Starting a new diet can be tough for anyone, but transitioning to a keto or low-carb diet brings its own unique mental and emotional challenges. When staples like bread, pasta, rice, and sweets are suddenly off-limits, it can feel like you’re giving up everything you love. Here’s how to overcome the mental attachment to favorites and make the shift to keto.
Carb-Heavy Comfort Foods Become Part of Our Identity
Many of us form an emotional attachment to the high-carb, high-sugar foods we’ve eaten since childhood. Things like mac and cheese, pizza, cinnamon rolls, and mashed potatoes. Through years of repeating food traditions and eating our favorite meals during special occasions and family gatherings, these foods start to represent moments, relationships, and warm memories from our past.
Before long, carb-heavy favorites become intertwined with our very identity and culture. As author Michael Pollan put it, “Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity.”
When we suddenly have to avoid these foods, it triggers a sense of deprivation and loss. We don’t just miss the taste, texture, and ritual of eating them – we miss what they represent to us psychologically.
The Standard American Diet Sets Us Up for a Tough Transition
The Standard American Diet (SAD) – full of processed foods, wheat, corn, refined carbs and sugar – conditions us to crave these foods and rely on them for comfort. As psychiatrist Drew Ramsey, M.D. said, “the high sugar, high fat, high salt foods many of us crave…are as addictive as heroin or cocaine.”
This sets us up for an extremely difficult transition when switching to a very low-carb diet like keto. High-carb favorites may trigger the same centers of the brain as drug addiction. That’s why giving them up can feel next to impossible.
But here’s the truth: while the mental challenge is real, it IS possible to overcome it. With commitment, time, the right mindset and tools, you can break the emotional attachment and stop carb-heavy favorites from sabotaging your health goals.
It’s All About Mindset and Reframing Your Relationship to Food
Focus On Abundance – All the Foods You CAN Have
When your mind dwells on restriction and what you have to give up, it fuels the sense of deprivation. Flip your perspective to all the delicious keto-friendly foods still available to you – meat, seafood, dark leafy greens, healthy fats like olive oil and avocados, nuts, full-fat dairy, low-carb veggies, and even modified keto sweets and bread. See it as adding new foods, not taking away your favorites. Staying focused on abundance reduces the sense of sacrifice.
Be Patient – Tastes Can Change
With an open and curious mindset, you can grow to appreciate and be satisfied with new flavors. Don’t insist the keto-friendly foods will never measure up – give them a true chance. Food preferences are not set in stone. With time your tastes can change as your health and relationship with food improves. Stay patient and keep an open mind.
Allow Yourself Planned Indulgences
Depriving yourself 100% of beloved carb favorites sets you up for binging when willpower fades. Allow yourself a small, thoughtful indulgence in moderation on special occasions. When it’s planned, it feels like a conscious choice rather than a reactive binge. Just don’t let it become a regular habit that throws you off course. A little gives you control.
Make Keto Versions of Old Favorites
There are many recipes that create lower-carb and keto-friendly versions of comfort foods and desserts with clever substitutions. Having these safer options available can help you satisfy the craving with a better carb count. Keto bread, pizza crust, even pasta made with almond or coconut flour make the transition easier.
Detach Favorite Foods From Emotions
Work on detaching favorite carb foods from the emotions and memories you’ve associated with them. They are just food, and you can make new positive memories around the delicious keto foods you eat now. This takes time but can reduce their emotional power over you.
With these mindset principles, you can reframe the keto transition in your mind as a positive, empowering choice to stop letting high-carb foods control you and start nourishing your body. This shift is within your power!
Using Tools to Facilitate the Mindset Shift
Conscious effort and motivation will take you a long way. But to help the mindset shift sink in on a deeper, more innate level, consider adding these tools:
Hypnotherapy Can Reduce Food Cravings
Hypnosis guides you into a focused, relaxed, and receptive state of mind using visualization and guided relaxation. In this state, a hypnotherapist can make positive suggestions that help change your subconscious attitudes and reflexive behaviors around food. This can significantly reduce cravings and impulse eating.
Daily Affirmations Help Reprogram Your Beliefs
Affirmations are positive statements you repeat to yourself daily to “reprogram” your self-talk and beliefs. Over time, messages like “I happily choose healthy foods that nourish my body” or “I am in control around foods that don’t serve me” can shift your mindset.
Visualization Enhances Willpower and Motivation
Practicing visualization – imagining yourself easily resisting treats, feeling satisfied with keto meals, achieving health goals – can help strengthen key qualities like willpower, self-control, identity and motivation through mental rehearsal. Your subconscious mind has trouble telling the difference between visualizing an act and actually performing that act!
With the Right Mindset, You Can Achieve Balance and Moderation
Together, conscious motivation and subconscious mindset shifts can empower you to successfully change your relationship with your favorite carb-heavy comfort foods. You may still occasionally crave them, but they will no longer control you. It is possible to enjoy your healthiest life and still occasionally savor special treats in a balanced way. With commitment and patience, you can overcome the very real mental challenges.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do we get so attached to our favorite carb-loaded foods?
It’s because those mac and cheese, pizza, cinnamon bun, mashed potato and other high-carb comfort foods take us right back. After years of chowing down on them during family dinners, holidays, and special occasions, they become tied up with some of the best memories and relationships in our lives. Before you know it, they’re part of our very identity and culture.
How does the Standard American Diet sabotage our keto success?
The SAD diet – packed with processed carbs, sugar, and junk – gets us addicted to these feel-good foods. Our brains light up just like they would for drugs when we so much as think about diving into a bowl of pasta or slide of pepperoni pizza. Talk about a tough habit to kick! No wonder transitioning to keto can feel impossible.
What mind tricks help us reframe our food relationships?
Focus on all the yummy foods you CAN eat on keto, be patient for new tastes to grow on you, allow yourself small, planned splurges on special days, whip up keto-fied versions of old favorites, and work on seeing your favorites as just food rather than emotional crutches. This way, you choose to eat keto to feel your best rather than feel restricted.
How can we shift our mindset on a deeper level?
Try hypnotherapy to curb crabby food cravings, repeat daily affirmations to yourself to cement new beliefs, and visualize yourself effortlessly reaching your keto goals. With these tools aligning your conscious and subconscious mind, you’ll have an easier time changing lifelong food habits.
Can we really achieve balance and moderation with keto?
Absolutely! It just takes the right mindset. While you may always have a soft spot for certain carby treats, they won’t control your diet or sabotage your results. Over time, with commitment to your goals, you can enjoy your favorites occasionally without going overboard. You’ve so got this!
Exploring Hypnosis for Mindset Changes
If you need additional support and tools for the mindset shifts required to change your relationship with food, consider exploring hypnotherapy and hypnosis. Here are some great resources:
The website Success with Hypnosis offers a wealth of information on using hypnosis for mindset changes around habits, motivation, and personal growth. Learn what hypnosis is and the basic process of hypnosis. Get tips on choosing a qualified hypnotist to work with either in-person or online. Read about how hypnosis can support holistic weight loss by changing mindset and habits. And for the skeptical – see an explanation of who can be hypnotized and how the process works.
Exploring self-hypnosis or working with a hypnotherapist skilled in behavioral changes can powerfully complement your conscious efforts to change your relationship with food. By aligning your subconscious mindset with your goals, lasting change becomes easier to achieve.