I was sitting in bed munching a small plate of raw veggies last night when a teaser came on for the late night news: “Find out which day of the week you are most likely to fall off the dieter's wagon.” Curiosity always gets me, so I decided for a lark to watch and find out what “wisdom” the news guys had up their sleeves. After all, this week is the “recommit to be fit” on your New Year's diet resolution, and since most have traditionally broken it by January 9 th , I thought what harm could come from watching the news to see this one story.
Here's the skinny on diet sabotage:
According to a university study, most dieters begin their diet on a Monday, and after one day of deprivation, they are most apt to fall off the wagon on Tuesday.
My first thought was, “of course you'll fall off after one day if you treat it as a diet”, but the second thought was, “who wasted taxpayer funds to tell us the obvious?!” Either we are becoming more intellectually challenged, or someone in the government who hands out the study grants is.
As I've said before, “diet” is a dirty word that makes us fatter by design. Who doesn't look at a diet and automatically think of starvation, four hundred hours of exercise in a week, and then being handed an appetizing plate of Bermuda grass? Studies do show that if you change a behavior, it takes 21 days at least for it to evolve into a habit, and yet three weeks into a diet, most of us are ready to throw in the towel, convinced we have starved ourselves to within five minutes of death. All that mental anguish, and the scale has barely moved – why continue to diet?
Diets don't work but lifestyle changes do. I hate carrots and have for years – you couldn't pay me to eat them. When I made the decision to lose the weight and get in shape, I began to eat raw carrots in moderation. As the days passed, my taste buds changed and almost 99% of all sweets cravings have disappeared, but making friends with this food didn't happen overnight. I have been eating carrots since early December 2006, so it's now a habit that tastes sweet.
Once you start down the “diet road”, you will fail because there's no way you can stay on a restrictive food intake for the extended period of time it takes to lose the weight, but to maintain it. The only option is to create new habits or else every day of the week will become a day of diet sabotage! I'll be the first to admit it's not always easy giving up the comfort foods, but you have to decide what's important to you: good health, or comfort foods?
I've been depressed more than a few times along this road, however, I have made a decision not to let the outside world control what goes in my mouth. You have to make a similar decision for yourself, otherwise when the world knocks you around, you will reach for the comfort of food instead of your inner strength.
There was a time I didn't believe in neurolinguistic programming , but now I'm starting to think there might be some wisdom in harnessing the power of the mind. Dietary changes and exercise are great places to start, but how often have you said in your own mind, “this diet's not going to work!” and sure enough, you fell off the wagon? Well, if you're willing to change your body,
why leave your mind out of the makeover process? At the end of the day you do write your own success or failure script, therefore why not control the wording? Instead of setting yourself up for failure, set yourself up for success with positive affirmations.
You can find sources online for making positive affirmation tapes , or if you don't have time, you can purchase a boxed program . There is one site I've found that gives you free scripts you can read into your computer's microphone that you can turn around and burn into a CD or just hit the play button on your computer. Should you want a middle ground of being able to create personalized content for your specific needs, you might want to check out this page as there are a variety of freeware, commercial, and shareware programs available . You pick your affirmations and it creates the script for you. If you want the ease of prepackaged content and a quick download , you might find this site to be the happy middle ground that will suit your needs. I am not being paid by any site to promote their product; I am simply giving suggestions to which sites seem to have good services.
Understand one thing if you go down the positive affirmation road: it will not work alone – you still must change your diet and learn to become active. If you don't, it's like believing you will become a scholar, but you refuse to crack open the spine of a book. There's a fine line between lining up your ducks in a row for success, and lying to yourself. You must choose the path and no one can force you to walk it at the end of the day.
If you don't like trying to find all the segments of this series, you can locate the links to them here and they will return you the exact spot on the socyberty.com site.
quazen.com articles by this writer can be found here
socyberty.com articles can be located here
relijournal.com articles are here
picable.com photographic images are here
