How Can I Lose Weight When the Best Part About Life is Food?

I saw this quote on Instagram the other day and was so inspired to write to you all.

Now, before I dive in, I KNOW this quote is meant to be funny and make people laugh. It’s also meant to be totally relatable, and it IS! You should have seen the amount of likes and comments it got.

People can definitely relate.

Which only inspired me to write to you girls EVEN MORE.

A little on diets…

If you’ve been around here a while, you know my blog is not a weight loss blog. Instead, I believe that in focusing on correcting our relationship to food (mentally, physically, and emotionally), which always entails correcting the relationship we have with ourselves (and often others, too), our bodies naturally arrive at their most healthy, happy, and natural weight.

I believe that we are better off focusing on our relationships to: food, ourselves, our bodies, and our lives, than we are focusing solely on weight loss.

I believe that diets steal more joy than they add.

If you’ve ever been on a diet, you know how those first lost pound feel… You feel accomplished and excited. But, the hardest part, which is often why we get stuck in cyclical dieting, is that the weight eventually comes back.

And here’s what I’ve found… If you lose weight on a diet, you usual have to continue doing whatever it took to lose that weight to keep it off (and eventually, your body might not even respond to the diet anymore – thus, making feeling good in your body even MORE difficult).

Dieting is not a very nice thing to do to your future self, if you ask me.

People who diet eventually feel stuck. How do I stay at this weight without dieting? Do I have to do this forever? How many calories are left in my day? Oh no, what do I do?

It’s a terrible feeling to be so distracted by dieting like this.

Which is why rather than focusing on diets, I help my clients heal their mental, physical, and emotional relationship to food so they can learn to eat in a way that leaves them feeling good, and ultimately, LESS focused on food and more on a life that they love.

“How can I lose weight when the best part about life is food?”

I’d love to argue that you probably can’t…

Now, that’s not to say that you have to dislike food in order to lose weight.

That’s also not to say that you have to love every single part of your life in order to not have food as your greatest pleasure.

There’s room for both: a love for life, and a love for food. 

Loving food and having fun with it is healthy.

We love lots of things. This is healthy and normal.

Imagine a relationship with your partner. There’s gotta be love there, right? But what if you’re all-consumed by your love for your partner and they’re all you think about or pay attention to? Wouldn’t other parts of your life suffer (career, education maybe, social life)? 

Imagine your relationship to exercise, you want there to be some love there, or you’ll burn out and it’ll feel hard and dreary, right? But what if you’re all consumed by your love for exercise? Wouldn’t other parts of your life suffer in the same way? 

Loving food is completely okay. It just can’t be our only love.

The goal: a HEALTHY relationship to food. One that feels calm, normal, and fun. One where we eat when we’re hungry, stop when we’re full, and sometimes, eat simply because it’s fun (just not all of the time). A healthy relationship to food looks like one where we enjoy food, and give it our attention when we’re with it. When we’re not with it, we’re doing and thinking mostly about other things (the good things and the hard). Food isn’t distracting us from our life.

We don’t want a relationship to food that distracts us from everything else in our life. Not one that you go to, to numb out being bored, feeling upset, or use as your primary source of pleasure or comfort – most of us know that long term, these things lead to us feeling not-so-good in our bodies (mentally, physically, and emotionally).

We can have pleasure in food, it just can’t be our only pleasure. 

In my experience, and the experience of coaching hundreds of clients, thinking about dieting only makes feeling good in your body MORE difficult.

Instead, the goal, if you’ll let it, can be to focus on turning inward. Reflecting. Learning to trust and honor your own beautiful and brilliant body.

You know, that body of yours that knows how to keep your heart beating 24/7 all on it’s own, make tears when you’re sad, feel pain when you’re hurt, heal a cut, heal a cold, bubble up in laughter when you’re happy… That body that loves you SO much… 

Your turn:

What do you think? Have you found it to be true in your own life, that having a healthy relationship to food is key to feeling good in your body? What are your thoughts? I love it when you take the time to comment!