Make 2019 the Year You Don’t Go On a Diet

It’s early January 2019, which makes it Diet Resolution Week. That’s supposed to mean that you keep your resolution to go on a diet in the New Year. But what if you choose to do something different this year? What if you make 2019 the year you don’t go on a diet?

It’s a scientifically-proven fact that diets don’t work. They don’t create lasting weight loss; they certainly don’t confer any health advantages – in fact, yo-yo dieting has been shown to be worse for your health than obesity – and they don’t make people happy.

In my book, Emotional Overeating: Know the Triggers, Heal Your Mind and Never Diet Again, I talk about the unmet emotional needs and the deep-seated emotional wounds that drive us to overeat and how the whole concept of dieting makes no sense because it ignores the cause of overeating.

People who overeat are driven by deep emotional urges which have nothing to do with physical hunger. These urges are reinforced by the brain’s tendency toward addiction. If we’re going to overcome compulsive eating, dieting is not the way to do it.

We overeat compulsively because we’re using food to self-soothe, self-nurture and even to numb our emotional pain. Dieting doesn’t address any of these needs; in fact by restricting our primary source of self-soothing and nurturing, it leaves us feeling even more deprived than ever. This is one important reason why diets repeatedly fail.

The vast majority of people who lose weight through dieting eventually gain back all the weight plus interest, and those few who keep it off only do so because they’re spending their lives miserably restricting food; often see-sawing up and down and never finding joy or peace.

Instead of going on a diet in 2019, it’s time to explore your relationship with food; with what you’re eating and why you’re eating it. It’s time to become more mindful about food and eating and more empowered to make positive, healthy choices about how, when, why and what you eat.

In her book, The Mindfulness-Based Eating Solution: Proven Strategies to End Overeating, Satisfy Your Hunger, and Savor Your Life, psychologist Lynn Rossy demonstrates how to have a more mindful, and joyful, approach to food and eating.

Rossy talks about how you can take yourself off automatic pilot and ask yourself what you’re really hungry for. She shows you the difference between depriving yourself of the things you enjoy and making mindful choices about what you’re eating.

Recently, I interviewed Dr. Rossy for my Ruthless Compassion podcast, where you can learn more about the subject of mindfulness-based eating.

In my book, Emotional Overeating, I talk about the emotional wounds that lead to a problematic relationship with food and I offer my four-pronged approach for healing these wounds and enabling people to let go of their cravings for unhealthy foods.

In the book, I talk about how we’re able to release our intense food cravings when we give ourselves the love, nurturing and validation we’ve been using food to replace. When we can take care of ourselves emotionally, we don’t have to use food for this.

Mindfulness-based eating is an excellent strategy for people who have eating and food issues, especially when this method is combined with emotional self-care.

Whether you’ve been anorexic, bulimic, a binge eater or a combination of the above, the mindfulness-based approach to eating can help you normalize your relationship with food and bring back the joy in mealtime.

In her book, Rossy talks about how by being mindful, you can enjoy some of the “forbidden” foods that you feel guilty about eating, but you can do so in moderation by using mindfulness techniques.

One example she shared with me in the podcast is that if you love ice cream, you can go to the local shop and thoroughly enjoy one scoop rather than buying a container, taking it home, and finishing off the whole thing in one sitting.

Mindfulness gives us a sense of empowerment because it allows us to make conscious, deliberate choices about what we want and what’s best for us in every moment.

When it comes to eating, mindfulness enables us to be in charge of our food choices, as opposed to being driven by powerful emotional urges.

The problem with responding to our food cravings is that we don’t really enjoy our food when we’re eating to fulfill an urge. We might have a small sense of relief after a binge, but compulsive eating never brings us pleasure or joy.

We eat for the pleasure of it and for our well-being, but no-one wants to be enslaved by their food cravings. No-one wants to feel out of control of their urge to overeat.

We all want to feel free to make the choices that are best for us. With mindfulness, we can release our overpowering cravings and at the same time, take great satisfaction from our food.

Rossy’s book on mindfulness-based eating complements my four-pronged approach to overcoming addiction. Both books employ mindfulness techniques and both show you how to regain the joy in eating.

Food should never be something we feel guilty about and eating should never be something that we’re ashamed of.

Our bodies shouldn’t be a source of embarrassment, either. With emotional healing and mindfulness-based eating, we can let go of our complicated, unhappy relationship with food and weight and start taking pleasure in eating once again.

Mindfulness is essential in every aspect of life. We want to be conscious and aware in our personal relationships so as to have more positive, constructive interactions; we want to be tuned in at work so that we can maximize our chances of success, and we want to be self-aware around our health choices so that we can be our best selves and live our best lives.

Let 2019 be the year you choose not to diet, and instead, let it be the year that you focus on emotional healing, self-care and mindfulness-based eating.

Subscribe to my YouTube Channel to watch my series Moving into Autumn with Good Self-Care, where you’ll learn simple tips for taking the best care of yourself and your loved ones this fall season.

Tune in to my Ruthless Compassion Podcast where I go in-depth about topics like mental health, trauma, and loneliness.