People are so different. Some women want lots of choices and feel too restricted if they don't have these choices to make. Others might feel frustrated and overwhelmed by many choices. It might even remind them of their out-of-control eating.
There is psychological research on this very subject. Here are some things you might like to know about choices and self-control.
First, we would all agree that your self-control comes into play when you are dieting You use your self-control so that you can stick to your dieting behavior. This is the way to attain weight-loss success.
Now, self-control takes a good bit of mental and physical energy. The reason is because you need to override one response—for example, giving in to being tempted by food—and then substitute another response, which is restraint. It's not easy, as most of us know.
OK, so you need self-control for dieting and self-control takes a lot out of you. You might even say it depletes your energy.
It is interesting that research about this shows how making decisions—choosing one thing over another—draws upon the same inner resource you use for self-control—which you might call energy, or strength. Furthermore, this kind of inner strength is limited, and apparently gets easily depleted.
To get more specific about self-control and dieting, let's say you are faced with some non-diet food, or even the thought of non-diet food—or, you may be faced with another kind of challenge having nothing to do with food, but you automatically think of eating as a way to help you meet the challenge. In order to stick to dieting, you need to override your inclination to eat whatever it is, and then substitute a different response. You need to interrupt what is by now a natural tendency on your part, and initiate another kind of behavior, which is pretty much the opposite. Can you see how this is an energy-consuming process?
So, if you add to this a wide variety of food choices while you're dieting, you'll need even more energy—decision-making energy.
The research findings indicate that having to make many decisions leads to impairment of self-regulation. Experiments have shown that people who did not have to make too many choices persisted longer then people who did have to make choices. This inability to persist was shown to happen on a wide variety of tasks.
It's a paradox. We all want to have choices, the freedom to live life as we want to live it. But we also tire of making choices, and even get stressed out by decision-making.
Making choices can be difficult, require great effort, and result in worse self-regulation. We are wowed by any dieting regimen that says "Eat whatever you choose and still lose the weight". But they usually don't work.
Think about these concepts, and see if anything here can help you on your quest to lose the weight.