I wrote yesterday about my three ingredients to a solid foundation in a healthy lifestyle and weight loss. I firmly believe in those three (but, actually four!) important ideas, but here’s something else I want to discuss: lifestyle change.

Diets are defined as the food you eat. Not the food you eat temporarily to lose weight as many people would define the word. We’re talking about the food you eat on a daily basis, as the standard range of food you eat in your lifestyle. My diet is the Paleo Diet, and every now and then (including right now), I adopt a more restrictive diet called Whole30. While my primary goal is typically weight loss when I do a Whole30, the actual work being done is the following:

• Reducing my carb intake and mitigating any effect sugar has on my diet
• Reducing my portion sizes

So, how does this relate to the title of this post? Well, I picture diets as sort of like a boyfriend or girlfriend. You chose to have one. You enter into a relationship with them, and they can bring you comfort, joy, and security, or at worse, they can cause pain, illness, and even jeopardize your health. The good news is that you are in control of this relationship, and you can terminate it at any time. The better news is that unlike a boyfriend or girlfriend, you can immediately begin a new relationship without repercussions and change your life for the better.

Changing one’s lifestyle isn’t easy. It means looking at food in a whole new way, and it also means relying on the three tenets of the foundation I laid out in yesterday’s post, but once you get through the first two-three weeks, it just becomes your way of life, and things get much easier.

Break up with that bad boyfriend or bad girlfriend and begin a new, healthy lifestyle by eating right. Whether that means Whole30, Paleo, Keto, CICO, IF, etc doesn’t matter so much as you dedicate yourself to making the change.