If you have food allergies, celiac disease or any other condition, which requires that you limit or restrict your intake of certain foods, it is usually a process to accept and embrace your new lifestyle. Even if you have been following your diet for a while, it can continue to be a challenge to figure out what to eat, how to communicate to people why you can’t eat certain foods, and to find places to eat when you are out in public.
In every situation where you are faced with the reality of your limited diet, you may also have different issues come up. It is very common for people with diet limitations to have different feelings about their new diet. If you’re just beginning a new diet, it may be more difficult as you may feel misunderstood or left out leading to feelings of frustration, anger, or sadness.
So where does acceptance come in with all of this? As humans, when we don’t like something, it is our initial reaction to want to change or fix it. The other side of this coin is that we may resist the change or circumstances that life is giving us. What we end up with is being unhappy with our situation, trying everything possible to change it, or simply giving up and believing that life is going to be miserable for us.
Even if our outward circumstances did change, it may not really bring us the peace and happiness that we think it will. In other words, is it really the pizza we miss? Maybe yes. But on a deeper level, if we can accept our feelings about not being able to eat the pizza, we will come closer to being “okay” with the fact that we can’t eat it.
Acceptance can be tricky. We hear we “should” or “need” to accept our circumstances. So our mind goes, “I accept the fact that I can’t eat pizza,” while our heart feels totally despondent. How do we go from not accepting or not liking what is happening in our lives, to being okay with what life serves us?