Chronic Dieting…has constant dieting become a part of your life?

Has Dieting Become Part of Who You Are?  Are you Addicted to Chronic Dieting?

Are you addicted to chronic dieting? Has dieting become part of who you are? Everywhere you turn, you see advice on how to lose weight. You see tried and true diets touted from the front covers of magazines. Fad diets are heralded as the next new weight loss miracle.

You see these things because we live in a diet culture. If you put twenty people together in a room, the majority of them will have been on a diet or are currently on a diet. Dieting has become the new normal.  As a result, it has become part of who you are; part of your “normal”.

Chronic Dieting

Most people don’t realize how narrow their world has become when it comes to dieting. Maybe you don’t understand that you’re simply trying another diet because you haven’t taken a step back and looked at the big picture.

If you’re someone who is a chronic dieter, it means you’ve most likely spent many years trying one diet after another. You might think it’s no big deal to live the kind of life where you focus on dieting. What you don’t realize is that your life can be overtaken by focusing on one diet after another. You can become so obsessed with counting calories and obsessing over food that it really comes to restrict your life.

You can focus on chronic dieting to the extreme point that foods are identified as good or bad. Perhaps you are chronically dieting and will often fail to see that your weight loss goals aren’t necessarily healthy. Instead, when you decide to lose weight, you may have a magical number in mind you want to see when you step on the scales.

It may not have occurred to you that number may be wrong for your bone structure or if that weight isn’t realistic for you. You may have come to link your self- worth and your happiness to that particular number.  Anything less than that reaching that magical number is failure in your mind.

This approach really sets you up to fail at one diet and turn right around and start another. It may also cause you to consider getting involved in fad diets that can be damaging to your health.

When it comes to chronic dieting, you may mistakenly believe that if you “fall off the wagon”, you’re technically not dieting any longer. During this time where you don’t see yourself as dieting, the cravings for the foods you been depriving yourself really kick in strongly. You may often binge eat what you didn’t allow themselves to have before while on the diet. Again, these are the “foods” you’ve been craving and denying yourself. This is very typical, and if you’re nodding your head in agreement, just know you’re one of the many who experiences this.

The diet industry thanks you, by the way, for your chronic dieting. You’re supporting a 33 billion dollar a year industry! Where would they be if you learned to eat to be well and allowed your body to find its own perfect weight. By the way, it will find its own perfect weight when you replace processed food and sugar with whole food. “Whole food” means what goes on your table and in your body doesn’t have an ingredient label on the bag or box. It’s whole food. Sounds simple doesn’t it? It really is, but in our processed food world, it’s become much more challenging that it needs to be.

Something else to keep in mind: if you’re someone who engages in chronic dieting, it means your diets are open ended. You don’t set your focus on an end goal that’s realistic, achievable and includes enough time to get to that goal in a healthy manner. You just keep dieting with diet after diet hoping to find the magical one that will help you reach a number on the scales that you believe will give you inner happiness.

Helping you achieve Major Wellness in your life!

Cheryl A Major, CNWC