Читать книгу The 7-Day GL Diet: Glycaemic Loading for Easy Weight Loss - Nigel Denby - Страница 19

Why do diets fail? Well, we’ve all been there. We’re all fired up and ready to go. It’s Monday morning, another weekend of overindulgence behind us, and it’s D-day – we’re about to start the diet!

Later that week, or even that day, things start to get a bit dodgy. Perhaps work is stressful, the kids are playing up, you’re tired, hungry, disorganized or a multitude of other reasons and it’s all too easy to decide the diet is just too hard or too much hassle. It then slips by the wayside, leaving us feeling lousy, disappointed, guilty and like a 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.