I’ve noticed that most people approach dietary adherence issues the wrong way.
Instead of understanding WHY they’re struggling to stick to their eating plan, they treat the symptom by trying to find ways to have more willpower.
This is a very surface level dynamic.
Struggling to adhere? I need more willpower.
But we really need to start questioning a deeper cause and effect dynamic.
Struggling to adhere? What is causing the adherence issue?
Take a look at the following 2 charts and see which one you fall into…
The first one shows the relationship between willpower and time when you are participating in Diet Culture.
As you can see, as time goes on, you need more and more willpower in order to maintain any new healthy habits you’re trying to form.
The reason is simple – Diet Culture behaviors are not in alignment with your body’s needs.
This tends to be reflected in generic advice along the lines of eating an arbitrary amount of calories and doing a specific type of exercise without any consideration for an individual’s relationships with food, body, exercise, or mind.
When you eat out of alignment with these needs, you have to “force” behaviors. And the longer you go trying to force things, the more willpower you need to use to keep the game going.
In time, the demand for willpower becomes too high, and everything comes falling down.
In contrast, look at the next chart…
This is what happens with willpower over time when you are part of ANTI-Diet Culture.
You initially need to use some willpower to get a new behavior going, which is a perfectly normal use of willpower.
But as time goes on, you need less and less willpower to maintain your habits.
This is the way willpower has to unfold if you have any chance of sticking to your new behaviors.
And if you think about it, things absolutely SHOULD get easier with time.
The way you approach this in practice is by learning to directly meet your body’s needs.
That means you need to heal the dysfunction in your relationships with food, body, exercise, and mind.
This healing process gets to the root of your struggles and removes the pressures on your eating and exercise.
In return, you don’t need more and more willpower to keep things going. It just gets easier and more effortless as time goes on.
So if your new behaviors are getting harder to maintain as time goes on, then there’s a good chance you’re out of alignment with your body’s needs and are engaging in a form of Diet Culture.
To get out of it you need to get to the root of the struggles and heal.
Talk soon…