Four signs you’re not ready for long term dietary change

Posted on 10 April, 2019

This article is not talking about your ability to download a meal plan and blindly follow it or get pre-made meals delivered to you.

It’s also not talking about a seven-day juice cleanse or 30-day clean eating challenge. No. This article is talking about changing your eating habits. The things that you do automatically, subconsciously and if you weren’t ‘on a diet’, every day.

Most people think they’re ready to change their eating habits, however, they’re usually met with a rude shock as they find their new changes unsustainable and unrealistic. Unfortunately, you can’t approach changing your eating habits in the same way you ‘shred fat’ or embark on a 12-week challenge. These short term approaches require willpower, discipline and for you to put other aspects of your life on hold while they take priority. They are short term because what they require of you is unsustainable in the long term.

One of the reasons habits are so hard to change is because the behaviour is deeply ingrained in our lives and we often do it without much conscious thought.

These kinds of habits include the following:

• What you do at the end of a long day at work when you walk in the door: Go for a walk or eat a box of shapes.
• What you do when you serve up dinner: measure out an appropriate portion for your energy needs or fill the whole plate and eat it all.
• What you do when you’re watching TV or answering emails later at night: Sip on a camomile tea or munch on a pack of the kid’s snack size Tiny Teddies.
• What you do when you attend a work morning tea: grab a biscuit and a few carrot sticks and move on or eat ‘all the things’ and skip lunch

These habits may seem insignificant but it’s the accumulated effect of them happening regularly that is the fundamental part of how you maintain good health through your nutrition long term.

If you’re constantly failing to take action with changing your long term eating habits, it’s possible you will relate to one, if not all of these signs below:

You say ‘I can’t’ a lot

‘I can’t’ is the language of someone not ready for change. Why? At a fundamental level, they don’t believe that they can. They might want to. They might believe that they need to, but at their core, they feel that they can’t, and so they don’t.

‘I can’t’ is a hopeless feeling. When you genuinely feel like you can’t, you don’t believe you have any control and as such life happens to you, rather than you feeling like you have the power to make life happen.

The great news is, just because you feel like you can’t now, doesn’t mean you’ll always feel this way. By being more realistic, breaking down your new habit into actionable steps and being kind to yourself, you can get to the point where your new habits feel possible and you can!

You don’t like cooking and food prep

I’m sorry, but in my experience, the people that I meet that loath food prep and don’t want to do it struggle to make long term changes to their eating habits. Why? Healthy food requires preparation. You have to shop for it, cut it up, cook it, store it and then clean up afterwards.

If you’re not prepared to do this at a basic level, unless you can afford a personal chef or pre-made meals for the rest of your life, you won’t make a permanent change.

Now, let me clarify a few things. I’m not talking about taking up cooking as your new hobby and becoming the next Masterchef. No, I’m talking about basic food-prep skills as a means of self-care.

Just like brushing and flossing your teeth. It’s your choice whether you do it or not, but you can’t expect to have healthy teeth if you don’t do it regularly enough. The same goes for your diet. You can’t expect to eat fresh, whole, minimally processed foods (which is the cornerstone of a healthy diet) if you’re not prepared to cook them regularly enough.

You refuse to meal plan and want someone to do it for you

“I just want you to tell me what to eat.”

“I don’t want to think about food.”

“Just write me a meal plan that I can follow.”

If meal plans were the answer, then none of us should be having any problems. There is NOT a shortage of meal plans out there on the internet, free or paid. However, for those of you who’s tried to follow a generic meal plan on the internet you’ll know that it was hard to stick to, didn’t always suit your food preferences, gave you lots of new meals to cook outside your comfort zone, so you spend heaps more time in the kitchen and you bought a whole heaps of foods you don’t normally buy and spent oodles at the supermarket…

Meal plans don’t work. Unless, they were written by you and for you and fit easily into your daily habits and routines. Unfortunately, you can’t just wake up one day and write yourself the perfect meal plan. You also can’t just have one consultation with a dietitian and change all your eating habits at once and have them write you the perfect meal plan.

Learning how to feed yourself well, in a sustainable way takes time and practice. Meal planning and healthy eating is a skill and like any skill, you have to work at it until it becomes second nature.

You keep setting yourself strict food rules that you’ll start tomorrow

“I’m going to be good and not eat any chocolate, from tomorrow!” *eats all the chocolate now*

“I’m never going to eat sugar again, starting from Monday!” *eats heaps of sugary foods over the weekend*

“I’m never going to get takeaway ever again! After I get back from holidays.” *eats all the favourite takeaway foods while away*

When you restrict a food, it makes you want it more and you feel uncomfortable at the thought of never eating it again. This uncomfortable feeling makes you postpone the change until tomorrow or Monday. That way you can enjoy the food one last time, because you’re never going to eat it again.

The problem is, this cycle means you continue to postpone your change until tomorrow and end up simply staying the same, continuing to overeat the food. If you keep postponing change you never will.

Insanity to doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Don’t be insane. Change can only happen in the present and the best way to make changes is to stop creating yourself strict, horrible food rules, that make you feel so uncomfortable that you can’t bear to actually enforce them!

I created a 12-month program to help you change habits not shred fat. You can find out more about it here.