You want to lose the weight. You go on a weight-loss diet.
But it's not just living with a weight-loss diet - you're really living with the diet in your head.
The idealized weight-loss diet you start out with often becomes less and less ideal as time passes. When this happens, it's probably not something that's changing in the diet itself. It's you.
Maybe in the beginning, you can suppress your anti-diet behaviors. But then they start to emerge, and what you thought was a "perfect" weight-loss diet begins to look like a waste of time.
Again, it's usually not the fault of the weight-loss diet plan. It's you. It's that maybe you haven't taken into account your own psychology. You've only concentrated on the food.
So, it may go like this. Week one: you're really vigilant and in total control. But whatever has made you overeat in the past naturally appears again. At first, there's maybe a tiny infraction. And guess what? It feels very familiar, so familiar that you might feel a spark of comfort in it. The next time you buck the diet's rules, it's not so tiny. And then it snowballs.
People have a tendency to slip back into behaviors that come automatically.
What to do?
Change your perspective! Concentrate on your very personal feelings, thoughts, and life situations. Reframe the problem in your mind. Go from "I'm too fat" to this: "I am used to overeating and indulging in unhealthful foods for my own reasons. My job is to find those reasons, and work them out another way."
This is how to change the dynamics of your journey to lose the weight and make a weight-loss diet really work, long-term.
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