I wanted to quit nutrition

Posted on 14 November, 2018

Not so long ago, I wanted to quit nutrition. Nearly every single day.

Why?

Because what should be a simple, natural process (feeding ourselves) is now an extremely complicated, frustrating and anxiety promoting process. The weight loss and health industry have messed people up and each day in my job I felt powerless to help people. It would stress me out – just ask my husband.

Here are just some of the things I’d see or hear from my clients:

• They’re afraid of the sugar in fruit and yoghurt so they stop eating these nutritious foods, yet binge on a packet of chocolate biscuits at the end of the day.
• They buy $100 protein supplements and other products and then complain they can’t afford to eat more vegetables.
• They try hard to drink lemon water each morning and still reach for their daily Coke fix.
• They cut out carbs completely and remove whole food groups, only to be ravaged by hunger and then over-eat poor quality foods all weekend.
• They try to quit sugar and end up panicking over the sugar in capsicum and milk (perfectly healthy foods).
• They follow a diet for one week, the scales tell them they haven’t lost weight, so they get depressed and go on an eating spree for 24-48 hours. They weigh themselves again and their weight has gone up. They’re convinced they can’t lose weight, even though true fat loss takes weeks to occur and they were just inconsistent.
• They call cake ‘evil’ and hot chips ‘bad’, or demonize fast food. Guilt riddles them when they eat these foods and other ‘unhealthy’ foods, even though our food choices hold no moral value. This often ended up leading them to eat more ‘unhealthy’ foods.
• They flick back and forth: on the diet. Off the diet. On the diet. Off the diet.
• They are stressed, anxious, miserable, trapped, frustrated and unhappy.

Every time, my heart would break for them.

You may be reading these things and thinking, ‘I’ve never done that’. That’s great! You are officially free of the chains of diet stress. But for those of you who have, know that you’re not alone.

It’s crazy, isn’t it, the way we approach our health with this ‘all or nothing’ mindset?

So yeah. Some days I just wanted to quit. These mindsets in my clients felt so entrenched, and I couldn’t seem to help them find a fresh perspective.

Then it hit me – actually, that’s not true. It didn’t hit me in just one moment. It started as a small inkling. A hunch. A tiny seed. And with each client, it grew until I started getting a clear understanding of how I was going to get them from A (where they currently are) to B (where they want to be).

Bit by bit, I started piecing together the answer that I was looking for. It was something that most self-improvement processes harness. It’s something I’ve known about for a long time. Yet, despite being a tried and true principle, it hadn’t quite filtered across to the nutrition industry. What’s the answer?

The accumulated benefit of marginal gain.

True behaviour change – where you develop new habits, behaviours, and routines that last a lifetime – takes time, and you can’t expect to change your whole diet overnight. The expectation that you should just wake up one day and be a healthy eater is ridiculous. However, if you focus on one aspect of your nutrition at a time, learn it, practice it, ensure it’s realistic and suits your lifestyle, and then repeat it often enough, you’ll actually start to create a new normal for yourself. A normal where it’s easy and natural to choose healthy food.

Here’s what you should do:

1. Pick five new habits that you’d like to build into your diet.
2. Focus on one habit and repeat it daily. Track your consistency with this and put effort into the days when consistency drops.
3. Don’t move onto the next habit until the first one feels easy.
4. Repeat with the remaining four habits.

This process is likely to take you a whole year (or more) but if you consistently change five areas of your diet, think about what that would mean for your long-term health. I’d say, it would be pretty frickin’ amazing! You will have built the skills to eat well, and you can do them consistently because you had to learn to fit them into your lifestyle, which meant that they were realistic.

Healthy eating is a skill and it’s that belief that keeps me going and working in a field that I love. No quitting for me. This belief also means that when I have a client who is ready to learn, has their expectations in check, and is willing to put in the work, I can help them reach their goals.