A Healthy Perspective on Food: Keys to Successful Dieting
/Many people who knew me growing up can agree that I had a love hate relationship with pizza, donuts, and almost everything delicious in the world. While I enjoyed these things, I had the restraint to resist them...most of the time. At the end of it all, I could never fully give it all up and every sprint of healthy eating ended with a massive binge day of the very food I had been trying to avoid.
What I hated most was the feeling of regret that came shortly after. I felt like all that hard work had been in vain & new in my heart that it couldn't be healthy. I would often question my will power and attributed my lack of resolve to that specifically.
But after acknowledging this vicious cycle, I took constructive steps towards strengthening myself and eating habits.
So what steps did I take?
1. Defining What it Means to Be Healthy
2. Realizing Physical Health Translates to Mental Health
3. Adjusting the Concept of Dieting
4. Tracking Progress & Staying Accountable
5. Not Being Too hard on Myself
1. What it Means to be Healthy
For myself, being healthier was often approached as a short-term goal towards being more active, more aesthetic, and/or socially acceptable. However, sustained results only come from adopting a healthy lifestyle for the benefit of long term well-being.
“If you don't know where you're going, you'll end up someplace else.”
~Yogi Bera~
The saying applies not just to where we go physically, but also to how our personal goals materialize over time. In the context of of health, its absolutely important to keep our future health top-of-mind. But too often, the decisions we make are approached from the perspective of our present self.
At age 60, how healthy will we be? At what point will we stop being able to do what we love? At what expense?
We make better decisions the more connected we are to our “future” self, reports Hal Hershfield in the Harvard Business Review. While the study if focused on financial planning and investments, the same applies to investments in health and wellbeing. Rather than viewing healthy decisions from how decisions will affect us in the next week, month, or year, psychological research indicates connection with your future self can be the strongest motivator for making better decisions.
Too often, I rationalized a burger here, a dessert there. I similarly pursued aggressively ambitious diets to achieve fast results which would in turn throw my metabolism into chaos. This mindset does not work. It is the accrual of decisions over time that shape who we eventually become. By shifting perspective from who we want to be in a month, to how we want to be in retirement, we tend to shift towards healthy decisions.
2. Physical Health Translates to Mental Health
Time and again, I find that when I exercise and eat the right foods I feel good and that when I fall back into poor habits depressions sets in. This isn’t a coincidence. This isn’t a coincidence. The body releases endorphins when you exercise inducing physiological changes in the brain. When released, endorphins interact with receptors in the brain to mitigate perception to psychological pain. We in turn feel better.
Similarly, eating the right foods largely impact both short term and long term mental health. Vitamin D is a hormone effecting the status of the brain and the immune system. Unfortunately, many of us are Vitamin D deficient—I only found out after getting blood work. However, we cannot simply supplement our bodies with pills or higher exposure to sun. Vitamin A & K2 are necessary catalysts for Vitamin D utilization.
So where do we get our Vitamins?
Fruits, Vegetables, Healthy Fats, & Lean Protein!
We’ve all heard we need a balanced diet, but there’s more to it than just maintaining a healthy heart and body. Recent studies now indicate that prolonged deficiencies in Vitamin D also contribute towards memory deterioration, dementia, and Alzheimers. Incorporating a healthy diet helps ensure we live life as our best selves.
3. Adjusting the Concept of Dieting
If you maintain a healthy lifestyle, there won’t be a need to diet. In the past, I found that every time I was “dieting”, it felt like I was struggling against my natural tendencies and that the diet had an end in site.
This approach was toxic. At every meal I found myself having to fight between what my diet and did and did not permit; the devil on my shoulder would always rationalize that the end of the diet was in site or that a single compromise in diet would not affect me. The few times I would fail, I would be excessively hard on myself and eventually my “diet” would fade with time.
Quite simply, we should know what is good and what is bad. We only live for so long, and every bad choice impacts your future self to some degree. Rather than fighting again diet-appropriate and diet-unappropriated food, I found it so much easier to maintain healthy habits—to define for myself what I should and should not eat for the sake of me as a senior citizen. Trust me. It works.
4. Tracking Progress & Staying Accountable
Past successes are the best motivators to keep on going. That being said, it is important to track what you are doing right & wrong and how you are improving over time. I often find myself wanting to exercise just because I exercised the previous day, and previous week, and previous month. And it is motivational to see improvements to my personal KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
KPIs I Track:
Personal Weight
Personal Body Fat Percent
Running Times (1 mile/3 mile)
Weight Lifting Performance
Daily Nutrition
Tracking how we do day-to-day to equip us with knowledge to set goals for ourselves. By knowing who we are today we can plan for how to get to where we eventually want to be.
5. Not Being Too Hard on Myself
The combination of tracking progress and keeping my overall health in mind helps prevent me from being excessively hard when I do slip up—everyone is bound to eventually slips up. The important thing to acknowledge is that we should strive towards a healthy lifestyle wherein we eventually achieve healthy eating as a norm, not a struggle. It comes with time and practice. The important thing is to not give up and to realize that every healthy choice contributes to lasting benefits.
When we slip up, we got to just jump right back on the course and maintain the tenacity to achieve our goals.