What’s the point of pursuing health if you can’t enjoy life?

16th February, 2018

Here are some examples of how the pursuit of health can take away from enjoying your life:

If being “good” with your diet means you can’t eat out without worrying about eating “too much” or the “wrong” thing.
If changes to your diet have you constantly thinking about food and/or worrying about whether you should or shouldn’t have something.
If tracking food, calories or macros is stressful, annoying or creating anxiety or guilt.
If having to avoid or limit certain foods means you avoid certain social events or feel immense guilt should you partake in the food.
If you can’t enjoy birthday cake on someone’s birthday without feeling you’ve been “bad” or blown your goals.
If all this obsessing over food is taking away mental space and energy to pursue more meaningful things.
If the amount of exercise you do is taking time away from spending time with friends, family or doing things you’d actually prefer to be doing.
If the type of exercise you “need” to do means exercise is not truly enjoyable.
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How many of the above points resonate with you? Maybe it’s time to reassess what it is you think you need to do to take care of your health. The common wisdom in our culture is that to manage our health or weight, we need to restrict or be careful with our food, but in actual fact this only ends up working against us. Restricting, or “being good” with food may seem like it works initially, but at some point, inevitably, this fails us and we find ourselves swinging back towards over-eating and feeling out of control around food. Allowing yourself to eat freely is not the problem, it is the solution. You can learn how this works with the intuitive eating (or non-diet) approach.

If you would like help in becoming an intuitive eater and to get out of the diet cycle and start living a more meaningful and enjoyable life, give us a call or send us an email today!