Centering Thought: I can choose to pay attention to what I eat to keep myself the healthiest. I can employ dieting systems to help re-set my body’s fat-muscle balance, and I can use accountability partners and expert input to keep an objective perspective. I can make the best eating choices for myself through self-honesty in any moment, no matter my history with food.
Food is the sustenance that keeps us alive. Biologically, we require the basics of protein and carbohydrates and water to convert energy to help our bodies grow—and to survive (and hopefully thrive) as we age. It’s a complex process that gets even more complicated when we add in the human element of desire: When taste meets cravings, our appetites grow.
The basics of a “balanced diet” have morphed through the years, based on the information and cultural belief systems at hand. One thing we know to be scientifically true is that an imbalance of body fat and muscle can be detrimental to our long-term health.
If we find ourselves personally susceptible to this imbalance, we can utilize dieting techniques to take control of our physical health. Many dietary systems and formulae exist to guide us through this journey. Few if any of them, today, take a comprehensive approach to the emotional eating factors that create this muscle-fat imbalance from the start.
We can take our own emotional ‘pulse’ to find the correlation between our emotions and our food choices. When we choose to add this information into our diet plans, we get the most complete snapshot of the steps we need to take to diet most healthily.
Some other steps we can take to keep our diet plans safe for us are:
tracking our goals, strategies and food or exercise in a diary or app
asking a nutritionist, doctor or other healthcare expert we trust to help oversee our diet plans and share resources
partnering with a physical therapist, personal trainer or other body health expert
using accountability partners, such as friends or family members who are on similar health/diet journeys to ours
For those of us with histories of or susceptibility to eating disorders, or hurting ourselves through our diets in some form, we can choose to seek outside perspectives such as those listed above to help check our motives around our dieting goals. Regardless of our past food usage, we can take an honest self-assessment at any moment—especially when we are able to employ more positive, honest self-talk—to make healthy choices about what we eat.