Have you ever counted calories or tracked your meals on an app like MyFitnessPal and prohibited yourself from eating more than a certain amount, even if that meant skipping a meal? What about ordering the lowest calorie item on a restaurant menu, regardless of whether you like it as much as other available items, just to try to minimize your calorie intake as much as possible? Or have you even skipped going out to eat somewhere entirely in fear that you’ll lose control, forcing yourself to miss out on fun times with friends and family to ensure that you don’t go above your calorie or macro threshold for the day?
If any of these apply to you, odds are you’ve fallen prey to a scarcity mindset: a diet mentality that focuses on rigidly restricting and limiting calories and other entities like fat, sugar, and sodium. In modern society, scarcity mindsets are unfortunately far too common. With diet culture always telling us that we have to shrink our bodies and our portion sizes, it’s important to utilize an abundance mindset instead, where we maximize the servings of essential minerals, vitamins, and nutrients as opposed to focusing on a decrease in traditionally “unhealthy” food components.
With this in mind, here are some tips to get out of that scarcity mindset and transition into one of abundance:
- Count your servings of fruits and vegetables, not your calories
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While it can be okay to have an awareness of calories if you’re trying to gain or lose weight, it’s important that calories don’t become a means of obsession or an area of hyperfixation. To combat this and to fully adopt an abundance mindset, I advocate instead focusing on counting servings of fruits and vegetables! Psychologically, this encourages increased consumption of foods that offer great holistic benefits for our bodies rather than allowing calories to be our only metric of health. Experiment and find all sorts of yummy fruit and veggies to enjoy!
- Use food as a tool
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Thinking about food as a strategic means of fueling our bodies singehandely took me from feelings of insecurity about my body and obsessive thoughts surrounding my diet to a healthy relationship with everything nutrition and endless days full of maximized energy and wellness. The phrase “food is fuel” may be cliched, but it’s absolutely true; methodical eating will take your health and productivity to the next level.
For example, carbs provide short-term energy, whereas protein provides long-term energy. So, if you’re eating breakfast before a big exam, you might be best suited to pair a carb with a protein so that you have short-term energy at the onset of the exam as well as long-term energy that lasts throughout the duration of the testing time. Similarly, if you’re feeling bloated or constipated, opt for foods high in fiber, like whole wheat pastas and breads, blueberries, popcorn and beans, as fiber promotes gut health. To fight against the common cold or flu, knock down Vitamin C, or if you want to maximize healthy hair and nail growth, Vitamin A is an excellent choice.
The options are limitless here, but the key is this: many foods have unique properties and vitamins to help us obtain optimal health and energy, so look to nutrition as a means of providing you with what you need!
- Make healthy additions to your meals
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Scarcity mindset insists that we cut down on what we consume at mealtime, making our plates smaller and our appetites as minimal as possible. However, this approach is equally as harmful as it is inefficient.
Instead, let’s concentrate on the additions we can make to our meals. Making a smoothie? Add some spinach or kale for extra iron and a bonus serving of vegetables. Wanting to get in some more fiber? Sprinkle a handful of chia seeds on your next bowl of yogurt or oatmeal. Preparing a pasta dish of some sort? Throw in broccoli to increase protein.
The point here is that we need to stop seeing meals as something to shrink down and start seeing them as opportunities to further fulfill our nutritional needs, because that’s exactly what meals are.
- Stop equating dietary choices with morality
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Too often, we hear others and even ourselves make comments like, “Ugh, I’ve been so bad today. I had cake and pizza,” or, “I picked a salad over macaroni at Panera. Look at me being so good!”
To be clear, there is nothing wrong with having both cake and pizza in one day, nor is there an issue with opting for leafy greens in place of a cheesy pasta dish at a restaurant. The problem with each of these statements lies within the fact that such actions are being attributed to an inherent quality of “goodness” or “badness.” We are not better people for having a green smoothie just as we are not worse people for eating a donut or snacking on potato chips. We are perfectly made exactly the way that we are, and nutritional decisions don’t have any bearing on our character, so there’s no need to allow the food we consume to negatively impact our self worth!
- Ditch the diet once and for all
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Perhaps this goes without saying, but diets like Keto and Weight Watchers that promise you the body of your dreams as long as you adhere to their stringent rules are merely a cash grab. Real dietitians would never advocate that you ditch carbs — we just talked about how important they are for short term energy! — nor would they feel that tracking everything you eat through an arbitrary point system is productive or sustainable.
Rather, an abundance mindset encourages us to pursue food freedom and eat what makes us feel best, and you simply cannot do this while cutting out an important macromolecule group. Sorry, Keto fans.
Here’s to a year full of abundant mindsets with nutrition!