Mindsets

Now, where was I? Ah yes, blathering on about starting this whole weight-loss thing.

One thing that I found to be the most important to me personally is to not see what I'm doing as 'a diet'. Once I get in the mindset that I can't have something then I just WANT IT WANT IT WANT IT AAAAAAARGH! I'm told this is pretty much the same for everybody, and I can believe it. As a species we tend to take what we want, regardless of the consequences. So when I tell my self "No, you can't have that chocolate bar/steak pasty/honey glazed pig carcass" then I immediately start dwelling on how much I want it and how delicious it would be and how sweet it would taste and we're back to WANT IT WANT IT WANT IT AAAAAAARGH! territory.

So I don't deny myself anything. If I want a choccy biccy, I'll have a choccy biccy. But only one. That's the compromise. OK maybe two. Or three. Don't look at me like that, you know what I'm talking about.

THREE biscuits?! I hold you in contempt Veacock!

The point I'm very poorly trying to get at is that I'm not on a diet; I'm trying to permanently change the way I deal with food. As I said in my previous post; diets are, for the most part, fads that may well lose you a load of weight initially, but when you stop them you don't really know how to deal with the freedom that you suddenly have regarding the stuff you eat. A diet will tell you what to do, when to do it and for how long. What happens when the diet is over? Do you still follow the guidelines set down by the diet? What if that doesn't fit in with the food you're now eating? It all falls apart, and suddenly you're putting weight back on again and feeling shitty, which usually leads to comfort eating and the like, then the whole cycle starts again.

The method that has been taught to me by Nursey is to actually think about what you're eating; make your own decisions about what you eat and learn from whatever mistakes you might make. The food diary helps a lot in this, as it allows you to go back over what you've eaten previously. Quick; what did you have for dinner Friday 2 weeks ago? What about the Monday before that? If you go for a weigh-in and find you've put on weight you can go back over the period of time since your last one and see where you went wrong. And learn from it. Here endeth the lesson.