If You’re Struggling to Stick to a Diet, You Don’t Need More Willpower
If you’re struggling to stick to a diet this year, please stop blaming yourself. You don’t need more willpower for your diet. You need to trust yourself, understand your body, and gain confidence in your nutrition. Quick fix diets and fad diets won’t help you get healthy. This is what to do instead…
This may shock you, but you don’t need more WILLPOWER.
You don’t need more self-control.
Because exerting more willpower means you’re going against what feels natural to you.
The 4th edition of Intuitive Eating defines willpower as “an attempt to counter natural desires and replace them with proscriptive rules.”
That’s exactly what you’ve done in every diet you’ve tried and it’s why you’re struggling to stick to a diet right now. Diets just don’t work.
If you’ve tried Whole30, you don’t eat grain, beans, alcohol or sugar for 30 days. You follow those rules for a finite period of time even though you may want them. Your willpower is likely successful because it’s only 30 days. But what happens on day 31?
If you’ve tried Weight Watchers, you’ve used willpower to stick to your prescribed points allotment. But after a few months when a day of parenting really kicks your butt, your willpower crumbles because it’s not natural to deprive yourself just to fit your points when you’ve been hungry for so long.
If you’ve tried keto, you’ve used willpower to ignore everything delicious that’s not filled with fat. But as you’ve seen with your kids, you’re born with the desire for sweets. So it’s not natural to eat lettuce with grilled chicken and avocado nonstop and never allow anything else.
This is precisely why you’re struggling to stick to your diet this year.
It’s not natural to follow EXTERNAL rules and guidelines for an extended period of time.
You’re rebelling against these rules is a form of self-preservation.
Think of a toddler… they rebel all the time because being told what to do sucks. As frustrating as this can be as a parent (does anyone else feel seen??), you have to understand that it sucks for them, even though it’s your job to keep your 2 year old safe.
No external rules or guidelines can know when you’re hungry or what food sounds good to you. So your body will fight to maintain its boundaries.
And when your willpower crumbles, it’s a big F-you to the rules you’ve been following.
But it’s also BIOLOGICAL.
Your body doesn’t like to be told not to eat when it’s hungry.
It doesn’t like to not eat carbs when it’s your body’s preferred energy source.
It doesn’t like to skip meals until 1pm when it gets hungry at 8am. (See more on why I don’t recommend Intermittent Fasting for women especially.)
Your body’s #1 job is to maintain homeostasis. This means it wants to preserve a weight that’s easy to maintain.
So you’re not a failure for not being able to follow diet rules for years. You’re normal. You’re helping your body protect itself.
If you’ve ever felt like a failure for not being able to follow a diet or prescribed rules/guidelines around food, I want you to know, from a dietitian and Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor, it’s not you.
If you’re struggling to stick to a diet, let’s challenge those diet rules and thoughts.
Because as I teach in the first mindset lesson in my programs, negative thinking can lead to negative feelings and negative behaviors.
If we learn how to flip around our negative thoughts into neutral or positive ones, we’ll be able to focus on behaviors that can positively influence our nutrition and health.
And this is exactly what we teach our clients in my programs and practice.
I invite you to join us this year in challenging your food rules to break free from a dieting mindset and feel confident in your nutrition.
XO