How to Stop the Unhealthy Diet Mentality of “All-or-Nothing”
Picture this: You’ve been extremely strict with your diet and eating ‘healthy’ all week by cycling the same types of food from Monday to Friday - Steamed chicken breast, brown rice, boiled eggs, and broccoli. You go all out tracking your food, chasing every grain of rice that falls off the food scale. You stay away from all kinds of snacks and desserts across the weekdays, just to follow the guidelines you have set for yourself.
And then comes the weekend. By then, you’ve been so sick of eating the same foods over and over again, and enough of being overly stressed about your food restrictions. Your willpower snaps, and you give yourself the license in indulge in whatever you want. You stuff yourself with desserts and drinks, eating way beyond what you usually do. The worst thing is that you feel terribly guilty after, hating yourself for the lack of control, and promise yourself you would restrict yourself for the whole week as a form of punishment.
Does that sound like you? If it is, it can be very tiring, right? Well, the good news is, this vicious cycle of restrict, indulge and guilt should not be the way you diet! In fact, the biggest reason why people fail their diet plans is because they are too restrictive, as seen in this study.
In this article, we will look at some of the common unhealthy “All-or-Nothing” mentalities and how to curb them. Let’s dive in.
How to Lose Weight Without Counting Calories
If you’ve been following me for a while, you would know that I’m a huge advocate of counting calories in order to lose weight. However, many people can be so obsessed with calorie counting that it causes eating disorders. Others also find counting calories too time-consuming and inaccurate.
But the truth still holds - the biggest factor in diet is calories. We must be in a calorie deficit to lose weight. But how do you do so without counting calories? The answer is to eat healthier foods. This is because the second biggest factor in diet is the kinds of foods you eat. When you try to eat healthier foods, you typically tend to lower your calorie intake without noticing or barely even trying. So, if you switch up whatever you’re eating to healthier foods, you are actually killing two birds with one stone - better for your health, reducing illnesses and diseases, and eating less food in general which lowers your calorie count. Therefore, we should prioritize eating healthier food instead of just eating less.
However, when trying to eat healthily, many people focus on what not to eat. Usually diets which eliminate certain foods are diets that are just fads and are not sustainable. Instead, what they should be focusing on is knowing what to eat. And here we will be going through the things to add into your meals to lose weight without counting calories. Let’s dive in.