If you’re a woman in 2024, chances are you have already done a diet in your life, or that you’ve at least considered going on one (or restricting your food intake in any way). And when I think of the quest of the Perfect Diet, I think about two things: finding the miracle diet that's going to make us lose all the weight, and the way we strive for a perfect way of eating, and the negative emotions we feel if we can't hold ourselves to that perfection we want to achieve.

The Perfect Diet: I want miracles

And if you’re anything like me, you probably even have tried several ones, in the quest of the "Perfect diet": counting calories, counting macros, points, syns, the “I'm only making better choices” but in the end it’s very much about eating less of a certain food group, juice diet, apple diet, keto, paleo, reducing carbs, and probably about 1000 more that I don’t even know about. All in the hope of finding The Perfect Diet that will make you lose all the weight and keep it off.

And that’s what media portrays to us, right? Brand new fad diets, that promise you miracles - and create an unattainable ideal. A lot of us have experienced the “yo-yo” effect of diets: you lose weight, and then you put it all back on then some. So you find a new diet to try and experience, because why not as it’s new and shiny, you lose weight again and put it back on (with a few kilos as a bonus!), and you start again, and again, and again… A vicious circle that never stops!

All the while, your body is experiencing the effects of all of this, but so is your mental health. The stress that trying to find this perfect diet is truly insane - we put so much pressure on ourselves, always trying to find the perfect way of eating that will give us the best results possible.

The reframe I want to offer you in this post is to ask yourself is, did any of those diets actually feel like the Perfect Diet FOR YOU? Did one of them feel like something that you could follow for the rest of your life, and more importantly, doing it with joy (on most days, because we’re all human and we can’t love something at every single minute or day!)?

I’d like to offer than focusing on feeding your body fuel is only one part of it: food IS our fuel, there’s no denying that. But actually, eating while in a stress state can create way more damage that eating something that you deem unhealthy. Learning to relax when eating is such an important aspect of the journey to food and body freedom.

Learning to nourish your body and yourself with food that both give you the nutrients you need but also bring you joy is essential. And there’s no diet that works for everyone: you will find a way of eating that works for you at that specific time, but it will evolve as your life changes. When you get older, go live in another country, move in with someone, have kids to feed, learn how to feed yourself once the kids have left, etc… So many things can impact what we eat.

The Perfect Diet: I'm a perfectionist

The second thing that comes to my mind when I think of the Perfect Diet and the other thing I wanted to mention in this post is that we often want to find perfection in the way we eat. The "all or nothing" (or "black and white thinking") mentality fits into that - when we want to achieve 100% of eating a certain way at every meal and every day, and if we "fail", we become super harsh on ourselves. And then the guilt and shame follow, along with our self-confidence plummeting.

Trying to achieve a certain way of eating and putting pressure on yourself to only eat foods that you see as “healthy” or "good", and avoid the ones you see as “bad” as much as you can can make you feel like you're in control. But how much stress does that cause you? Well, I can tell you because I’ve been there: SO much stress. I even stopped wanting to have a social life because going out meant being in contact with food that I considered bad: anything that I wasn’t cooking at home basically was, because I couldn't control what would be put in my plate or my drink.

It just made me miserable, and I know I’m not the only one who's ever felt like that. Trying to maintain that "Perfect Diet" I had picked for myself was causing so much stress and so much mind drama! I felt like I was losing all my power and willpower when I was offered some food that I considered bad for me. Being offered a brownie would completely derail my day and cause so much stress - the brownie would trigger my "all or nothing" thinking, so by having the brownie I would feel like a failure and would often binge later. Why? Because I had already ruined my diet of the day with the brownie, so the day's efforts were lost anyway...

Learning to let go of perfection and looking for shades of grey in my diet (to replace my "black and white thinking") and about eating intuitively following my body cues were essential steps in my journey - and they were game-changers. And that's something my clients often work on in my Body Freedom coaching programme.

So what I want to share in this post is that, if you were to define your perfect diet right now, what would it be? What do you imagine when we talk about Perfect Diet? Can you look for your own "shades of grey" in your diet? And is this only about fuelling your body, or is there any aspect of enjoyment in it?

Grab your journal and write about it!