Don't lose your mind over your weight!

Many dieters complain that the only thing they lost recently while on a plan was their mind and not weight! Why? Simon Lovell from www.thelunchboxdiet.com explains...

The stress involved in dieting can be high.  The pressure to be thin can be immense.  We are willing to try most anything to lose weight.  And after all the effort, many times they feel as though they’ve failed.  Stop!  You haven’t failed, the diet failed you!  Here are some of the common stressors in dieting.  Before you embark on another effort to lose weight, check the diet against the following warning flags that will tell you if the diet will again fail you.

Does the diet have a lot of rules?

We have enough rules that we have to follow.  Don’t speed.  Get to work on time.  Pay your bills on time.  Women past 35 shouldn’t wear mini-skirts.  (That last one is ludicrous, by the way.  Wear what you want!)  Why put added stress on yourself by succumbing to a list of self-inflicted rules about what you should and shouldn’t eat?

The fact is, you like what you like.  Nobody’s going to convince you to eat five grapefruit a day if you don’t like it.  Some fad diets are so demanding that you might wonder why bother eating at all?  They’ve sucked the sheer joy out of eating! 

Inflexibility in some dieting plans is a major sabotage!  When there is no wiggle room for occasional indulgences, the diet will fail you.  When we deny ourselves constantly the things we really enjoy, the tendency to binge on that item grows with every day you don’t give your tongue the satisfaction it desires. Instead of having a crisp or a cookie now and again you eat an entire box!

Does the diet involve calorie countring (or carb or fat grams?)

As if your life weren’t busy enough.  I contend that the amount of time the average dieter spends tabulating calories or carb grams per day could easily put her in a gym for a 5 K run on the treadmill!  Think about it.  When was the last time you said “I have too much time on my hands.  I really wish I had another tedious task to eat up my time!”  Of course you didn’t.  You’re a busy person!  So, again, why are you adding stress to your life?

Diets that force you to spend time counting and learning the carbohydrate content of everything are bound to fail you if you live a busy life.  You simply don’t have time.  You need a simple plan that is easy to manage.

Does the diet involved elaborate recipies?

Here we are with a time issue again.  A lot of diets require complicated recipes and preparation.  If you’ve gained weight because you didn’t have time to cook a healthy meal and ate fast food, what makes you think you will all of a sudden change and start preparing elaborate meals with ingredients you’ll have to search for at five markets?

Eating healthy doesn’t mean you have to spend a lot of time in the kitchen.  In fact, some of the foods that are best to eat on a diet involve nothing more than a quick rinse in the sink for preparation.

Is the diet a roller coaster ride?

You may like roller coasters, but I know you don’t like to see them on your scale.  Any diet, and I mean any diet, that allows you to lose a lot of weight in a short amount of time will fail you in the end (and rear end for that matter).  Healthy, long-term weight loss involves slow, steady weight loss.  There’s nothing worse than working so hard at something only to have the end result ruined.  Think about the last time you worked really hard on a project and for reasons beyond your control, the project was tossed by your boss or co-worker. 

 If you’ve been on a restricted calorie diet, I know you’ve worked hard!  I know you sacrificed and gave up and pulled from deep down to have the willpower to turn down eating when you were hungry enough to eat an elephant.  You got into those skinny jeans!  Yea for you!  But what happened in a month?  That’s right.  The skinny jeans got put back at the bottom of the pile in the closet.  Here you go again!  You feel like you failed.  You’ve added stress to your life.  But you didn’t fail.  The diet failed you because it made promises it couldn’t keep.

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