A healthy relationship with food is crucial for long-term and sustainable success in fitness, essential both from physical and psychological perspective for everyday functioning.
Your diet should be well-structured and closely aligned with the goal you want to achieve! The more specific and distant your goal is, the stricter you’ll need to be with your habits initially, much closer to that golden 80-20 rule, perhaps even 90-10 or 95-5, eating almost all the time what you already know you should—unprocessed, whole, and healthier food than the one that led you to your current state that you want to change.
On the other hand, what is not necessary, unless you want to go in that direction or follow a trendy diet, is to eliminate anything from your diet. Literally anything! Again, the farther and/or bigger your goals are, you will need to limit some things, to some extent, maybe even drastically if you have been overdoing them so far. Nevertheless, absolutely every food and meal can be part of a balanced diet, which is basically the point of today’s picture in the attachment. People sometimes find this concept incomprehensible. They will be surprised when they see you holding a piece of pizza and ask questions like, ‘what are you allowed to eat,’ driven precisely by that unhealthy ‘all or nothing’ mentality that, in the long run, is not sustainable and can even be harmful, causing an unhealthy relationship with food and certain psychological issues. Elite professional athletes do not eat 100-0 ‘clean,’ so it is truly hard to tell where such craze and aspiration for it came from among us recreational athletes. In the end, the pursuit of progress through self-improvement really should not involve something so burdensome and disheartening.
Original release date: April 25, 2022.