Continued from page 1
Deprivation Can Lead to Cravings
But it is not just your body that rebels when you diet. Your mind rebels too. When certain foods are forbidden, you may begin to feel deprived which can lead to powerful cravings. When you finally give in to
cravings for these “bad” foods, you may feel guilty and out of control. You may give up diet and binge on foods you’ve been missing. This often leads people to develop a painful “love-hate” relationship with food. Of course, most dieters blame themselves when diet fails, but in reality, dieting itself is to blame.
Diets Ignore Rest of You
Another problem is that diets and other restrictive means of losing weight focus on what and how much to eat and don’t address why people eat in first place.
Many people eat or overeat because of environmental triggers such as appealing food, automatic meal times, or learned messages like “clean your plate”. Restaurants, break rooms, holidays, and vacations are full of tempting “bad” foods that aren’t allowed on a diet. You can deal with it while your motivation is high, but in long run, you may decide that diet just isn’t worth it.
In addition, many of your urges to eat may be triggered by emotions such as stress, boredom, loneliness, sadness, or anger. Since these emotional triggers don’t go away simply by imposing a strict set of rules, you may try to cope with them by eating “allowed foods”. In other words, you never really give up emotional eating or learn other coping skills, so when diet is over, you go right back to eating way you did before.
So What Does Work?
At this point you are probably thinking, “If diets don’t work, what am I supposed to do?” To begin with, if diet plan you are considering isn’t something you can imagine doing for rest of your life, then don’t bother doing it for a day!
It is time to face fact that key to solving your struggle with weight and food does not lie in a magical, or even a logical, combination of diet and exercise. The real solution lies in finally addressing your relationship with food and learning to recognize and effectively cope with your eating triggers. Start by asking yourself “Am I hungry?” whenever you have and urge to eat. When you relearn to trust your innate ability to know when and how much to eat, you will begin to eat in a way that fuels your body, mind, and spirit.
Michelle May, M.D. is a practicing Board Certified Family Physician with expertise in the cognitive-behavioral aspects of weight management. She is the author of Am I Hungry? What To Do When Diets Don’t Work in collaboration with a Registered Dietitian and Psychologist. Visit her website www.AmIHungry.com for more ideas on managing weight without dieting.
