Dieting and exercise have pretty clear positive outcomes, right? You achieve a healthy weight and increase your level of fitness. But are there more things to gain? Yes – essential life lessons. We’re going to take a look some more of the long-term bonuses you receive when you commit yourself to a healthier diet.
Self-control
Most of us could do with more self-control. When we procrastinate, that’s a failure of self-control. When we drink too much or smoke, that’s a lack of self-control. Self-control is something that you really have to develop through a regime that has a clear positive outcome – and a diet does just this. It forces you to control your food intake, to resist temptation. The lessons you learn during dieting – the self-control you develop – will be easy to translate to other areas of your life.
Accountability
A good diet and exercise regime requires you to be proactive in noting the specific results of your actions. You weigh yourself, check your muscles, compare one result to another, keep track of your progress. All of this means you can properly define the cause and effect relationship between what you’re doing and the result of your body, positive or otherwise. This leads to developing accountability in both senses of the word: it allows you to accurately define the changes and also increases your sense of responsibility for what occurs.
Reward
Dieting isn’t exactly easy, but it can come with a heck of a reward. Many people will find that achieving weightloss revealed to them just what you can achieve if you’re willing to make sacrifices and put in hard work. This is an essential life lesson, but a lot of people don’t seem to learn it. Many seem to be happy with simply drifting by, putting very little effort into self-improvement. It seems that they expect some kind of reward to fall into their lap. But it doesn’t work that way – and people who have lost weight and gained fitness through a good diet and rigorous exercise know this.
Food knowledge
Not a lot of people really take the time to consider what they’re actually putting into their bodies. Most seem to be aware, in some vague sense, that there’s a lot of bad food out there, but they seem to prefer to be in blissful ignorance about what’s in the food they eat. The fact is that sticking to a diet forces you to be aware of what nutrients you need and where you can get those nutrients. It makes you more vigilant.
Cooking
Dieting often requires you to prepare your own food – and this is something you should continue to do even when you’ve reached your goal and feel confident that you can be less strict with yourself! Making your own meals gives you control over what you’re eating, which is an essential part of ensuring that you eat healthily throughout your life. Pre-prepared meals are often loaded with additives, as well as more sugar and salt that you really need to make a tasty meal.
