Identify these trouble spots and you’re half way there. Know how to get through them and be a diet success.
1. A bad mood
You know the scenario. Things aren’t going right and your mood is sinking fast. Isn’t this a perfect recipe for wrecking your diet? Yes, but you don’t have to let it happen. There are many things to do to ease a bad mood besides eating. In fact, going back on your decision to stick to it may put you in a worse mood. Your best line of defense is to prepare beforehand, so when a mood hits, you can go into remedy mode. Plan to write a description of how you are feeling, and identify the reason for your feelings. Then think of a way to address that reason more directly.
2. Socializing
When you are on a diet, rely on knowledge about yourself in relation to other people. For example, if you usually go out on the weekends with certain friends and you always eat too much, avoid the situation. You might meet with your friends at times other than mealtimes. Or you might tell them what you are trying to do and enlist their support. Don’t keep putting yourself in the middle of an environment where there is social pressure to eat.
3. Impatience
Unfortunately, there is no such thing as immediacy when it comes to weight loss. You can’t decide to go on a diet and expect to weigh twenty pounds less the next day. Some weeks you lose well, some weeks only half a pound, some weeks no weight is lost at all. That’s how the human body works. You can get angry because it’s not happening faster. You can give up, the biggest diet-crusher of all. A smart answer to impatience is setting small intermediate goals: the first five pounds, getting through one good diet week, speaking up instead of stuffing it down. Small goals bring significant satisfactions as you go, so you don’t have to wait patiently all the way until the end to be rewarded.
4. Rebelliousness
- I’ve been good for a whole month, isn’t that enough?
- Why don’t I deserve what everyone else is having?
- I want to eat what I want to eat.
- No one can tell me what to do.
Fighting the rules can hijack your diet. In order to handle your rebelliousness, refresh your goals. Revisit those high hopes and good ideas you had at the beginning when you decided to take the significant step of going on a diet. Remind yourself about why you want to lose weight and how your life will change for the better, both short term and long term.
5. Overbooked schedule
You have demands and obligations to fulfill, and it takes big energy. You get tired, even exhausted. Your diet focus starts to slip. The remedy is: prioritize. If losing weight is something you really want, put it first on your to-do list. It’s the only way. When you feel life getting so hectic that you might lose something of such importance, reorder things. Diet comes first. Don’t let it go.
6. Disappointment
If you’re counting on something and it doesn’t happen, or the opposite happens, or someone doesn’t come through for you, or you don’t win, or someone or something is not what you thought, it can create a big emptiness inside of you right where the thing you were counting on was supposed to be. If you find yourself moving toward food to make up the difference, you’re in for more disappointment-disappointment in yourself. Instead of filling up with food, acknowledge your disappointment. Identify what you were hoping to get from the person or situation that let you down. Then think of another way to find what you’re looking for so you can keep your diet intact.
7. Temptation
To one person, it’s a party with lots of great food. To another, it’s a leftover piece of cake at the other end of the house. Temptation can be a very real obstacle for a dieter, causing her to lose self-control. The truth is, we only have so much self-control capability at one time, so ease up on yourself in other ways while you are dieting. Make sure you don’t use up all your self-control energy in other areas of your life. Then you’ll have enough self-control to resist temptations and safeguard your diet.
8. A crisis
Here’s something you can’t be prepared for. You don’t know when a crisis will occur or what it will be. The best thing to do is just let the diet go. Does that sound counterintuitive? It’s not. The good thing about a crisis is that it passes. Often it’s not possible to deal with a crisis and a diet together, and the crisis needs to take precedence. The trick is to get right back when the crisis passes so there is no real diet harm done.
Keeping your diet intact takes pre-planning. Stay alert to these 8 danger zones and stay diet committed.
© Maria’s Last Diet
About the Author:
Kenneth Schwarz, Ph.D. is a psychologist specializing in personal change and goal achievement. Julie North Schwarz is a writer in the field of women’s weight-loss issues. They are authors of the online weight-loss solution, “Diet Tuffy: The Fun Way to Seriously Make Your Diet Work”. For Diet Tuffy and more about how to conquer the psychological side of dieting, go to their website, www.mariaslastdiet.com
