by Maria's Last Diet
Relapse prevention refers to helping a person develop strategies for maintaining new behaviors and preventing a "relapse" into old, unwanted behaviors. You can relate the concept of preventing a relapse to kicking a drug habit, giving up alcohol or smoking, or giving up a relationship to food that leads to overeating and gaining weight.
One idea about what contributes to relapse - going back to the unwanted behavior - is something called "zero tolerance beliefs". It goes like this: you start dieting with the idea in mind that absolutely NO cheating is acceptable.
There's a paradox here. Initially, this belief can aid your efforts to regulate your relationship with food. It does, after all, provide a strict rule by which you can govern your behavior: NO CHEATING ALLOWED.
But here's what usually ends up happening. Over time, this belief undermines your effort to lose weight, because of one simple fact: lapses back into old behavior are inevitable. If you have that zero tolerance motto stuck in your head, when the lapse does occur, you have no way to handle it. You simply ruled it out, didn't allow for it at all. So, having no way to deal with your cheat, the most likely outcome is to revert back to more and more cheating. You once again find yourself engaging in the very behavior you are trying to change.
What can you do? First of all, you can recognize that cheats will indeed occur, and it does NOT mean that you've failed. It only means that you are not perfect (who is). Accepting this, you can move on to develop coping strategies for just those times when you have a cheat (a lapse back to your old relationship with food). What can you do after a cheat? How can you regain control of your newer behavior, your newly forming relationship with food and eating? Do you know how to accept your dieting transgression and move on? Can you learn from this mistake?
When you are really trying to change your behavior, why not give up that "zero tolerance belief". Accept that you will have some lapses, and prepare yourself for them. A good way to prevent a total relapse is to have effective ways of handling a cheat when it occurs.