Do your food-related habits affect your relationships?
Do you want to stop feeling so anxious, stressed, overwhelmed and conflicted around food-related events and decisions?
Are you wanting to make food choices that help fuel your active lifestyle, help you feel good physically and satisfy you mentally?
Are you ready to break free from food rules and build a healthy relationship with food and your body?
If you said yes to any or all of the following, you may find that there is one thing that is holding you back from feeling controlled by food.....you are worried about gaining weight/body composition changes.
Unfortunately, we live in a world saturated with diet culture. We are conditioned to group food into "good" and "bad" categories and it's almost universally acceptable to fat shame. Even worse, nutrition experts often encourage disordered eating strategies as a way to improve health, lose weight or enhance fitness/performance.
Trying to maintain a lifestyle with food rules, rituals and restrictions means you are not living to your fullest potential. The more energy you expend on your food choices, the more distracted you become mentally and physically. Letting go of food-related fears is how you can live a more fulfilling lifestyle.
But if you are worried that a flexible and varied style of eating will result in a body type that would be seen as unhealthy, unacceptable, unattractive or performance limiting, I must remind you that as an athlete, you need full physical and mental freedom to perform at your best and to keep your body in good health. Restricting the food in your diet, placing food rules on when, how much and where you eat and obsessing over your body will not allow for that freedom. To truly put this 'diet' mentality behind you, you must get over your fear of weight gain.
But if you are worried that a flexible and varied style of eating will result in a body type that would be seen as unhealthy, unacceptable, unattractive or performance limiting, I must remind you that as an athlete, you need full physical and mental freedom to perform at your best and to keep your body in good health. Restricting the food in your diet, placing food rules on when, how much and where you eat and obsessing over your body will not allow for that freedom. To truly put this 'diet' mentality behind you, you must get over your fear of weight gain.
- Identify the source of your weight-related fears
-Comments made by coaches, athletic outfits and performance, a culture that emphasizes leanness.... it's important to identify who or what is making you feel how you feel about your body.
-Most weight gain fears initiate from cultural weight stigmas.
-Success, beauty, attractiveness, ability, happiness, social standard are often tied to what the body looks like.
-Food is often used to control stress and to reduce anxiety. Rituals and regimes around food may give you the illusion that you have more control over a situation, making you feel more at ease around eating. Being able to eat without feeling restricted, regimented or ritualistic is a way to challenge the fear of weight gain. - Rewire your thoughts
-The brain can be retrained. If you constantly think that if your body changes, you will no longer be successful, happy or attractive, it will be difficult to change your behaviors.
-Positive affirmations and mantras can help build new thought patterns.
-Recognize the triggers for when your thoughts become self-sabotaging. - Change behaviors
-The purpose of the first two steps is to recognize that there's a close connection between how you think you will look, perform and be treated if you step away from a rigid and restrictive style of eating.
-Take a step back to consider how your current style of eating is helping or harming your heath, performance or quality of life.
-A healthy weight supports the metabolic demands of your training, while protecting your physical and mental health. It's not controlled, it just happens.
You may be wondering what will happen to your body when you get rid of the food rules?
The truth is, I don't know and you don't know. The unknown can be scary - thus the constant need to feel controlled by food. While the idea of not being able to tightly control your weight can be scary, your reasons for giving up control over food must be stronger than your fears over weight gain.
And if that is too hard for you to think about right now, I'll remind you where that fear of weight gain came from.....diet culture!
Diet culture is constantly selling you methods for how you can and should control your weight to be leaner, lighter or smaller. This puts great pressure on you that your moral obligation as a human being in this world is to control your weight. And if you fail, it's a personal failure. With every diet, restriction, regime and ritual, it's the illusion of control. You must trust yourself that when you eat enough to fuel and nourish your body, while also feeling food freedom and flexibility, your body will be at the weight that it needs to be to function at its best.
There are many layers to your relationship with food, weight and your body. And these layers change in different times of your life.
But now is a great time to start learning (and unlearning) your food, body and weight related thoughts and behaviors, while challenging those thoughts and deciding what food related decisions are helping you and should stay, and which ones need to be tossed out as they are keeping you from living a meaningful and quality-filled life.
The truth is, I don't know and you don't know. The unknown can be scary - thus the constant need to feel controlled by food. While the idea of not being able to tightly control your weight can be scary, your reasons for giving up control over food must be stronger than your fears over weight gain.
And if that is too hard for you to think about right now, I'll remind you where that fear of weight gain came from.....diet culture!
Diet culture is constantly selling you methods for how you can and should control your weight to be leaner, lighter or smaller. This puts great pressure on you that your moral obligation as a human being in this world is to control your weight. And if you fail, it's a personal failure. With every diet, restriction, regime and ritual, it's the illusion of control. You must trust yourself that when you eat enough to fuel and nourish your body, while also feeling food freedom and flexibility, your body will be at the weight that it needs to be to function at its best.
There are many layers to your relationship with food, weight and your body. And these layers change in different times of your life.
But now is a great time to start learning (and unlearning) your food, body and weight related thoughts and behaviors, while challenging those thoughts and deciding what food related decisions are helping you and should stay, and which ones need to be tossed out as they are keeping you from living a meaningful and quality-filled life.