Women, Don’t Go on Diets but Focus on Making Healthier Food Choices Instead!
What’s a Diet?
Diets are any “disordered eating behaviors”.
According to a survey by Self Magazine in partnership with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 65% of American women between the ages of 25 and 45 report having disordered eating behaviors.
For example, banishing carbohydrates (26%) or a gluten-free diet; skipping meals (37%); extreme dieting like a 1,000 calories or less (16%); calorie counting; taking laxatives and/or diuretics; taking diet pills; going on a detox; fasting, etc.
If you’ve ever done any of these above, chances are, you’ve tried more than one in your life.
Why do we Diet?
The core idea behind dieting is that we’re not happy with how we look. Whether we need to lose some weight or not (53% of dieters are already at a healthy weight!!), we have an ideal picture about how we should look. This ideal is really based on conditioning from the media and the fashion industry and not on reality.
Reason # 1 Why Diets Don’t Work
They’re NOT sustainable!
The very concept of a diet is that it’s temporary. We change our habits for a certain amount of time to get the desired results. The problem is that once we stop, we go back to the food habits and choices that caused the weight gain in the first place!
Moreover, diets lead to yoyo dieting or weight cycling. When your weight comes up and down several times in your lifetime, this has dangerous consequences on your health.
Reason # 2 Why Dieting Doesn’t Work
It starts with the premise that there’s something WRONG with us!
We take on for ourselves external perception and pressure, yes the media and fashion, but also our parents, our peers. Their perception is that we have a defect. We’re weak. We lack will-power. We’re different and don’t fit in.
The message is that if we stand out, we’re not going to be safe and accepted.
For women, this core messaging is even more significant and insidious. Because it doesn’t stop with our weight. Anything can become a reason for not feeling safe, not being enough or okay: our hair, our skin color, the color of our eyes, the shape of our body, the way we talk, the way we dress!
For a long time women of color were not okay because they didn’t look white and so they used lightening creams to lighten their skin and products that burned the scalp to straighten their hair.
Many men AND women still consider the show of emotions wrong!
Reason # 3 Why Being on a Diet Doesn’t Work
Diets wreak HAVOC on your physical and mental well-being!
In this episode, Dr. Oz dramatically demonstrates the damages of yoyo dieting and weight cycling on our hearts:
“Researchers believe that the link between weight cycling and heart disease involves the cells that line the blood vessels called endothelial cells. When people gain and lose weight repeatedly, these cells become damaged so blood can’t flow freely. When blood flow to the heart becomes restricted, the stage is set for heart attack and stroke.”
Weight cycling is not only connected to cardio-vascular disease and diabetes, a study in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine revealed that dieting causes psychological effects such as stress, anxiety, low self-esteem, depression and irritability.
And if you’ve been weight cycling most of your life and you’re now over 40, you’ll more likely experience fatigue and digestive troubles. Furthermore, symptoms related to peri-menopause may drastically increase!
If diets don’t work and are dangerous why do we do them?
We’re brainwashed!
The diet industry is a $33 billion industry! It’s very profitable! They make sure you get the message!
That’s why it’s important that you shift your focus off of diets and on making health choices.
I recently read somewhere, “It’s get healthy to lose weight, not lose weight to get healthy.”
And getting healthy is easier than you think!
You don’t have to be drastic! You can start with one thing. For example, you can eat more vegetables by making a vegetable soup one evening and the following week by preparing a plant-based lunch. Each week, keep adding vegetables and fruits at one meal. By the end of the month, you’re eating a lot healthier!
The following month, you can tackle something else, like decide to cut down on sweets for one day. Each week, add one more day.
Work in increments in order to stick to a new habit and create change. It takes about 67 days for a new habit to take root!
And for substantial change you need support.
Ask a friend to do it with you. Or seek help from an expert.
This year, make your HEALTH a priority, download my ebook, 3 Dieting Mistakes Sabotaging Your Weight.
#ayurvedaandnutrition #ayurvedabocaraton #ayurvedabodytype #ayurvedadelraybeach #ayurvedadiet #ayurvedalifestyle #ayurvedanearme #ayurvedapractitionerbocaraton #ayurvedapractitionerdelraybeach #ayurvedapractitionersouthflorida #ayurvedasouthflorida #ayurvediccoaching #ayurvedicfood #ayurvediclifestyle #digestiveissues #healingwithfood #mindbodyconnection #womenshealthcoach #ayurveda #ayurvedic #ayurvediccooking #ayurvedicdiet #ayurvedicnutrition #healthydigestion #healthyeating #healthyeatingforweightloss #healthyeatingforwomen #healthyeatingtips #healthylivingforwomen #healthynutrition #healthyweightlossforwomen #howtoloseweight #mindfuleating #plantbaseddiet #vegan #vegandiet #weightlosscoach #weightlossforwomen #weightlosstips #womenofcolorhealth
Leave A Comment