We all want to take control of our health. After all, a healthy body and mind help to create a situation where we can look and feel our best. Cultivating that isn’t necessarily always the easiest thing in the world though. You have to figure out how to strike a balance between many competing factors with the unfortunate fact being that some of these factors are how often you get to enjoy certain kinds of food. There aren’t necessarily any outright dietary restrictions in place that stop us from enjoying what we eat, but our bodies can only handle so much of particular foods without there being negative consequences. Trying to eat right or simply cut things out of your diet can be a difficult task that sometimes creates an all-or-nothing attitude that leads us to just stop enjoying food as we associate it with bad things. This kind of “deny-itying” doesn’t help anyone and can actually hurt you.

Hurting Your Body
The physical issues with deny-itying cover a range of issues. One of the most prominent is simply physical discomfort. We all get used to certain amounts and kinds of foods. That’s what gradually creates our diet and ends up governing a lot of our weight. Denying things you enjoy to yourself becomes a very physical thing as your body responds to the presence of particular foods after long enough. The longing for them can end up making denying yourself physically painful and thereby hard to tolerate. Furthermore, this can actually sidestep into the bad habit of just outright not eating when you want to lose weight. Yes, feeling hungry when dieting is usually encouraged to a degree as it will mean your body will burn more fat, but denying yourself too much and feeling too hungry can become unhealthy. Your body will actually hold on to more energy in anticipation of you not getting enough to eat regularly. That will just hurt your chances at improving your health through the dieting. The mental effects are just as bad.

The Failing Art of Self-Denial
Refusing to eat the foods you want to tends to be a losing proposition. We all have a finite amount of willpower and the desire to eat the tasty food, whatever it is, will eventually break. The trick is figuring out the best way to try to minimize the habit. Outright denying it isn’t just almost impossible, but it will make your miserable. After all, many people know very well the feeling of watching a friend eat something they wish they could have if it weren’t for a diet. The food becomes an obsession and it makes maintaining the break from it even harder. Deny-itying like this is a recipe to be mentally and physically miserable. As a result, most of us will not be able to maintain the dedication to the change in diet. The worst news out of this is that we’re likely to end up overindulging after we finally break down and give in to the craving.

A Balance In All Things
Deny-itying goes nowhere fast. Actually making meaningful changes to your diet is typically a gradual process. You phase out problem foods and replace them with others. Adding in new foods that help you feel full for longer is a good way of gradually reducing your overall appetite too. The key thing to remember is not to abandon your guilty pleasures. They’re pleasures for a reason and you deserve to feel happy with your diet even when you’re making meaningful changes. All you have to do is make sure that you’re guilty pleasures remain that way. This will mean you can go out and indulge occasionally with friends or make that comfort food you love occasionally. It isn’t cheating to reward yourself and make yourself happy. It is reaffirming and will help you commit to the larger scale changes that will help your health slowly improve. That is how you make and maintain truly long lasting change.

There are good and bad ways to diet. Unfortunately, the bad ways tend to outnumber the good and we end up getting a lot of bad advice. All the bad habits we get from such advice make actually dieting in a proper and healthy manner far more difficult than it needs to be and ruin our chances at making them stick. A diet isn’t meant to be sentencing yourself to misery. It is about improvement. So don’t practice deny-itying and just remove your favorite foods from your diet without your doctor telling you that it is necessary. Make your guilty pleasures better by making them the indulgences they’re supposed to be and use them to help you enjoy an overall healthier diet in other ways.