Celebrate your diet.
When you do it right, you are taking control of your choices, body, and habits, so that your life will be better.
You are ensuring that you will feel more energetic, live longer, have more opportunities to do the things you love, be proud of yourself, and look better while doing it.
These are all wonderful things. And should be a joyous experience.
Dieting the wrong way is miserable
But most people absolutely hate dieting. And this is understandable when you try to diet in the traditional way that doesn’t work.
Depriving yourself of the foods you love.
Constantly being hungry.
Forcing yourself to spend your precious time on exercise that you find either boring or painful.
A daily drain on your willpower.
And the underlying sense of self-hatred telling you you’re worth less as a person because you aren’t already skinny.
Anyone would hate that. Those are terrible things to put yourself through.
And it’s because traditional diets are so unpleasant that those who try them inevitably fail.
Even if you temporarily lose weight, you’ll quickly gain it back again.
Celebrate dieting the right way
It’s different when you diet the right way.
As I’ve said many times before, you won’t be able to permanently lose weight by giving up the foods you love.
Instead, you need to build sustainable habits you can keep for the rest of your life. One of the most important habits is to think before you eat, and decide if the food is worth it.
Sometimes you’ll decide that the enjoyment you get from unhealthy food is worth it. That’s totally fine, as long as you do it in moderation.
There’s another vitally important habit that you will absolutely need to develop in order to lose weight and keep it off for life:
That is to celebrate your good decisions. Take pride in your progress. And be excited for the future success you are confident you will achieve.
Celebration is important for habit formation
There’s a scientific reason it’s important to celebrate your good decisions and weight loss. It has to do with habit formation.
A habit consists of an action and a reward. Before you start your weight loss journey, you have a habit of eating poorly.
Your action is to eat too much unhealthy food. Your reward is the delicious flavor and dopamine hit of the fat and sugar hitting your bloodstream.
Your goal is to replace this habit with a healthier one.
In a traditional, ineffective diet, you replace the action with deciding not to eat the unhealthy food. But instead of a reward, you give yourself a punishment.
You feel sad and deprived. You remind yourself of your body that you hate. You tell yourself you deserve to be unhappy as punishment for overeating in the past.
By punishing instead of rewarding your behavior change, you are actively stopping yourself from forming a new habit.
Now look at losing weight in the right way.
Your action is to make a rational decision whether the food is worth it.
Perhaps you decide to have a small amount, so you still get the reward of enjoying the food. But you also get the reward of pride, knowing you’re taking ownership of improving your life, and confidence that this is something you can keep up indefinitely.
With this mental reward, you’re able to build the habit.
Be excited for your progress and future self instead of hating your past/present self
Another useful mental shift is to focus on excitement for your progress and what your future body will be, instead of being unhappy about where you are now or where you were in the past.
No matter your size, you are a wonderful person who is worthy of being loved.
Get rid of the mindset that you’re trying to lose weight because there’s something wrong with you. Instead, you are trying to lose weight and keep it off so that your life can be even better.
A good way to do this is by planning celebratory things to do that you wouldn’t have been able to or wanted to do with your old body.
You could plan a vacation to a beach resort where you’ll be comfortable wearing swimsuits, or to a national park where you’ll be capable of going on hikes.
You could pick out the sexy outfits you’ll be able to pull off.
You could plot out what will go in your closet after you donate the clothes that will be too big for you.
You could look up dance lessons, or tennis lessons, or some other activity you’ll be able to enjoy a lot more once you’re skinny.
You could tell your partner about the adventurous things you plan to do in the bedroom once you have the confidence and athleticism.
(Just make sure your celebration isn’t food. Dreaming about the big meal you’ll have once you’ve lost weight is dieting the wrong way.)
Conclusion: Celebrate your diet so you can succeed
Dieting is as much or more about mindset than it is about what you actually stick in your mouth.
If you think diets are miserable and expect to fail, your expectations will come true.
But if you see a diet as a celebration of your decision to improve yourself, and have confidence that you’ll succeed, that confidence will be rewarded.
Did you find this article helpful? You might enjoy my book The Weight Loss Habit: The No BS, No Gimmick, (Sort Of) Easy Way to Lose Weight and Keep It Off Forever. Available now on Amazon.
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