Melissa Byers has written a thought provoking article called Zone Gone Bad (full article is only available to subscribers, but you can read a summary) about the disordered thinking that she and her sister experienced whilst on The Zone Diet. Her article is not a criticism on The Zone Diet, as she freely admits that she had disordered thinking whilst on other diets as well, but rather a look at how being on a diet can affect our relationship with food.
With me, I had disordered thinking whilst counting calories. It simply did my head in. I was afraid to eat foods I didn’t know the exact calories of and I started to dislike eating in general because of all the hassle of tracking the calories. I developed an extremely unhealthy relationship with food and so I stopped counting calories before it escalated into a full blown eating disorder.
Most of us begin a diet because of our unhealthy relationship with food. We binge eat, we experience emotional eating or we eat all the wrong foods in all the wrong amounts. Therefore a diet like The Zone Diet or counting calories can start to get us focused on a more healthy way of eating. However, it can all go very wrong when we start to take it too far. We start to decrease the amount of calories we are consuming every day because we think if we can lose some weight whilst eating a healthy amount of calories a day, then we could start losing a lot more if we slash the calories we are consuming in half. Or we get obsessed with measuring and weighing foods. Or we start to skip meals.
So if you find that you have started to develop a very unhealthy relationship with food, how do you get back to having a healthy one?
1. Stop skipping meals
If you have been skipping breakfast or lunch or dinner, then it is time to start eating three healthy meals and two snacks every day. You must give your body the proper nutrition it needs if you want to be healthy and to be able to get through your daily workout.
2. Clean Up Your Diet
If you have started binging or just simply eating the wrong foods, then it is time to throw all that junk away and to stock your kitchen with whole foods. Remember if it comes in a box it shouldn’t come into your house. The best diet contains meat, vegetables, some fruits and nuts & seeds - nothing else.
3. Get Off Those Scales
If you are finding that you are weighing yourself multiple times a day, then it is time to hide those scales and break the habit. Try to get down to weighing yourself only once a week. This is something I struggle with as well as it is so tempting to weigh yourself once a day to see how you are doing. However, your weigh will fluctuate, sometimes quite considerably, due to water weight and other factors. Therefore it is best to only weight yourself once a week at the same time every week to get a true reflection of how your weight loss is progressing.
4. Look At Your Portion Sizes
So you have cleaned up your diet and think you are eating well, but you are still putting on weight. Take a look at your portion sizes. Are you eating too much meat and too little vegetables? Is your snack really a full meal? In today’s world we are used to our portions being huge when in fact the amount of food we actually need is much smaller.
5. Track Your Workouts Not Your Food
If you have started to develop an unhealthy relationship with food, then it is time to put that food diary away and start tracking your workouts instead. Now, this is not intended to develop an obsession with how long you spend exercising, but instead to see how much your fitness is improving. How long did it take you to run a mile this week? Is your time better than what you got last week? How much weight could you deadlift this week? Did you set a PR? Tracking your workouts can give you a sense of progress and achievement that tracking your foods never could.
6. Take Some Time Out
Sometimes we just need a vacation away from the dieting mentality to recharge and refocus. Take a diet vacation. This does not give you licence to binge eat all week, it is just to take some time away from being focused on food all the time. Maintain a healthy diet during your vacation but don’t count calories or blocks or replace meals with shakes or whatever your current diet has you doing. Use this week to refocus goals and how you plan to reach them.
7. Start Enjoying Your Food
With all this dieting we can forget that food is there to be enjoyed. Spice up your diet with some new recipes or try some brand new foods. Spend some time in the kitchen this week experimenting with food, you may be surprised what culinary delights you can create.
A healthy relationship with food is a very important aspect of maintaining a healthy weight, good health and ensuring that you have all the energy you need to get through your day. Don’t sacrifice your health, both mentally or physically, to chase a number on a scale. Eat a well proportioned diet, exercise 5-6 times a week and you will reach and maintain a healthy weight.
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