Cheat On Your Diet If You Want To Be Successful!
I know that is a strange title but let me explain and I think you will agree. If you follow a diet that is too strict then you probably won’t stick to it for any length of time and you will inevitably crash out of it as you crave other foods and you finally give in. We are not good at restricting ourselves too much.
The problem with really restrictive diets is that they make us essentially go ‘cold turkey’ and come straight off our high fat, high sugar western diets and suddenly crash onto this super strict low fat, low sugar kind of diet, but our mind stills craves the other foods. Notice I said your mind craves those foods not your body, and that is important because your body does not need that kind of food and your mind will never be satisfied like your body would if that craved something to get some nutrients it needed.
So you are on this restrictive diet and you get cravings all the time, perfectly normal for every dieter I think, but then when you finally give in you go into a downward spiral of hating yourself for ruining your diet and therefore pigging out more which makes you feel more guilty etc. Eventually you just crash and burn and end up stuffing your face and stopping the diet.
Wouldn’t it be better if you had times when you allowed yourself to cheat? Then you are not ‘ruining’ your diet because it is something you have planned, you can then also plan what you will eat too and stick to that. It still requires willpower don’t get me wrong, you need to stop after eating those two muffins or whatever, but at least you do get to satisfy some of those cravings and you don’t feel like you ruined everything and stop the diet.
Try to aim to have a cheat meal once a week or if you need to then twice a week and work it down to one. Make it a meal you can really enjoy and think of it as a treat for sticking to your diet at all other times. This means you can now go out on a weeknight for that meal with friends etc so you don’t feel miserable about missing that and start to resent your diet.
Of course this will make your fat loss slower, but isn’t slowing your fat loss slightly worth it when you actually stick to the diet for the long term and don’t hate it? Some modern diets actually have cheat periods built into them like Fat Loss 4 Idiots, because they understand how important it is that we don’t suddenly go ‘cold turkey’ and then feel guilty every time we even look at a chocolate fudge brownie… So try adding a cheat meal or two to your diet and see how much easier it makes things!
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