Mindset Factors that Affect Dietary Decisions
Hey Angels and Alphas,
I hope we can all agree that having full control over your diet is one of the most useful skills and habits you can develop on your weight loss journey. When they’re trying to lose weight, a lot of people naturally start gripping to the nearest food trends and diets, hoping to get that control.
But sometimes, we all make wrong decisions simply because of the fact that there’s so much generalized misinformation out there about fitness and nutrition.
Ultimately, our decision-making process on what to eat (and what not to) will be decided by two main factors: internal factors and external factors.
First, there are internal factors.
These have everything to do with your lifestyle and your knowledge base about nutrition.
Your age, height, weight, sex, fitness level, culture, workout intensity, your taste in food, as well as your way of managing time. These all have to do with your responsibilities to yourself – your training, your diet, your stress relief practices, your mindfulness, everything that has to do with your journey as an individual.
Even though taste is one of the more critical factors from an individual standpoint (because even if you’re genetically pre-disposed to liking some foods), external factors can still have a massive impact on whether or not you actually consume them. And when it comes to managing time, some people just don’t have the ability to cook for an hour a day.
Determining your individual tastes, goals, and abilities is the first step to creating a productive and healthy meal plan. Whether you’re just starting out your journey or you’re someone who has been trying to achieve a fitness goal for a certain amount of time, creating a plan that takes into account your individual tastes and preferences will help steer your entire journey.
Then, you have to take into account the external factors.
These include marketing, advertising, social, and economic status, everything that has to do with your unconscious perception of certain foods.
Your beliefs (for example, chocolate is bad) get reinforced every day by what you see online. But if you want to follow a productive plan that will get you where you want to, you have to clear your mind of all these generalized beliefs and look at things from your individual perspective. Don’t go cutting all of your favorite foods just because the TV said so.
Your external beliefs therefore include a lot of your societal programming about weight loss, fitness, and what it means to live a healthy lifestyle as a whole. Many people will try to project their view on the world on you and say that theirs is the right (and usually only) way to do things.
This is where you have to take into account the internal factors and decide your tastes and preferences so you can find out if what is promoted is in line with your individual goals.
Always remember to focus on both of these factors when planning your nutrition! If you only listen to yourself, you won’t be learning enough to grow. But if all you do is take in information, soon enough you’ll be blindly following fitness trends without making any progress.
Listen to yourself first, but always keep the external factors on your mind.
If you want to develop more discipline and develop a healthier relationship with food, you should never ignore your individual preferences.
That being said, you should also never forget that people and organizations will always try to promote their concept of healthy nutrition, so don’t allow yourself to be pushed into following any specific diet, plan, or routine.
Be flexible with your approach until you develop your own internal hierarchy of fitness and nutrition values that will reflect what you want to achieve.
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