Everywhere around us nowadays there is food. We end up eating seemingly all the time, even when we aren't hungry. We drive down the highway with big billboards on either side of the road advertising pizza delivery services, soda pop, fried chicken, you name it. We drive down the main street in town and there are those golden arches. We open a magazine to page after page of luscious looking cakes, cookies and pies.
Food is all around us. It is available at any time of the day or night; grocery stores open 24 hours, restaurants, you name it. These environmental cues often serve as the triggers for us to overeat. These things are pretty obvious,, but have you ever thought of dieting as a potential trigger to overeat?
Dieting is a trigger. Yes, it really is. How, you ask? Dieting is deprivation. With dieting you are telling yourself over and over again, “I can’t eat this, I can’t eat that, I can only eat this, I want to eat it, but I can’t , its not on my diet.” Our focus is on food. Our natural tendency when we tell ourselves no to something is to have our desire for that something increase! We want it even more because we aren’t allowed to have it.
So what happens when you break your “diet”? It’s really an all or nothing approach, as any of you that have been on and off a diet can attest to. Whatever food you have banned from eating, when you do finally allow yourself some, it tastes so good it’s hard to stop eating. You’ve denied yourself for so long, the food just tastes so heavenly that pretty soon you are into an all out binge. Sometimes you pig out so much you can barely even remember what the food tasted like after you are finished.
Before you know it, foods get labeled as “good” or “bad”. This is so common yet is really a sign that your attitude about eating is getting unhealthy. Why? You are placing a value judgment on something that is not inherently good or bad, it’s just food. This takes the enjoyment out of eating because of the guilt or shame you feel when you eat something “bad”.
The sad thing is, your good intentions with dieting end up backfiring in the end.
Take this example. You are going along just fine on your new diet, you are proud of yourself for all the goodies that you’ve denied yourself (notice the value judgment), when suddenly you catch sight of some “forbidden fruit”, only instead of fruit its more likely brownies, a DQ Blizzard or Krispy Kreme doughnuts.
What happens?
In a split second you make the decision to indulge, then the downhill slide begins. You start feeling badly, so badly about yourself that you begin beating yourself up with such thoughts as, “you’re lacking willpower”, “you can’t lose weight”, you’re disgusting”. Then, before you know it, you realize you’ve blown your diet .So you just throw in the towel and really pig out. An all out binge, where you really pack on the calories.
It’s a never ending cycle, isn’t it?
Get off this dieting roller coaster. Until you do, your chances of successfully losing weight and keeping it off permanently are very slim indeed.
