you are in your life choices, how good your ethics and morals are, what a kind person you are, how beautiful you are, how fit or strong you are, how generous and loving you are… So why are we so hooked on this number?
What is it actually telling us? Our effect on gravity! It doesn’t even tell us if we are gaining muscle and losing fat. It just tells us how heavy we are. And here’s another thing – if you’re exercising using weights, your body will be changing. You’re likely to look slimmer but weigh heavier. All the scales know is a number dictated by gravity.
This is possibly the single most important thing you absolutely have to do in order to welcome in a happy relationship with food and your body – break up with your scales. Recognize that it is a toxic relationship that always leaves you feeling bad.
Even if you think the scales don’t impact your happiness, chances are, they do. Because they are making you compare yourself to the number you had a year ago, five years ago, two weeks ago or yesterday morning.
The Art of Abundance
No food is metaphorically off the table. No food is out of bounds. No food is ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ or ‘on the naughty list’. No food choice means you ‘failed’. There is no pass or fail. There is no good or bad. There are probably quite a few foods that you have on the safe list or the unsafe list. You may have been swearing yourself off big food groups too, such as anything that remotely feels like a ‘carb’.
The author invites you to put all this aside: all the rules that you’ve been telling yourself around food or justified you not eating certain things. And invite you to take your rules and say loud and clear to yourself, ‘Screw them!’ Life is simply too short to imprison yourself with them. Following rules means you’ll always be encouraging a relationship with food that feels trapped and unexpressed.
Embrace the fact that all food is now readily available to you – in abundance – and you have the power to take it or leave it, in exactly the way your body wants to be nourished. Even the foods you may have created a story about – the ones you think make you gain weight just by looking at them, for example. When you stop living in fear of these foods and acknowledge that you have the simple choice to take it or leave it in that moment – because it’s your body, your rules – you take back your power day by day and stop feeling like food is running your life.
The Future You
This is the version of you that you perhaps picture and imagine every time you start a new diet. Maybe it’s an old version of you, in which case we are going to rewrite it. if you’re constantly trying to get back to an old version of you – your old body, when you were younger, when you were happier, when you were healthier – you’re going backwards. Aka, the wrong way.
You are in a completely different place now than you were back then, and you want be going forwards: moving into a new chapter, a new you, the dream you, the future you. And, of course, we will be stepping into her right now – not waiting to be ‘ready’ or wait for a certain number or dress size.
So, what does the Future You look like? How does she feel? And what are you waiting for? Visualize it. What does a day look like for the Future You? If you had all the time, and all the money – how would you spend your day? What would you do for your body each day, or each week?
It doesn’t mean doing everything, every day straight off, it just means getting into the feeling of how it is to have these things be a part of your life. You deserve to have these things right now, even if it is just in a smaller way.
Visit your Future You often and ask her for advice. She might be six months down the line, a year down the line or five years down. What would she have you do? How can you honour the Future You right now?
What’s Your Why?
Start thinking about why it’s so important to you personally that you make this shift. What is it that you really want? Be totally and completely honest. Whatever your past struggles around food, weight or body image – what is it that’s driving you to make a change? What is your big why? What is making you want to end this struggle?
It could be that you are looking to welcome love into your life and you know that’s pretty hard to do if you don’t love yourself first. Or maybe you’re shedding old chapters of your life and are ready to step into a brand new one. It could be that your relationship is really suffering because of how you feel about yourself
When you find your why and your relationship with your food and your body takes an upgrade, so does every other area of your life. Suddenly you will find so much more joy in everything you do.
You will feel happy and wild and free again, and as if you can really take everything and anything you want out of life! And here’s the magic – you really can!