With the upcoming New Year, resolutions to lose weight, get fit, and “eat right” will be in full swing.
Suppose one of your goals is to find holistic wellness. If that is the case, it is essential to know what will actually produce health and balance in your life, rather than allowing “diet culture” to influence your perceptions and ideas around what wellness entails.
‘Diet Culture’
“Diet culture” relates to ideas or perspectives that value slenderness, appearance, and size above general health and well-being. This concept also places importance on unhealthy practices including restricting calories, negative self-talk, and identifying various foods as ‘good’ and ‘bad.’
This “diet culture” perpetuates these concepts at the expense of individuals actually defining for themselves and experiencing what it means and feels like to be healthy and well in their lives. Because of its prevalence in modern society, it is something to be wary of when looking to improve your health.
The Problem With Dieting
It is normal to have a diet, as consuming food is vital for existence. However, diets can become tricky when they are too rigid, structured, and restrictive. If you have ever gone on a diet, only to fall off and begin again, you are not the problem.
Research shows that those who dieted gained back all the weight they lost after the diet ended, as this is the body’s biological response to the restriction of food. Therefore, the way to truly honor your body is to find a diet that allows you to be intuitive, nourish your body, and live your life with flexibility rather than restriction.
Remember, what is healthy for you may be different than what is healthy for someone else. Your dietary needs also change with age.
Discover What ‘Health’ Means to You
To appreciate what it truly means to be healthy, you need to determine what your body needs to experience wellness outside of what society has convinced you to do to be well. This includes fueling your body with foods in line with your individual health, appetite, and cravings rather than eating to manipulate what your body looks like.
Give yourself the true experience of health this New Year by unlearning harmful “diet culture” and wellness principles that have kept you stuck in unhealthy cycles. It is time to access the true freedom, confidence, and health you desire and deserve.
The mark of a new year can feel full of pressure to be different than who and how you are. Rather than it being a time of forcing yourself to be something you aren’t, it can be a time for self-acceptance and to experience wellness in your life in a way that makes sense for you. At Avalon Malibu, we are here to support you as you discover what health and wellness mean for you. To learn more, call us today at (844) 857-5992.
