I’ve had a difficult relationship with food for years now. When I lived with my parents I always told myself, “Once I move out, I’m going to eat really healthy. I’m never going to buy any unhealthy snacks or processed foods”. I’m been living on my own for two years now, and that hasn’t happened yet. In the last few weeks, I’ve realized that trying to diet (especially to lose weight) is a flawed idea. Instead of me watching how many calories I eat and burn, I should be following a healthy lifestyle. This means, instead of going on drastic diets for a short time, we should instead focus on cultivating healthy eating habits in general. But before I came to this realization, I tried (and failed) at several diets. Here are a few:
- Intermittent Fasting
-
Intermittent fasting involves eating food during specific hours of the day, and the rest of the time only having zero-calorie things like tea or coffee. I tried this because I thought if I had a filling meal before my classes started, I wouldn’t feel hungry for the rest of the day. But no matter how much I ate in the morning (and I ate a lot), by tea-time I was hungry again. This often resulted in me buying a couple of slices of cheese pizza or munching on a sugary M&M cookie.
- Going Vegan
-
I’m not a huge meat-eater so when I saw my favorite yoga gurus on Youtube talk about their vegan diets, I thought making this change would come easy for me. But the challenge turned out to be just how much dairy I had in my diet. While I don’t drink milk, I need at least two spoonfuls of ice-cream before going to bed every night and pizza is my comfort food. I gave up on veganism because I thought being mindful about buying vegan food, meal-prepping and making sure that I was ALWAYS eating vegan food was too much work. But I still aspire to go vegan someday.
- Saying no to Fast Food
-
I’m a little bit addicted to Wendy’s, I eat it even when I’m not hungry. But very soon I knew that this wasn’t great for my health. I watched too many documentaries about processed foods which told me that frozen meals include cardboard (exaggeration) and fast food chicken nuggets don’t have any chicken in them (not an exaggeration). So I decided to never eat fast food again. But it didn’t last very long, I usually either got hungry, or bored or just had some money to spare.
I also tried the “no sugar” diet, “no gluten” diet, one of the dramatic kpop idol diets; and all of them failed. I realized that I was setting some very strict rules for myself and if I didn’t follow one of them, it would cause a domino effect and I wouldn’t follow any of them. So recently I’ve stopped completely forbidding myself from eating any kind of food. I now eat healthy, nutritious breakfasts loaded with protein and keep fruits in my backpack to snack on. When I go out with my friends I don’t watch what I’m eating or if I’m really craving something, I’ll eat it. But the next day I’m back to my yoga, green tea and vegetarian food grind.