What you can do: Identify your diet-sabotaging habits by analyzing your food journal. Once you pinpoint the situations, times of day or other triggers that make you eat mindlessly, you can work to break the connections between those triggers and the food you eat.
Plan ahead: Instead of always going to the vending machine at work for a mid-day snack, bring low-fat cheese and whole-wheat crackers or an apple.
Establish rules: Overcoming overeating means no eating while watching TV.
Pay attention: Don’t nibble while you’re cooking or continue eating after dinner’s over by snacking on “leftovers” when you clean the dishes.
Redecorate: That candy dish looks lovely on your coffee table, but it costs you 400 calories a day when it’s filled with Skittles.
3) You’re resigned to being overweight.
You’ve started a diet, stopped a diet, started again and stopped again, and you just can’t seem to lose the girth. Why bother, you think. Believing in futility can be disastrous, because giving up on weight loss often means weight gain. Maintaining a stable weight – even one that’s too high – takes some effort for most of us. The higher we are above our ideal weight range, the worse the consequences for our health, self-esteem or motivation to get back on the weight-loss wagon.
What you can do: Be realistic. Don’t expect to lose three inches in three months. What took 10 years to put on won’t come off by the time next season’s clothes are in stores, if you’re just getting started today. And don’t think that eliminating French fries from an almost all-junk-food diet will make much difference – no matter how painful the sacrifice might be. Sometimes a seriously disillusioned dieter needs to see a professional, like a dietitian, surgeon or psychologist, says Dorfman.
