Are You Preparing Not to Succeed?

Are you preparing not to succeed? 

Diet cookbooks are helping you to do just that. 

I saw a cookbook today, on the big glossy cover were 4 photos of sensational looking food and the title of the book was “Healthy Snacks” with the sub text saying Eat Healthy & Lose Weight. 

TO SNACK OR NOT TO SNACK 

You don’t need to make healthy snacks, if you eat a meal (not a snack) when you’re hungry, eat food with nutritional value and eat until you are full, there is no need for “snacks”. 

Snacks are foods you eat because you’re;

• Skipping meals 

• Eating low nutritional foods 

• Not eating enough food to feel satisfied 

• Or they are something you eat because you feel compelled to eat to relieve stress, boredom, anger or some other physiological or psychological response

PREPARING NOT TO SUCCEED 

If you’re on a diet and you prepare the so called healthy treats and snacks, then you’re preparing not to succeed at sticking to the eating program you are on. 

Why? 

The images in the book cause your brain to want to have it, that causes a physical response in the body of salivation as the brain starts to taste the food even though you’re not eating it yet. 

You’re brain becomes involved in the food and it sets you up for impulse eating either there and then or later on.

Preparing those “healthy treats” is the death knell for the majority of people on their quest to lose weight because the reason people are overweight to begin with is because impulse eating is driving their caloric intake up. 

Being on a calorie restricted diet is challenging enough – if it wasn’t then there would be no need to be on one as you would have moderated your own eating in the first place and eliminated the need to diet, right? 

You know what to eat and what not to eat, you don’t need someone to tell you what that. 

The problem is that you don’t have a handle on emotional and impulse eating, binge eating or overeating. 

When you go on a diet, the accountability to someone else is what you’re looking for, the instructions of what to do is what you’re looking for, because we lovely humans secretly want the direction and expectations of others to propel us to do what we are not doing naturally for ourselves. 

WHAT’S HIDDEN ISN’T ADDRESSED 

Diets don’t resolve the underlying issue that got you in the predicament in the first place, do they, and, as you’ve experienced, when the diet concludes, you eventually (or sometimes immediately) revert back to your normal eating habits and behaviours. 

When you’re on a calorie restricted diet and you’re preparing “healthy” snacks, you are preparing not to succeed because not only do you create temptation for yourself but you’re brain has bookmarked that as allowable, dietary enhancing food and when the impulse to eat to relieve stress comes, you will consume it in the same unhealthy proportions you would consume any snack food, if not more because it’s allowable food. 

Dieting will always fail if you don’t get a handle on impulse eating. 

When you get a handle on impulse eating, dieting is no longer necessary.