MyWeightLossForLife.com

The Benefits and Perils of Cheating

You’ve committed to changing your diet

You’ve made a commitment to improve your diet in order to improve your health. Whether you’re giving up a particular food or trying to work in more healthy foods, you’re making a change to your eating habits. How strict do you need to be? If you’re anything like me, the idea that you simply can’t have a favorite food (even if it’s junk!) isn’t very appealing. However, you know that you need to eat better.

Your commitment is for a lifetime

Because you’ve committed to making a permanent change to your eating habits, you’ll need to look at what you eat, and why, more carefully. You’re not simply giving up sweets for the month only to go back to munching on candy bars daily, are you? There’s not a lot of point in that, is there? The point of developing a habit is so it becomes, well, a habit.

No, that doesn’t mean you can never eat sweets (or some other junk food) again.

What it does mean is that you’ll

1. Prove to yourself that you can do without the food you’ve chosen to give up for a month,
2. Reduce your cravings for that food,
3. Enable you to eat the food in moderation, when and if you choose to.

I’m giving up sweets for the month. Does that mean that I’ll give them up permanently? No. What it does mean is that I’ll reduce the amount of sweets I eat, even after the habit-building month is over.

Cheat only after 30 days of habit-building

This is an important point. You need to give yourself the month to develop your habit before deciding to break it. Otherwise, you’re more likely to give up entirely. Besides, you want to prove you can do it, don’t you?

Schedule your cheating

Okay, you’ve completed your month of habit-building, and you’re ready to allow yourself the occasional treat. How do you do that without falling back into old habits?

One technique is to schedule one day a week as a cheat day. On that day, you can allow yourself to indulge, guilt-free.

Another idea is to allow yourself one treat a week. This is more flexible, allowing you to splurge on the spur of the moment. However, be careful that your treat stays once a week!

Too much cheating can lead to falling back into old habits

Adhering pretty closely to the habit you just created is important, at least in the few weeks after your initial month is over. Too much cheating, too soon, can lead you to quickly fall back into your old eating patterns. It’s all too easy to become accustomed to cheating again.

Too-rigid adherence can lead to giving up out of frustration

Beware of erring in the opposite direction. Denying yourself for weeks or even months is a recipe (pun intended) for disaster. Eventually, you’ll be so tired of doing without, you’ll binge, and then it will be even harder to get back on track. Remember, moderation is key! I don’t look at these changes as a diet, but as a way to re-train myself to eat better for the rest of my life.