Obedience, willpower, and failure are three connecting pieces to a chronic dieters puzzle. Once you have one set in stone, the other two follow. I call this a “puzzle” because as a chronic dieter you believe that you need all three pieces to feel good about yourself and to get to a satisfying weight.

What if I told you that this is not the case? What if I told you that these three components are actually lethal to your health, and cause you to get trapped in the dieting cycle over and over again?

Let’s start with “obedience”. Say for example you have a new pet (how about a dog) and you are training your dog. You teach the dog what he can and cannot do (a set of rules if you will) and when the dog is not obedient, you punish the dog for bad behavior. For example, you tell the dog he cannot enter the living room when you are not home. You arrive home and your couch is all chewed up. Now you punish the dog by putting up a gate at the living room entrance because the dog was not obedient, the dog was “a bad dog”.

Now relate this to yourself. You are following a particular diet this month which lists for you foods that you can and cannot eat.  You are following a list of rules with do’s and don’ts. Yet, you eat the very food you are told not to eat (let’s say, pizza) and you tell yourself you’ve been “bad”, you weren’t obedient to the rules. You vow never to do this again.  Guess what? That’s not going to happen. You will absolutely eat that pizza again at some point in time. No one or thing can tell you how you feel and what you should eat. You are the expert of your body! You should be responsible for when, what, and how much you eat. So, let’s forget about obedience.

The second piece of the chronic dieter’s puzzle is “willpower”. Let’s take the party scene for example. Whenever you go to a party do you find yourself staring at the dessert table, drooling over everything that you love but have vowed to never eat again? You keep telling yourself you don’t need all the calories, just have willpower. You try and walk away but end up overindulging because you have starved your body from those desserts for a few weeks or even longer. Willpower is not a component of intuitive eating. You have natural desires, we all do. And to try and will yourself away from them just ends in disaster. Forget the willpower and listen to your own body’s signals because that will bring you back to your natural instincts, which you have lost through the dieting schemes.

The final piece of the chronic dieter’s puzzle is “failure”. This is what you feel once obedience and willpower have once again failed you through this dieting process. So you in turn overindulge and gain back all the weight that you lost, and sometimes even more. Newsflash: you are not the one that failed; the diets are what have failed.

Should I say that again? You are not a failure, nor will you ever be with intuitive eating.

You need to start working on a NEW PUZZLE.

THE INTUITIVE EATING PUZZLE. There are only three pieces to this puzzle.

Puzzle piece #1:          A Healthy Non-Diet Mindset

Puzzle piece #2:          Nutrition Education

Puzzle piece #3:          Caring Support

Does it sound difficult? Well, nothing in life comes easy. But it is truly your solution if you want to finally break free of the pain of dieting and achieve the body that you love.

Now it’s your turn to take action: Contact me for your FREE Break Free of Dieting Strategy Session so you can put your INTUITIVE EATING Puzzle together effortlessly.