Perfection is poison to your diet success

Google the term ‘diet’ and ‘weight loss’ and page after page after page appears extolling the virtues of diet after diet, most of which are downright ridiculous (as are the credentials of most of their proponents for that matter). Anyway, regardless of which diet you follow, in my experience one of the major reasons why they fail is because people expect perfection. That is, when they are on a diet, they are ON a diet and they will not deviate from that righteous path. To do so would be regarded as abject failure.

Now this approach is great when everything is rosy and you feel super motivated but what happens when you’ve had a bad day and your mood is lower than a snakes’ belly? And your cravings for that chocolate digestive are higher than Pete Doherty on a Saturday night? Simple, you reach for that chocolate-topped biccy and munch through it with gusto, and do you stop at just the one? Of course not, just like Taylor Swift and her celebrity boyfriends, you go for another and then another and then another. By this point you’re so upset and despondent with yourself that you are now officially OFF of your diet and you end up eating the whole blimmin’ pack of biscuits.

The following morning you wake up with more regrets than a vertigo sufferer who’s just go a job on the waltzer, and because you’re now no longer ON a diet you spend the day eating rubbish. A day turns into a week and a week soon becomes a month. Before you know it, you’re back at square one with regards to weight loss and that’s if you’re lucky. Often, if you’ve followed a fad diet you’re worse off than you were to start with because you’ve ended up losing a lot of muscle mass when trying to shift the fat.

If you adopt this attitude, that anything less than absolute perfection is a failure, unfortunately, just like Danny DeVito entering a high jump competition, you’re pretty much doomed from the start. The trouble with dieting, as with most things, is that life gets in the way.

So what is the antidote to this perfection poison?

It is something called the 80/20 principle, which basically states that if you follow your diet for 80% of the time, the other 20% doesn’t really matter too much, not unless you make it an issue of course. So don’t strive to be perfect all of the time, just most of the time. Think of dieting as learning to ride a bike – you have to expect to fall off now and again!

Another way is not demonising certain foods or food groups. For example, if biscuits weren’t regarded as sinful, perhaps they wouldn’t be the catalyst for binge eating the whole pack. But that’s not to say that biscuits are ‘good for you’, of course an apple would be a better option, but then again eating shed loads of them would have their down sides! Perhaps renowned songstress Cheryl (formerly Cheryl Fernandez-Versini, formerly Cheryl Cole, formerly Cheryl Tweedy) summed it up perfectly in her hit song ‘Fight for this Love’ when she sang ‘Too much of anything can make you sick’. As my old nan would say ‘a little bit of everything does you good’.

Thanks for reading,

Matt

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