Diet vs. Lifestyle Change
When we talk about weight-loss, we often think about dieting. Because dieting is the key to losing weight, right? Wrong. In reality, dieting isn’t all it takes to lose the weight and keep it off, feeling great all the while.When you hear the word dieting, what comes to mind? Restriction. Limitation. Dissatisfaction? But, what if instead of focusing on dieting — the verb, we began talking about diet — the noun. When we shift the conversation from what we shouldn’t be eating to what we could be eating to improve our health instead, a balanced diet becomes an addition to our life, not a subtraction. It’s this line of thinking that brings us to the alternative to strictly relying on extreme dieting to lose weight: a lifestyle change.
A weight-loss journey is just that. A journey. It’s about more than avoiding certain foods, hitting the gym, or eating your fruits and veggies. It’s a combination of all of these things and everything in between. It’s about creating an enjoyable, sustainable lifestyle that will facilitate weight-loss and improve the overall health of the body and mind.
As opposed to dieting, a lifestyle change is not rigid or finite. It looks different for each and every person and should be approached with creativity. Maybe part of your lifestyle change looks like taking the dog for a walk both morning and night. Maybe part of it looks like packing a lunch the night before instead of picking up fast food during your lunch hour. Maybe it looks like ten minutes of meditation before bed to improve the quality of sleep. Why not all three? Unlike dieting, a lifestyle change is not a cut-and-dry strategy. It’s a continuous effort to enrich our lives during the process of achieving a goal and setting new ones.
What do some of the lifestyle changes you’ve made look like? Share with us @orberausa.
