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Home » Diet » 9 Questions You Should Ask Yourself If You’ve Ever Gone On A Diet – The Good Men Project (blog)

Diets are inherently contradictory. They demand you to fit a new set of instructions (the diet itself) into your old lifestyle.

Instead, you should be working toward building a new lifestyle.

Diets promise short-term solutions: Try our 10-day quick-fix, magic elixir, ultra-secret, fat-scorching solution!Well, thats great, but what happens after 10 days?

Think of it this way: diets are like cramming for a test. You might pass the test but what did you get out of it? Do you really think that youll be able to override an entire lifetimes worth of habits with a new set of rules in a snap of the finger?

The answer is No.

If youve ever tried and failed a diet before, thats proof.

And yet, thats what all these commercial diets promise. They expect you to read the manual (the new instructions) and somehow learn how to integrate these new choices and habits to meet your lifestyle. What youve found, inevitably, is that life always wins. Its too hard to cram in this new diet without first changing your lifestylewhich means changing your habits.

If so, isnt it finally time to try something different? The definition of insanity, after all, is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

If youre up for it, there are some questions below that I want you to be honest about. Theyll challenge you, yes, but theyre designed to help you.

1. How many times have I tried to lose 10 pounds in 1 month, or 20 in 2?

Lets be real for a minute. How many times? How many times have you tried dieting? 5? 10? Maybe youre always sort of on a diet. Maybe the past 5 years have been one great big perpetual diet.

2. Are my dieting attempts a race against the clock, rather than attempts to learn something?

Ill say it again and again because its my job: the goal is not to lose weight quickly. The goal is to master your diet.

I never talk about cutting portions, reducing calories, or hopping on the scale every morning to track how much weight youre losing. I talk about changing the kinds of food youre eating. I talk about your relationship with food, how to take back control, and how to master yourself through your food choices. This is not about losing weight, specifically. This is the process to master your diet. Mastering your diet is about your mindset, your attitude toward learning, your willingness to sacrifice immediate results for long-term success, your motivation, and your habits.

3. Do I think I have to earn my calories when trying to lose weight?

Dieting makes food your enemy and makes you believe you have to earn your calories.

This is wrong.

Meet cravings with real food. If the afternoon lull hits, dont try to resist, ignore, or outwill feelings of hunger. Instead, meet your craving head on and feed yourself with real food. When you change your lifestyle, the first few weeks will be tough. As your blood sugar levels even out, its far less important how much youre eating and far more important what youre eating. Eat more than enough of the good stuff.

I dont care if youre having five real meals per day. You want to feed yourself with MORE than enough of the good stuff to overcome cravings.

I repeat: the ONLY objective for you is to overcome the cravings. I cannot tell you how many times this has helped my clients overcome temptation in the beginningmerely eating healthy food whenever tempted otherwise. (As opposed to trying to push through and starve themselves when theyre either hungry or their blood sugar is out of whack and making them feel hungry.

The only thing that matters is that you develop a new relationship with food.

4. If I make a mistake and eat something off plan, do I believe the day is ruined and sabotage myself even further?

Often our emotions can sabotage our greater goals because change is hard and our emotions dont respond well to hard. Thats fine. We pay you respect, dear emotions, but you arent our king!

Anchoring the day with healthy habits that do and dont have anything to do with eating will domino and, over time, compound into sweeping change. Once you notice yourself doing things that are healthy for you, that support your health and greater goals, that you imagined yourself wishing you could accomplishyoull begin to see yourself from a new perspective, and youll feel inspired by seeing yourself change.

5. Do I believe that the only way to succeed is to be absolutely perfect?

My clients have tremendous success when we strategize together how theyre going to get through a particular challenge, such as a business lunch at a restaurant theyre not familiar with, or a board meeting in which lunches are ordered for themBEFORE THEY GET THERE.

Its important to note that Playing to Perfect wont serve you here and that Good Enough is the way to go. If there isnt an option thats 100% on our plan, the strategy is NOT to starve yourself. Be at peace with your imperfect choice; make it as close to our plan as possible, and move on. This is not an opportunity to go entirely off plan, but rather an opportunity to prove that you can live in-between the extremes in the gray.

6. Do I believe that to be successful, I have to restrict my choices to foods I dont enjoy, or weight-loss plans that allow for little variation?

Diets, generally speaking, are restrictive, absolutist, and quantified. Which means, your relationship with food is one in which youre constantly measuring against how much youre not allowed. Thats not on the plan, or Ive had too much, or Im at my points limit for the day. The food is shit. The process is torturous. The whole thing incongruous to your actual lifestyle. Youre always hungry, and youre always thinking about food in an unhealthy way.

And you wonder why your dieting attempts havent been successful?

7. Do I believe that eating low-fat/low-calorie is the best (or only) way to lose weight?

My job is to make sure that you never go hungry. We do this by eating enough protein and fat.

Fat! OMG! Calm down. Fat doesnt make you fat.

But I thought this was a diet!? Doesnt that mean I need to starve myself and be unhappy?

This is not a diet. This is a way of life. Life is not meant to be restrictive but to live in harmony. Were interested in energy, not depletion.

8. Do I come home at night and look to food for relief, either from stress or boredom or loneliness?

For many of us, we have emotional attachments to foodwhether or not we know it, whether or not we think of it that way. These are deeply ingrained, and they cause cognitive biases that are VERY hard to detach from.

For example: Do you often feel like eating when youre bored? How about if youre stressed, or sad, or lonely? Do you pair food with relaxation? Do you often say you work hard, therefore you deserve this treat or that outlandish meal,etc. ?

Those are all cognitive biases that you now consider to be truths. Theyre loosely defined operating principles that condition how you treat certain situations. Theyre not inherently bad or wrong. Its simply that theyre emotionally-based.

They generate from a place of vulnerability. I deserve it means that whatever is in front of you isnt enoughand therefore you need more. More of what? More fulfillment? So, is that what it is? Is the food FULFILLING YOU? Is it honestly expanding your worldview, pushing you to grow in your business, create great art, or helping you to feel more social or be a better lover?

9. When I go off plan, can I stop myself from binging or is it more like permission to binge?

If youre finding yourself binge-eating, here are three quick and highly-actionable tips for the morning after:

If you cultivate a growth mindset, theres always something to be learned, something to be gained.

__

Photo credit:Getty Images

Daniel is the CEO of EvolutionEat, where he'll teach you how to master your diet, stop overeating, and take control of your health.

Daniel is exceptionally good at high performance coaching, as it pertains to diet and lifestyle. As a world class motivator, lifestyle designer, and dietary strategist, he specializes in unpacking motivation, disentangling emotions and distractions from intentions, and getting to the bottom of what really influences our choices.

Sign up today to access his free, 3-hour online training program designed to help you master your diet once and for all. Follow him on Facebook and Instagram.

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9 Questions You Should Ask Yourself If You've Ever Gone On A Diet - The Good Men Project (blog)

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Home » Diet » 9 Questions You Should Ask Yourself If You’ve Ever Gone On A Diet – The Good Men Project (blog)