You’ve tried everything. Your health is at risk. What do you do now? Our culture tells you that a diet is the answer, and that messes with your relationship with food.

You tell yourself, “It’ll be different this time around.” But let’s be real. Is it ever different?

Time and time again, I hear people shame themselves for not being able to maintain diets that are often unrealistic to follow over a long period of time and include malnutrition and self-starvation. The dieting industry often makes you feel bad for “failing” the program to entice you to come back, over and over again. Hey, it’s worked, right? At least that’s what the marketing tells us. However, the long-term weight-loss results do not hold.

Remember this: Diets fail you. You don’t fail diets.

The dieting industry is worth over $66 billion and growing. I encourage you to think outside the box with a logic problem. If the dieting industry is growing, is it actually working? My friend, the diet industry thrives on your failure, so why would the dieting industry want you to ‘succeed’? There’s no money in your success.

Let’s talk about 4 ways to get yourself out of the never-ending dieting cycle and rethink your relationship with food.

Food is Not the Enemy

The dieting industry leads us to believe that food is the enemy, and coupled with your lack of self-control, you must follow restrictive and sometimes dangerous diets to be healthy. This idea could not be farther from the truth! Restrictive diets foster a negative outlook toward food and prompt you to work against your natural food intuition, often leading to distrust of food.

What if food became a positive aspect of your life, rather than something that you fear or dread?

Consider what food can help you do instead of all the ways that food is your enemy.

• Carbohydrates can help boost your energy levels by supplying glucose to the bloodstream.
• Plant-based fats can support immunity, hormonal processes, and offer protection to your body’s organs.
• Proteins can help build muscle mass and support all structural components of your body.

Is there Good and Bad Food?

Having a healthy relationship with food and making nutritious choices is not about willpower. You may be thinking, “Uh, yes, it is! At least, for me.” I encourage you to be open to what I have to say next.

You may view foods as either “good” or “bad” and attach a moral value to food, saying, “I’m good for eating salad today” or “I’m bad because I had a piece of chocolate cake.” This good-or-bad outlook on food reinforces the idea that food deals with willpower. This mindset reinforces the idea that you are to blame for poor nutrition decisions, often leading to feelings of shame.

Believe it or not, you are not the one to blame. Instead, following restrictive diets often places the “bad” foods on a pedestal, making them untouchable. Therefore, we naturally gravitate towards those “bad” foods. Not to mention, restrictive eating leads to low blood sugar, which encourages a physiological response to eat simple carbohydrates.

How Do I Identify Stress and Emotional Eating?

We all have emotionally or stress-eaten, and it is okay when it happens occasionally. However, when you notice food becoming a regular soother of emotions and stress, rather than a way to soothe hunger, it may be time to take a few steps back and ask yourself these questions.

• Do you eat to feel better emotionally?
• Do you eat more when you feel certain emotions and/or stress?
• Do you eat when you are not hungry?
• Do you feel out of control around food?
• Do you reward yourself with food?

If you have answered yes to any of the above questions, you may be eating to soothe emotions rather than hunger. Although you can begin by identifying emotional eating triggers, it is best to seek ongoing professional help from a dietitian and a therapist if you struggle with emotional eating.

Stop over-analyzing Food

You may have heard from an influencer that they do not eat any food with more than five ingredients. Or you may eavesdrop on a conversation at the grocery store of two women chatting about how they chose to go gluten-free. Nutrition opinions constantly bombard us at the consumer and social levels. How are you supposed to know exactly what to eat?

News flash! Food is meant to be simple, and we often complicate it. If you consume wholesome, fresh foods that provide a variety of macronutrients and micronutrients from various food groups, you are doing a good job. Quick-fix, sustainable diets do not exist! There is no magic pill. Food is simple.

Food is just food.