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Have you ever tried to lose weight or adopt healthier eating habits by following a diet plan, based on food rules and restrictions?

If you have, I’m willing to bet that you struggled to stick with it long term, you succumbed to your cravings and ended up eating all the foods on the “forbidden”list.

It’s normal, and to be expected and NO there is nothing wrong with you.

Diet culture and the wellness industry will have you believe that losing weight and eating well is all about motivation, willpower, food rules, restrictive meal plans, elimination diets and complex protocols. The whole industry is built on taking control away from you and often leads to disordered and extreme eating behaviour.

Unfortunately, these extremes are rarely sustainable and lead you on the path to bouncing back and forth from diets and restrictive meal plans on one end of the spectrum to neglecting your nutritional needs on the other.

Some people chalk this up to balance, choosing to believe that spending a bit of time on each side of the seesaw means they have somehow found a balanced approach, only to wind up feeling the toll it takes on their body and holistic wellbeing in the long term.

Sadly, it’s not always easy to recognize when we have a problem because society rewards this behaviour and the diet industry thrives on keeping us stuck in this cycle.

How to recognize extreme eating behaviour in yourself

As the old adage goes, the first step toward change is awareness and unless we recognize extreme eating behaviours in ourselves we’ll never be able to move past them to find true lasting balance.

Here are just a few ways that all of the bouncing around can manifest in your life:

Planning “cheat days” when anything and everything is “allowed” only to find yourself losing all manner of self control and feeling all kinds of guilt and shame afterwards;
Eating a whole bag of potato chips (or other “forbidden” food) for lunch and then skipping a meal later in the day to “make up for it”;
Fasting on Monday to make up for a weekend of "over indulgence”;
Extreme dieting / deprivation before a vacation or event so that you can look better in a bikini/dress;
Extreme dieting / deprivation after a vacation or event so that you can “reset” or “cleanse” your body;
Not eating unless you can eat the “perfect meal” then getting so hungry and overeating everything in sight when no one is watching (if no one saw it, it didn’t really happen);
Convincing yourself that eating healthy is too hard and doesn’t come naturally to you and using it as an excuse to eat whatever you want, when you want without regarding your nutritional needs.

I could go on and on, but I think you get the picture.

Bouncing back and forth between extremes is not only harmful to your relationship with food, it’s also harmful to your health as it affects your ability to meet your nutritional needs consistently and can cause a chain reaction of hormonal imbalances, digestive issues, blood sugar disregulation, lowered immunity and a cascade of mental and emotional issues, to name just a few.

In my one on one coaching program, I teach women how to find their wellness sweet spot so they can find balance and consistency in their eating habits long term and finally stop bouncing back and forth between extremes.

What is the wellness sweet spot and how do I find it?

The wellness sweet spot is just a fancy term for saying, balance. But don’t let that word scare you. It’s about finding the:

middle ground where, you care about your health and wellbeing, without letting it consume you;
happy medium where you meet your nutritional needs, without food rules and restrictions;
golden mean where you enjoy the foods you love, mindfully and without guilt and shame;

Today, I’m sharing 5 tips to help you find your sweet spot, so you can find balance and consistency in your eating habits, for good:

Practice mindful eating - how, where and why you eat is just as important as what you eat. Brind mindful presence to meal times by avoiding distractions, fully engaging your senses and connecting to the bounty before you with gratitude and appreciation. This will help you tune into your body’s signals to know what and how much you need.
Tune into your body’s innate wisdom to know what works for you. Get reacquainted with your hunger and satiety cues and start paying attention to how you feel when you eat and which foods make you feel your best. Once you know what works for you, you make a deliberate effort to make healthier choices for their inherent benefits and for how they make you feel.
Aim for progress, not perfection in your eating habits. Doing something most of the time for the long haul is far more powerful than doing it all the time for a short period. Lasting habit change doesn’t happen overnight and with extreme behaviours, but rather small consistent steps and a lot of trial and correction.
Focus on abundance and variety and stop worrying about what you have to cut out of your diet. The more you tell yourself you can’t have something, the more power it has over you. Instead, focus on adding a variety of minimally processed and unrefined whole foods and plenty of vegetables to your meals.
Include the foods you enjoy and that are part of your family traditions and cultural heritage even if they don’t fit the ideal “healthy food” standard. All foods fit when you have a well balanced approach to nutrition.

The bottom line is that diets are not the answer to creating healthy, mindful and intuitive eating habits that are sustainable long term, but ignoring your nutritional needs and eating with reckless abdandon is not the solution either. There’s a sweet spot, a happy medium, where you can care for your body and how you nourish it, with love, compassion and respect.