Easy Tips to Strengthen Your Commitment to a Whole Foods Diet
A whole foods diet is the vehicle that will deliver permanent, hunger-free weight loss. Commitment is the engine that makes this vehicle move. Knowledge of the weight and health benefits of unprocessed plant foods will make you comfortable with this top-of-the line diet. But facts alone are static and are not likely to get you to your goals.
Commitment is a drive that you consciously build. At first, this can require much effort. Later, commitment becomes more of a habit and worldview, reinforcing itself every time you make a positive choice.
Willpower is different, and necessarily short term. When you rely on willpower, you force yourself to do something you really don’t want to do. For example, if you don’t like your job, it takes enormous willpower to show up every day. Taking the unwanted, even
Commitment makes choosing whole foods this easy and fun
dreaded, action becomes harder each time you do it.
In contrast, commitment becomes easier over time. Eventually your choices are as effortless as floating in a refreshing pool on a hot summer day.
Commitment will keep you consistently on track to take actions you desire, but which may be drowned out by other choices if you don’t stay focused. Consider moving toward a whole foods diet as one example. You actually want to eat healthy food and learn to build your taste for crunchy vegetables, sweet fruits, and whole grain breads. To get there, you need to break old habits, overcome lazy inertia, and retrain your appetite. So commitment moves you from longing to success.
Many strategies enhance the dedication that real commitment requires. One of the most effective methods is to focus on a cause outside your own self-centered concerns. The power of caring is enormous. If weight loss is your goal and a whole foods diet is your method, choose the cause that has the most emotional impact to keep you on track. You can focus on slowing climate change through a sustainable diet, ending animal suffering, or feeding hungry people with grain otherwise destined to become animal feed.
The more methods you use to foster commitment, the sooner and more completely you will succeed. Visualization is a readily available tool to reinforce choices you want to make, but maybe have sidelined. This method is most effective when you use all your senses to imagine, in detail, where you want to go and how you want to get there. Frequent and intense visualization can put you on the road to success.
Visualization, like all skills, takes practice. To get yourself going, try creating a physical image of yourself looking the way you want to after sticking to your whole foods eating plan.
If you can draw this picture yourself, or even put up an old photo of the fit you, go for it. If you need some help, the site empowermephoto.com can create a motivating image for less than the charge for a typical doctor visit or prescription. When you think of the cost of illness, the expense of being healthy becomes manageable.
Don’t expect commitment to increase in a straight line. Your dedication will be stronger some days than others. If your commitment is moving up more often that down, be confident that you will succeed. You will make the choices you want and break free of limiting habits. Commitment then becomes a passionate liberation, straight from your heart.
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Blog by Janice Stanger, Ph.D. Janice authored The Perfect Formula Diet, a nutrition book built on sustainable food choices. Enjoy six kinds of whole foods for permanent, hunger-free weight loss and health.
Tags: getting healthy, global warming, greenhouse gases, Janice Stanger, lose weight, perfect body, Plant-based nutrition, process of change, visualization, weight loss, whole foods
