failure.
This probably sounds familiar to many of us … and is exactly what we’re talking about when we describe the ‘diet trap’: a cycle of preparing for a diet, starting a diet, stopping a diet and feeling guilty about it.
The problem is that we repeatedly just accept this cycle and put our failure down to things like:
I haven’t got any willpower.
I haven’t got time to fuss about with diet food.
I can only diet when everything is going smoothly in my life.
I could diet if I lived on my own.
I’ll diet when things calm down at work.
I’ll diet when my social life quietens down a bit.
Diets are really confusing – I just want something simple to follow.
Are these reasons or excuses for a diet failure? Well, they can be a bit of both, but what I see with so many of my patients, and from my own weight-loss experience, is that dieting behaviour is something we learn. The more times we go through that diet-trap cycle, the better we get at perfecting our destructive diet behaviour. Often the time it takes us to complete the cycle of starting the diet and feeling guilty about our failure gets shorter and shorter the more times we practise the cycle. In extreme cases this means that eventually some people don’t even get as far as starting the diet – they believe they will fail before they start so what’s the point in bothering at all?
All this can be changed. The diet-trap cycle can be broken right now, today, this second.
So, this is how to make the massive step out of your diet trap and turn your back on that miserable cycle forever …
Remember: ‘If you do what you always do, you’ll get what you always got!’
The first thing to do is accept that you have been stuck in a diet trap. If you’re not sure, go back over the previous paragraphs and see if you recognize your own behaviour there.
If you already know this applies to you, think about the last time you started a diet-trap cycle and work through the list of questions below to help you unravel what really happened. For some of the questions I’ve given you answers some of my patients give me. Highlight the answer which best fits your story, or write in your own if none of them are appropriate, and then read on for some suggestions and tips on how to overcome and change your dieting behaviour.
What sort of diet did you choose?
A diet from a magazine
A diet a friend or colleague recommended
I just tried to cut down
I went to a slimming club
I always follow the same diet when
I want to lose weight
Other ________________
How did you plan for it?
I didn’t
I told everyone I was on a diet and warned them not to temptme
I filled the fridge with diet food
I just played it by ear
I cancelled my social life
Other ________
What did you dislike about the diet?
The food was boring
I was hungry and just thought about food all day
The diet was really confusing so I had to guess what to eat a lot of the time
It would have been fine if I was home all day, but eating out was a nightmare
I ended up cooking different meals for the rest of the family
Other ________
What did you like about the diet?
I got results
It was really simple
I knew exactly what to eat and when
I was dieting with a friend and we kept each other going
My friends and family were really supportive
I had a clear goal to work towards
Other ________
What about eating out?
I’d starve all day so I could enjoy going out for dinner I didn’t eat out
Once I started eating out it was the slippery slope
I just ordered salads
Lunchtimes were the hardest; all I could get was a sandwich or fast food
Other ______
Why did things start to go wrong?
I got really stressed and gave in to comfort eating
My weight loss slowed down and I got fed up
The effort just got too much for me
I had a lapse and just couldn’t get back on track
Friends and family were trying to be helpful, but they were driving me mad going on about my diet
Other ______
