3 questions you need to ask yourself about your diet

R.Madhwal Veteran & Farmer

Restrictive diets are a way of eating that reduces calories to below someone’s energy needs and/or limits the macronutrients or food groups a person eats.

Such diets aren’t sustainable,. You might not get your calorie or nutrient needs, or they might encourage bingeing behaviors and could lead to unhealthy relationships with food and your body.

But how do you know when a diet is restrictive or when you are just making choices with health or longevity in mind?

There are good rules of thumb. If you find that you base your choices on hopes of losing weight or if your diet excludes whole food groups, you are likely on a restrictive diet.

How often are you thinking about food?

One way to evaluate your diet is to look at how much you are thinking about food.

With a health-conscious lifestyle, you might be able to eat what your body needs and move forward. But when under a restrictive diet, people tend to obsess over what they ate, what they will eat and the shame they feel after they have eaten.

How rigid are you?

Another good gauge is your flexibility around the style of eating you are following.There’s a difference between a preference for eating or a way of eating that makes somebody feel good versus a set of rigid rules that have to be followed.There are certain health conditions in which a food needs to be cut out entirely, but otherwise you can give yourself permission to approach the food in question in a more balanced way.

For example, if you are trying to limit Chicken — are you saying that you will never have chicken again, or can you be comfortable adding salads ,vegetables and nuts to the Chicken gravy alongside the chicken, so you are eating less of it?

“Instead of looking at what you can cut out,” Food experts say, “look at what you can add in.”

Can you have just a little bit?

If you put all these rules around certain foods, you’re going to feel like feast or famine on that food.

Feeling as if you can’t control yourself around particular foods might be a sign that you are being too restrictive in your diet. And that can be physically restrictive by not allowing yourself to eat the food or mentally restrictive by shaming yourself while eating it and afterward.

Moving away from restriction

The goal is to remove the mystique of demonized foods so you can make choices based on what your body needs rather than what your brain is scared it won’t be able to get again.

Nevertheless, there are health conditions such as allergies in which foods do have to be cut out entirely. Be sure to follow your doctor’s advice in those cases.