Be kind to yourself.
Improving nutrition can be an act of self care or a self enforced punishment depending on how we approach it.
If we want to work on our nutrition I think we need to ask ourselves whether we are doing this because we want to fix something we consider a flaw, possibly because we dislike our weight or our appearance, or whether we can approach nutrition from a place of kindness, where we aim to offer ourselves the benefits of better energy, mood or body composition?
In my opinion this distinction is very important to the quality of our results. Self compassion has been shown be supportive of healthier eating habits and a better body image (1).
If we hit ourselves with the proverbial stick in order to force ourselves to reduce our calories or deny ourselves the pleasure of food, we might reduce our dress size but be miserable or exhausted or stressed. This approach might not make us feel as good about ourselves as we thought. It’s notoriously difficult to battle on with a regime which makes us feel stressed or tired or starving.
I suggest a compassionate paradigm where we start from a place of self acceptance. If we can accept ourselves as we currently are, whilst working on giving ourselves what we need nutritionally to be healthy, happy and energetic, we can take good care of ourselves as we improve our wellbeing rather than battling against self imposed harshness or criticism. We can be kind to ourselves rather than self punishing, which in my opinion is a much better way to approach nutrition.
References
Carbonneau, N. et al. ‘Feel good, eat better: The role of self-compassion and body esteem in mothers’ healthy eating behaviours’, Nutrients. (2021); 13(11): 3907. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8625178/