are back where you started, was it worth it? And once you climb on the dieting seesaw, it is very difficult to get off. The diet habit becomes deeply ingrained as a way of life and the ‘language’ is imprinted on your brain.
You are always thinking about food, evaluating the calorie content, having those ‘Shall I, shan’t I?’ conversations in your head about some fattening item of food, usually ending with ‘Oh well, I’ve blown it now. I might as well go on eating for the rest of the day and start my diet again tomorrow’.
Bear this in mind: dieters always eat much more when they think they have ‘broken their diet’ than people who never diet at all. The urge is to cram it all in now so they can start tomorrow with a clean slate (plate?). The only way to stop this is to get off it. Lose the dieting mentality. If you want to be permanently slim, you have to change the way you think, act and behave.
It is no accident that some people are fat. This is a disease of choice. People carrying a lot of extra weight may have a slower metabolism but they are still making choices. You can either choose to eat something fattening or choose to eat something non-fattening. Maybe you choose the fattening option every time? If so, why? You have to acknowledge that if you choose to behave in a certain way, you also choose the results of that behaviour. It may not be ideal but it’s the only deal you’ve got. There is no point in saying ‘I’m going to do this or that’—you have to activate the plan and start doing something.
The Solution
Be Accountable
Acknowledge and accept accountability for the shape of your body. You are accountable for the type of food you put into your mouth—not some of the time but all of the time. If you follow someone else’s diet that tells you what to eat at each meal, you are simply handing over your responsibility. When you don’t lose weight, it is the ‘diet’ that didn’t work, thereby absolving you of all blame.
You are accountable for the way you see yourself and the way you feel. If, at times, you are angry, hurt or upset, then those are your feelings and you are accountable for their presence in your life. Whatever your circumstances, accepting this key premise—whether you like it or not—means you can no longer dodge responsibility for the position you find yourself in.
If you think I’m labouring this point—I am! If you don’t accept accountability, if you insist that you ‘can’t help’ being overweight, nothing will ever change, plain and simple. By convincing yourself that you are a victim and ‘can’t stop eating’ (of course you can), that you ‘really try’ (obviously not hard enough) and that you ‘hardly eat anything’ (who are you kidding?), you will stay stuck on the diet/binge seesaw for the foreseeable future.
The only person you can rely on to change your life is you. You have free choice. You make the decisions about what you are going to eat; you take responsibility for your shape, your health, your level of fitness and the thoughts that govern all of the above. Once you acknowledge that you are in charge of your life and your eating, it will happen.
Self-choice isn’t deprivation – it’s freedom.
Get Positive
To get a clearer picture of how things will be, you have to move towards something positive, not just away from something negative. Create a picture in your mind: in this corner there is ‘you’—overweight, feeling heavy and lumpy and hating yourself. This is a very painful state to be in. Over in that corner is ‘you’ as you want to be—slim, light and attractive and feeling good about yourself. No pain there. When you have embarked on a weight-loss programme before, you have simply gone on a restrictive diet without a clear plan or strategy. At the beginning, your motivation is obviously high. As the pounds disappear you begin to move away from the ‘fat you’ corner and the pain lessens slightly. Then when the hunger and cravings start to kick in, you go back to your old habits and begin to eat a ‘little bit’ of the fattening foods you ate before. Soon you get sucked back into the fat corner because nothing has really changed. You have simply gone on a diet without changing your behaviour or your lifestyle, without including any extra activity into your life, without a specific strategy for change.
If you keep on doing the same, you will keep on getting the same. However, once you stop being reactive and make a definite commitment to change your way of life, you will gradually and steadily start to move towards the positive corner, and become the slim ‘you’ that you want to be. In this way, you are not just moving away from something negative—the ‘fat you’—but towards something positive—the ‘slim you’.
To do this you have to be very clear about how your life will be different once you have lost the excess weight. What aspects of your life would you have to overcome or change in order to become the person you want to be? What are you doing right now – or not doing—to impede your efforts to get slim?
Negative thoughts produce negative results. Positive thoughts produce positive results.
Be Mentally Slim
To be a slim person, you have to live like a slim person. You have to see yourself as a slim person. This means having a very clear picture in your mind of what it is like to be a slim person, how to behave like a slim person, how to present yourself as a slim person, all the time. You have to mentally turn into that person. Even though you are not there yet, by pretending that you are, by acting as though the weight has already gone, you are programming yourself to succeed.
A slim person is not someone who is on a diet. She does not wake up and tell herself that she will be ‘good’ today. Acting slim means that when you look in the mirror you don’t dwell on the rolls of fat round your waist and hips. You simply check that the clothes you are wearing look OK and move on. It means you don’t call yourself names like ‘greedy pig’ and tell yourself you look ‘fat and revolting’.
Slim people see themselves as attractive and energetic. They automatically veer towards healthy food and limit their intake of the more fattening varieties. They would rather eat two squares of good quality chocolate than gorge on several bars of the cheaper kind.
Slim people do not have a problem making food choices. They do not agonize over whether they should or shouldn’t eat some fattening item of food in case it starts them eating for the rest of the day. They simply avoid eating obviously fattening food because they know it will make them fat. Fat people know this too but always seem to be amazed and depressed when it happens.
The rules for living like a slim person are very simple:
