Maintain A Healthy Relationship With Food While Dieting maintain a healthy relationship with food

If you are on a diet plan, you may come to ‘fear’ certain foods as against your diet plan principles.  You’ve been conditioned to know  ‘good’ foods and which ‘bad’ foods and do all you can to stay away from the bad ones and only eat the good foods.

The problem with this good and bad way of  thinking is that it forms a negative association in your mind with certain foods in your diet.  If you’re not careful, this could lead to eating disorders over time, which are serious and could require extensive treatment to overcome.

Let’s look at some of important things to remember when dieting in order to maintain a healthy relationship with food that will help you develop a more  positive relationship with food while dieting.

Think: Healthy Or Not Healthy

The first thing to observe is think in terms of healthy or not healthy rather than good or bad foods.  This shifts your perspective and allows you to focus on health benefits that certain foods provide which is a much healthier association whilst dieting.

Fill your diet with the most nutritious foods available, not because they are low in calories but because they will do the most for you from a nutritional and health point of view.

Incorporate Cheat Meals

Next, allow for some cheat meals in your diet programme. Cheat meals are great because they give you psychological relief from strict diet plans and help you see that eating a food that’s not permitted usually on your diet list won’t automatically make you gain all the weight you’ve lost.

This is key to maintain a healthy relationship with food.  Cheat meals should be scheduled once or twice every week for maximum benefits.  More frequently may not be a good idea as it may hinder weight loss progress but ensure you get them in every so often is important.

Take Diet Breaks

You should periodically add some diet breaks as well.  This is key for helping you manage your maintenance calorie intake so you don’t start thinking that you must maintain a very low calorie intake all the time in order to succeed with keeping the weight off.

Often what happens is that as you progress on a diet, your metabolism slows  so you start decreasing your calorie intake further to see more fat loss but over time this leads to a very low calorie intake. Before you even are aware of it you’re scared of eating more for fear all the weight will come rushing back on.

Diet breaks help reset your metabolism and also teach you that you can eat more food once in a while and still maintain your body weight.

Use the tips to mainitn a healthy relationship with food while dieting and your weight loss success will be long term and effective. For your psychological health this is an important requirement.

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What Diet: maintain a healthy relationship with food