So, your diet’s been going well. You’ve successfully stuck to a rigid regime of lean turkey breast, kale and carrot sticks. Then, one fateful afternoon, you hit a bump in the road – and before you know it, you’ve not only scoffed down one chocolate chip cookie, you’ve finished the packet. Sound familiar?
Despite our best efforts to exercise self-control and improve our eating habits, we often experience setbacks that sabotage our weight loss goals. And unfortunately, they sometimes leave us feeling like we’ve totally failed – seriously undermining our progress. If these setbacks become more frequent, we often give up on our goals altogether.
Dieting setbacks come in various forms – some cite emotional eating as their biggest crutch, while others go overboard with their cheat meals and spiral into overeating oblivion. Everyone has different triggers – the key is knowing yours.
Here are the 5 ways you could be potentially sabotaging your diet without meaning to:
Bad eating habits
Some of us have developed bad eating habits over a long period of time, so find it particularly hard to break out of them. You wake up in the morning and start off your day with the intention to eat healthily and shed those pounds. Yet by the afternoon, you’ve become increasingly sluggish and give in to a cappuccino with full-fat milk. Double chocolate muffin to accompany it? Well, why not. And come to think about it, why not have pasta with that cream sauce for dinner tonight? Dieting can start tomorrow, you tell yourself.
Some find their overeating is triggered whenever they eat a forbidden food. As soon as that cookie touches their lips, guilt takes over – and immediately, they feel like they’ve ruined everything. Then, because they’ve slipped up once, they feel they might as well go all the way and gorge themselves – and that’s how two cookies becomes twenty, taking you back to square one.
You make excuses
Some of us use holidays and special occasions as excuses to eat badly – your sister’s wedding, your uncle’s 60th, Thanksgiving – times when we believe we’ve earned a break and deserve to let loose. The problem is, many of us extend this philosophy to weekends too – following a healthy eating plan during weekdays and then relaxing our dietary vigilance over the weekend.
Healthy choices
Research shows that those who are consistent with their healthy eating – making healthy choices 7 days of the week – were 1.5 times more likely to maintain their ideal weight than those who decided to let loose over the weekend. The same study concluded that those who allowed themselves more flexibility with food on special occasions were more likely to regain any weight they had lost. So, being flexible with your food actually increases your exposure to situations involving unhealthy food – and could inevitably lead to falling off the healthy wagon.
Social eating
Sometimes it could merely be the company of others that causes us to increase how much we eat. Psychologists have long investigated how social situation affects the quantity of food we eat. Being in the presence of someone eating large portions might encourage us to eat more, too – distorting our perception of how much we ourselves are eating.
Discipline
Finally, you might want to consider whether the trigger of your overeating was emotional. Ice-cream splurging clichés aside, it is important to recognize if how you were feeling could have influenced your choice of food and how much you ate. Being tired, stressed or generally feeling a bit down are all common causes of a temporary loss of diet discipline.
If episodes of overeating are sabotaging your weight loss goals, try to better understand the thought patterns that lead up to those occasions. Recognize when one begins and realize that the sooner you stop, the better. But if it happens, don’t beat yourself up about it – there’s no point ruminating in guilt over half a slice of chocolate cake, and you can always go for a slightly longer run or a kickboxing class to work off those additional calories.
Don’t panic – you haven’t blown it! Let QardioBase smart wireless scale help you track your progress toward better health.
