Help – I can’t stick to my diet!
Why do people start a diet only to quickly crash off it a week or so later and then feel more miserable than before they started? Hey if this is you then don’t feel alone, we’ve all done it, but what causes it? I’d say there are two main reasons and we’ll look at them now:
- Choosing the wrong diet. Yes there may be a perfect diet out there for you, but you have to scout around for it as what will work for you probably won’t work for somebody else. We all have different lives and different tastes which make certain diets better suited to us than others.
Take a diet which forces you to eat a small meal every 2 hours, that might be perfect for someone who works at home, but for the people who work all day in an office it might not be great, imagine trying to excuse yourself from an important meeting so you can have some chicken salad.
If you choose a diet that does not gel with the way you live your life then you are doomed before you even begin, you’ll find it too difficult to follow and suddenly it won’t be worth all that extra effort.
- Emotional eating. This is the second major cause of ruining your diet, eating caused by your emotions. It could be eating because you’re bored, lonely, heartbroken, stressed, whatever it is then eating food makes us feel good so it is a way to deal with those negative emotions.
The only way to stop this is to catch yourself when you do it, most of us do it without even thinking about it so it is hard to stop ourselves. If you keep a food journal of what you eat then you’ll see the times you pigged out and be able to identify what made you do it. By recognising the signs then hopefully next time you can stop yourself.
Also once you identify the triggers then try and replace eating with something else to take your mind off it. There is nothing worse than trying to just use willpower to stop yourself doing something and feeling deprived as you do it, that makes it so much harder, instead if you replace it with something else, like phoning a friend, or going for a walk, building model airplanes, whatever, then it will be 10x easier to keep away from the fridge and eventually you’ll break the need to eat when you feel those emotions!
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