10 Reasons You Need To Stop Dieting And Do This Instead

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It’s possible to learn how to be happy with yourself without the diet!

  1. Dieting is a temporary state of deprivation and therefore an ineffective way to lose weight. As soon as you return to your normal eating habits, you will regain the weight.
  2. If dieting was a solution to a problem, most people would only ever have to diet one time in their lives ever. But it’s not.
  3. Dieting makes you grumpy and unpleasant.
  4. Dieting turns people without binge eating issues into people with binge eating issues.
  5. Dieting takes your mind off of more important pursuits of life and turns you into someone hyper-focused and even obsessed with losing weight.
  6. Dieting can cause you to stop doing things you used to find enjoyable, such as spending time with friends or at social events because you dread being around non-diet friendly foods.
  7. Diets teach you to measure your worth in terms of numbers on the scale, calorie counts and grams of carbohydrates instead of nurturing the lovely person that you are.
  8. Diets force you to reject your current life and look toward a different life that you might never have. They cause you to wait to live your life with passion until you are thin. You don’t have to wait—you can choose be happy now.
  9. Diets can drain you financially, especially if you’re constantly spending money on new diet books, or diet foods or special foods or training programs.
  10. Diets can set you up for self-esteem issues. Because they are a set-up for failure for 98% of the people who diet, each time a diet doesn’t work it causes you to evaluate your self worth according to a system that is set up for you to fail.

What should I do instead? Think about making a lifestyle change and just make one small change a week. For instance:

  • Week One:Add a fruit to your breakfast each morning.
  • Week Two: Add a salad or a vegetable to your lunch each day.
  • Week Three: Cut down from 3 sodas per day to 1 sodas per day and substitute with water.
  • Week Four: Take a walk each afternoon after your lunch.

Make it work for you and your schedule. Think about what you could do for the rest of your life and each week add one small thing to make that change sustainable. Love your body, one step at a time! Slow methodical change is the way to make change last a lifetime. Sudden unsustainable change is the way to set yourself up for failure.

This post originally appeared at YourTango.