Don’t set yourself up for diet failure

Jun 28 2007 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

IF YOU’RE desperately cutting out chocolate and crisps to prepare your body for its grand beach unveiling, then you are not alone.

Across the UK, 55% of people admit they want to lose a stone or more before mid-August, yet many of them are coming up with excuses for their failure before they’ve even begun dieting.

More than one in five Liverpudlians blame a night on the tiles for causing them to ditch their good intentions, according to a survey by Kelloggs, while 39% admitted they often lied to themselves about the high calories in junk food or nibbled without thinking in front of computer screens at work.

Diet and fitness expert Joanna Hall believes skipping breakfast is perhaps one of the most worrying of all diet traps, as it is often the one that can make or break plans to eat healthily.

“In many cases, dieters believe that skipping breakfast or even starving themselves completely can be a fast-track to weight-loss success. In fact, studies show that those who make time to eat breakfast actually tend to be slimmer than those who skip,” she explains.

“If you don’t have this meal in the morning, you’re more likely to over-indulge later in the day on high fat, high sugar foods. Many forms of dieting are a false economy and will simply leave you devoid of energy and your diet doomed to failure – it’s best to focus on a balanced diet and regular exercise.”

Joanne has come up with a list of diet traps that we are all prone to fall into:

• The Breakfast Skipper: You miss breakfast in the false hope you are saving yourself calories;

• The Do or Die Dieter: You’re prone to following restrictive diets that, once proved too difficult, result in bingeing or giving up. The pattern of extreme behaviour then sets you up for failure, leaving you feeling devoid of energy and perceiving your dieting efforts as doomed;

• The Mindless Nibbler: Sub-conscious munching is stretching your waistline. Absent-mindedly devouring a packet of crisps, a bag of chocolates or that tub of fabulous ice cream can often be the dieter’s downfall;

• The Booze Binger: You’ll eat more the day after drinking. In terms of weight management, perhaps the most significant factor is that drinking alcohol lowers your awareness of what you are eating and is likely to provoke a “devil-may-care” attitude in which self-discipline goes out the window.

By recognising why our efforts to lose weight are failing, and making simple lifestyle changes, most of us should be able to flatten the tummy in time to look better on the beach.