Lifestyle Expert: A New Year’s Don’t Diet Resolution

A New Year’s Don’t Diet Resolution

New calendars have a way of making people dream big. When the first day of a new year falls on the first day of the week, as it does this year, the possibilities seem endless—all that time to make drastic life changes! And there is no goal more frequently pursued in January than the total diet makeover.

Maybe this is the year you vow to eat only organic, and stick to it 100%. Or you decide to swear off all forms of sugar. Perhaps you recommit yourself to following that low-carb plan you did so well on the first time around.

Whatever nutritious ambitions you may have as you begin the first week of this New Year, in order to have any shot at lasting success, make sure the goal does not have the word diet in it.

In short, make 2007 your Don’t Diet Resolution year.

The End of Dieting

The word diet has a built-in trapdoor that everyone who’s ever been on one eventually falls through. That trapdoor is that the diet will eventually come to an end. They’re like little vacations – places we visit where we know can’t stay forever.

The truly amazing thing is that when the trapdoor ending of a diet opens and you fall through it, you end up right back where you started. Your weight may have changed while you were “gone,” but your world didn’t. And since all the same obstacles and excuses still exist from before you “left,” your lost weight will eventually find its way back, too.

Consider this: do you know anyone who has gone on a diet and stayed on it the rest of her life? Me neither.

So what’s the alternative? You can begin by simply changing your vocabulary, and you can eliminate the trapdoors of dieting.

Terms of Entrapment

The first thing that needs to go are the dieting absolutes. Words like always, never, must and can’t demand a perfect performance, and there just aren’t enough gold medals to go around. You can also skip the unrealistic time frames and exact quantities typical of most diets, they’re all trapdoors.

Consider the examples in these diet resolutions:

“I will always drink 3 cups of green tea every day.

“I must have 6 ounces of wild Alaskan King salmon 3 times a week.

“I can never eat anything after 8:00 pm.

Life just isn’t that predictable, so any eating plan anchored by such restrictive terms is designed to fail.

Be careful of the word habit, too, as in eating habits. Our culture has taught us that habits are hard to break, so if you believe you’ve got some bad ones, it’s easy to feel doomed by them.

A Language for Losing

Instead, of dwelling on eating habits, focus on your eating behavior and how you’d like it to improve since, behaviors can be changed, and we can change our behavior in response to different circumstances. Behavior is more flexible and forgiving. It allows time for maturing and for spontaneity, and that’s much more realistic when you’re talking about eating.

To begin your Don’t Diet Resolution,

(1) Identify an eating behavior you’d like to improve.

(2) Next state what your intentions are in general terms for the new behavior. Why intentions and not promises? Intentions don’t guarantee you’ll get it right every time.

Your intentions may sound something like this: “I will try to eat breakfast before I leave the house.” It doesn’t say what you’ll eat and it doesn’t say how often, so you can rededicate yourself to this mantra each day, and you won’t feel you’ve failed after you’ve missed your first morning meal. Or your intention may be, “I will be mindful of the eating I do while working at my desk.” You’re not vowing to stop snacking or to give up chocolate, you’re saying you’ll be more aware of the fact you’re eating and that alone will help modify the behavior.

The world has enough diets in it; you don’t need to start another one in 2007. By resolving not to diet, you can fill that new calendar with your good intentions and be rewarded with new eating behavior that can last a lifetime. Switching the focus from a list of rules to wellness and nutrition are attainable goals. That’s a resolution worth keeping.

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