The off-a-diet approach to nutrition is a process of disconnecting from the diet mentality and restoring a healthy eating behavior.
In more detail:
The main purpose of the off-a-diet approach to nutrition is physical, mental and emotional health.To achieve this goal, the approach is based on the following three main objectives:
Gradual return to our instinctive way of eating.
Nutrition, exercise, and overall lifestyle with awareness and mindfulness.
Nutritious way of eating with nutrient-dense foods that provide all the nutrients the body needs.
In order for you to stop your diet journey and your unhealthy mentality around weight and eating, you need to work on some important areas of your everyday living.
You need to get rid of the diet mentality and the way you think about nutrition, foods, diets and everything else related. The first step is one of the hardest. You need to stop thinking about weight loss.
If you have a long dieting journey in your past, chances are that you have one or more signs of disordered eating behaviours. You need to recognize them, get to their roots and work on uprooting them. It will be the most important behaviour change you will make. And it will lay the foundation for building a new intuitive eater.
Your relationship with your body has been affected by the diet mentality. It is crucial for your recovery that you heal this relationship. You need to start taking care of your body and be grateful for all the things it can do for you. For a start, you need to stop punishing it and start listening to it.
If there is a bond in your mind between exercise and weight loss, it is about time you break that bond. You need to embrace body movement for all the great things that it can do for you and your health. You will try different types of exercise and turn the ones you like into a lifelong habit.
Although mindful eating is part of the eating behavior change, doing everything in your daily life with mindfulness can actually improve the quality of every aspect of your life. The modern ways of living have had their toll on our focus and awareness. We eat mindlessly, scroll mindlessly, watch mindlessly, even communicate mindlessly. We need to minimize multi-tasking and regain our focus.
In order to heal your relationship with food, you need to stop focusing on numbers such as calories. But that doesn’t mean that accurate nutrition knowledge can’t help you. Information such as nutrient density in foods and health-supportive nutrition facts can empower you in your intuitive eating journey.
Physical, mental and emotional health are interrelated. When one suffers, the others are affected. You need to take care of all the things that matter to the well-being of your mind and body, like sleep, stress management, social connections and anything else that needs your care.