No More Diets

How do you stay motivated when you start to feel deprived of all the good-tasting stuff?

It really depends on how you are losing weight.

If you are following a weight loss program where you have rules where foods you love are forbidden then you can start to crave the good stuff more than you ever did before.

This takes iron will-power especially when the food you love is on offer in a restaurant or at a friend’s house. (You aren’t tempting yourself are you, I hope, by keeping the food around at home…?)

You may want to practice pausing at the moment you are tempted and remind yourself why you want to lose weight and what it means for you - run through the end result in your head - and then compare that with the momentary pleasure of the food.

But I tend to tackle this issue by working on removing the feeling of deprivation altogether.

In my program I have my clients tackle this problem by encouraging them to :-

a) eat the food they love, to buy the very best and to eat it in small portions, sitting down, very slowly, enjoying every moment. If you really taste the food, eat it when you are hungry and “know” you are consuming it - then a small amount is much more likely to satisfy you than if you stuff down a huge portion guiltily by the fridge.

b) find new healthy satisfying recipes and foods so that over time the food they love and the food that does them good get closer together. Healthy food does not have to be wall to wall salad and cottage cheese - there are loads of fantastic real food dishes which taste great, fill you up and satisfy your hunger for the good things in life so that you’d never know you were trying to lose weight.

These two approaches take away every sense of deprivation - the sort of diet mentality where you can’t have this and you can’t have that … until you come off the diet, eat it all again (in large amounts) and put the weight back on.