Do you find yourself consistently running out of gas before your day is over? A lot of clients I work with ask me, “how can I keep going?”
Sleep is the first thing I ask about. The second question is always “what are you eating?”
Why?
Most of us grew up with messages that promoted:
- Counting calories
- Restricting eating
- Ignoring hunger
- Obsessing over calorie burn in workouts
These are all tell-tale signs of DIETING not LIVING. Dieting leaves us feeling tired and hungry. We ask for more from our bodies so we can be active and do the things we want to in life — all the while ignoring the fact that our bodies require more food to be more active — something that constantly dieting takes away from us. Persistent dieting often is followed by:
- Increased stress on the body
- Brain fog
- Other undesirable physiological changes
You weren’t meant to spend your life trying to find ways to eat less. You weren’t meant to live in a constant state of DIETING. You were meant to LIVE.
There’s a difference between dieting and living. Dieting is withholding or restricting food intake to a level below what your body needs to function optimally for some reason. Living is meeting your body’s needs so it can rise to the challenges you face each day in your life and in your training.
Dieting isn’t something that’s inherently bad (it can have a place and our bodies are made to adapt to changing circumstances), but it’s meant to be temporary state — not where you spend your whole life. And so many of us are trying like hell to stay there anyway while trying to squeeze more and more out of ourselves. In doing so, we’re holding ourselves back because when you diet, you’re preventing your body from being at its best. It cannot thrive and support you well while you withhold things from it to make it smaller.
Because dieting isn’t living. Dieting isn’t thriving. Persistent dieting limits your ability to live and thrive and it impedes your ability to make progress and grow in every aspect of your life.
Your body deserves to be nourished and cared for — we all as humans deserve to be nourished and cared for, on the regular. When you diet (intentionally restricting or unintentionally just not eating enough), you are likely denying your body some of the things it needs for fuel and overall nourishment. And when that diet is paired with the expectation that your body will somehow be able to do more, better, faster, it becomes a recipe for disaster.
If dieting prevents you from reaching our goals, why do we let ourselves live in the misery of dragging ourselves through the day only to get up and do it again the next day? Is the stress on your body really worth it if you’re not living as fully as you could if you were able to reach your goals?
How can you do awesome shit when you’re undernourished, failing to give your body what it needs to perform well, and obsessing over living in a calorie deficit?
Enough I say – it’s time to start LIVING. What I mean by living is:
- Feeling strong in your body
- Pursuing your goals
- Recovering well
- Embracing your potential
- Eating enough to meet your body’s needs based on your activity level
- Getting your power back from diet culture
You may be thinking “Dieting is all I know, what can I do?” My goal in creating my soon-to-be-released Fuel Your Awesome Nutrition Guide is not to become your nutrition guru, it’s to educate and empower you with real, evidence-based information to experiment with to find the fueling strategy that allows you to live the life you want and pursue your own personal idea of awesome.
You deserve to do more than diet – you deserve to live fully, you deserve to thrive. If you’re ready to ditch the diet and feel energized while supporting your body, sign up now for email updates on the late-february release of Fuel Your Awesome: A No BS Nutrition Guide to Support Your Active Life and Adventures.