Are you in the diet mentality?

I toss around this term diet mentality a lot, and it occurred to me that I'd better define it.

But, it's kind of hard to define. So, here goes:

Do you think in terms of "good" foods and "bad" foods?
Do you feel good when you eat "good" foods and bad when you eat "bad" foods?
Do you ever feel disgusted with yourself over what you just ate?
Do you tend to think of yourself as either on a diet or off a diet (and eat accordingly?)
Do you try to trick your food cravings?
Do you feel guilty when you give in and eat what you are craving?
Do you celebrate by ordering "something fattening"?
Do you spend a lot of time thinking about food?
Do you often find yourself trying to calculate calories, or carbs, or fat grams?
Do you think that life will be better once you reach a certain weight?
Does your scale tend to dictate whether you feel happy or not?
Do you live by certain eating rules, such as not eating white foods, or not eating after 6pm?
Does eating healthy feel like a chore to you?



These are all indicators that you are living in the diet mentality; One of the reasons the diet mentality does not work is that you put all of your energy into external rules (good foods, bad foods, best time to eat, appropriate serving size, etc), and very little energy into your own internal cues (how hungry are you? what do you feel like eating? what is your body craving?) You are simply not listening to your body anymore when you are trying to go by a scripted "diet". And your body will always refuse to be ignored - your cravings will get more intense, your emotions more on the cranky side, you will be less satisfied with the food, etc.

Food is food and nothing more. A Twinkie is not evil and it does not make you a bad person if you eat one. Broccoli does not make you a better person when you eat it. Sure, nutrition plays a role in health, but there are many facets to health - a person eating a virtuous diet but not enjoying their life is not healthy, in my book. I'd also like to propose that a person surviving by eating only junk food is also obviously not healthy, for reasons other than just the food they are putting in their system. When you have a healthy self-esteem, you simply don't want to eat only junk food. A person who only wants the so-called "bad" foods is beating themself up from the inside out, for reasons known only to them.

Let's get off of the diet rollercoaster, and out of the diet mentality, so we can get on with the business of nourishing ourselves with food and life.