by Jill Jacks

Created on: July 21, 2010

Why it's okay to break your diet every so often. 

Life is full of rules. In general rules are fraught with good intentions and innate wisdom. Society as a whole benefits from rules as they lend communities a harmonious atmosphere and encourage the likes of safety and productivity. Rules provide reliability and predictability, which likely accounts for our obsessive need to allow rules to govern our lives - from the complex rules of law to the simple rules of baseball play. Most are not even aware of how controlled their lives are.

Yet there are times when rules are meant to be broken. Imagine if engineers never questioned the confines or rules of architecture? How high and how long would our bridges have turned out to be? Rules have been broken since the beginning of time and have provided as much benefit to society as keeping the rules have been. So is it okay to break your diet every so often?  You bet it is.

Enough can't be said about living a healthy lifestyle, eating nutritious foods and keeping fit. The benefits of anti-aging, strength, self-esteem, and overall better health are the results of following such superior lifestyles. I personally don't consider healthy eating a "diet" but rather a life choice. The rewards derived far surpass a smaller dress size.

For the majority, eating healthy is seen in terms of "a diet" rather than what their "diet" or eating habits consist of. It is also seen as something of an obstacle to get around rather than as a preventative of far graver future obstacles . For others dieting has become a necessity due to obesity and/or health issues. Nothing is harder to change than old habits, especially if that habit has always been your way of life.

Changing poor eating habits and incorporating exercise into your daily life takes time and perseverance. No one asks you to run a marathon before your ready and equipped to do so and dieting works much the same. The all or nothing theory is weak at best and more often than not is unsuccessful for more than one reason.

Drastic changes to our eating or exercising regime can knock our systems on it's butt. Small steps, done steadily, will get you the distance you need to go - without putting your system on malfunction and will let your mental faculties keep pace as well. We don't change our weight or our minds overnight.

It doesn't matter if you consistently live a healthy lifestyle or if you are just now learning to live a healthy lifestyle. Either way it's okay to break your

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