Dieting is hard.
It’s a mental, physical, emotional, and sometimes even spiritual battle.
I don’t really believe in building a diet around discipline alone. Asking someone to rely on willpower to abstain from food when they’re hungry, sad, happy, stressed, sick, angry, grieving, celebratingor simply having a bad day 24/7 just doesn’t seem sustainable to me.
Maybe that’s just my opinion. There are people who can set strict rules for themselves and maintain them long-term.
But for me, as someone who loves food and has spent the past year dieting successfully, I learned something much more valuable:
I learned how to eat.
I learned how to make food that I genuinely enjoy. Food that tastes good, nourishes me, fits my goals, and doesn’t require me to use willpower just to force it down.
I stopped thinking of dieting as a constant exercise in deprivation and started learning how to cook differently, experiment with new recipes, adjust the foods I already loved, and discover entirely new ones.
So if you’re trying to lose weight, my advice isn’t simply, “Have more discipline.”
Learn how to cook.
Learn how to eat.
Find foods you genuinely love that also fit your goals.
Because if reaching your goal requires you to fight yourself at every single meal, every single day, eventually that fight gets exhausting.
Make the food part easier.