What Will It Take To Make Eating Healthy a Lifestyle?

Finding a deeper reason for eating healthy is essential for making it a lifestyle. We all have gone on quick-fix diets to lose weight for certain occasions like weddings, high school reunions, and parties. However, we can’t count on the superficial or temporary motivations to help us to maintain our weight loss.

Once we stop eating the way that a diet prescribes, our weight comes back; and more often than not, additional weight is gained. We fool ourselves into thinking that since we lost the weight, we could now eat anything we wanted. Our rude awakening comes quickly when our weight rapidly returns.

Wishing we could just eat healthy won’t cut it!

We can wish until the cows come home, but it won’t happen for us. Our motivation must be founded in a strong desire to be healthy in mind, body, and spirit. We must be sick and tired of being sick and tired!

We must be willing to do whatever it takes to be free from the compulsion and control of food.

Only then, will we be ready to submit to a process that works over the long haul, instead of a short timeframe. The process is called recovery. We find recovery in working the 12-Steps. (Want to know more about the 12-Steps and food?  (Read my blog series on the Steps. See Step 1: https://bit.ly/2RgvvWK)

Actively working the 12-Steps of recovery, along with eating healthy, is an entirely different path than just working a “diet.” The 12-Steps of recovery is the missing link to long-term weight loss, peace of mind, contentedness, and freedom from the control of food.

Community

Join a 12-Step group that speaks to your particular issue with food. We must have the support of others who understand our struggle.

My Experience

I have found that regularly meeting with others who have similar issues with food, in a structured environment, will give me the support that I need to live a healthy lifestyle. I know that I can’t do it alone!

Literature – Read and Meditate

The 12-Step materials help guide us through the Steps, one at a time. Reading daily devotional books and the Bible will give us the spiritual foundation and guidance for each day.

Higher Power

The 12-Step recovery process points us to God because we can’t overcome the compulsion and obsession with food without the help of God.

My Experience

I have tried for years to do it on my own, but it doesn’t work. I need God’s help to give me the power to daily walk this path, forsaking my compulsions.

Perspective

Living a healthy lifestyle doesn’t just mean eating right or staying at a normal weight. It is living in recovery from addictive eating, which incorporates a healthy mind, body, and spirit. The 12-Steps encompasses all three of these elements.

When Food Calls

When we are in the routine of eating healthy, we will experience “food thoughts.” Be prepared for when that voice in our head says, “I need a chocolate candy bar” or whatever food you crave at that moment.  Many times, this thought seems to pop into our minds out of nowhere! But, if we examine why we are having food thoughts, we will discover that there is a reason. We either feel stressed, tired, too hungry, lonely, angry, sad or we just want to comfort ourselves for whatever reason.

To be victorious over food thoughts, we must not continue to entertain it. After we’ve figured out the trigger that caused us to think of food (stress, etc.), we must do the next right thing. Use the tools that we’ve learned in our 12-Step recovery group. We can call someone in our group, pray, go for a walk, journal, and more.

Recovery is Key

This is why recovery of the mind, body, and spirit is the answer to yo-yo dieting. The 12-Steps of recovery a holistic way of tackling our addiction to food. Living in recovery is a way of life that affords us to live in freedom from the compulsion and obsession with food, one day at a time.

Are you having issues with doing whatever it takes to make eating healthy a lifestyle? If so, why? Leave your comment below.

Cynthia