It’s a difficult concept to understand, but dieting can make you fat! It all starts quite innocently. She has put on a few extra pounds, her jeans are suddenly TOO tight and her husband starts hinting that she could lose a couple of pounds. So you start searching the internet for a miracle diet where you can lose 5 or 10 pounds a week. wow! You find The Grapefruit and Egg Diet. All you have to do is eat grapefruit and eggs for a couple of weeks and you can lose over ten pounds. This grapefruit and egg thing sounds too good to be true! He runs out and buys dozens of eggs and bags of grapefruit. Start your diet.
By the second day, the thought of hard-boiled eggs is making you dizzy. By the third day, you can’t face another egg, you have a terrible headache, and all you do is growl, growl, growl. By the fifth day, he has lost six pounds, mainly because he is not eating much of anything. You are weak and you are VERY hungry. That is all! He gives up his diet and binge eats because he has been feeling so deprived. You eat everything in sight until you’re disgusted with yourself. You have a great idea! You will start a new diet on Monday. A new diet, a better diet, a diet that has no grapefruit and no eggs!
The cycle begins when you tell yourself that you will start your diet on Monday. This gives you the mental clearance to eat whatever you want and how much you want until Monday comes around. You must eat all those foods that will be prohibited on Monday. You may not even be a sweet eater (yes, there are overweight people who don’t like sweets!), but you buy cakes and ice cream because you know you won’t be able to have them next week. You can eat whatever you want without guilt because your world is going to change on Monday. All of this is great and wonderful until Monday comes around and you’ve gained 5 pounds, you’re still hungry and not ready to go on a diet. You are even hungrier than before because overeating makes you hungrier. However, today is Monday and you really need to start that diet, so you decide to fast this week to make up for everything you ate last week. On Monday night you are so hungry and deprived that you give up completely and decide to eat a lot. Go ahead and eat a big meal and tell yourself that you can eat tonight and fast again tomorrow. You promise yourself that you will be “good” tomorrow (so now eating means being bad). You think to yourself “Didn’t I tell myself that last week?” Well, yes, but tomorrow will be different. I’m definitely going back to my plan tomorrow. So you stuff yourself all night because you won’t be able to eat tomorrow.
Now it’s Tuesday and so far this week you’ve misbehaved, realized you can’t trust yourself, broken a promise you made to yourself, felt guilty and failed. And this is only Tuesday! Then what do you do? Do you go back to your fast? No, you say to yourself “Hey, I already screwed up this week. I’ll start my fast again next Monday.” You promise yourself that you will definitely start your fast on Monday. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Don’t you remember you told yourself that last week? Well sure, but next Monday I’m definitely going to do my fast or maybe the Atkins diet. You could even try the Zone diet, South Beach diet, Weight Watchers, Slim Fast diet, Nutri-System, Medifast, Optifast, Air Force diet, Grapefruit diet, Body Type diet, No Diet diet, or maybe I’ll do The Richard Simmons Diet, Jenny Craig, The Perricone Diet for Weight Loss, The Raw Food Diet, The YOU Diet or The Best Life Diet. The only thing you know for sure is that you are on some kind of diet where you have to eat diet foods. You hate diet food, but the cycle starts all over again and you proceed to eat all the “forbidden” foods that you will soon miss out on. The problem even gets worse when you start telling yourself in October that it’s useless to diet during the holidays. You have a great idea! Eat as much as you want over the holidays and go back on the diet on January 1. Now THIS is how dieting can make you fat. Is it a little crazy? Well yeah, didn’t I tell you? Dieting can also drive you a little crazy!
If all of this sounds too familiar to you, it’s time to stop dieting and start losing weight. The reason you want to eat all of these “forbidden” foods today is because you know you can’t eat them tomorrow or Monday. Guess what? With The 100 Calorie Diet, you don’t have to worry about so-called bad foods because there are no “bad” foods. You don’t have to worry about not being able to eat bread, candy, chocolate, soda or beer because on the 100 Calorie Diet you CAN have them tomorrow and you CAN have them Monday and you CAN have them Thanksgiving, Christmas and even January 1 ! It’s time to calm down and eat for today what you CAN eat today. Start EATING the 100 calorie way today. It sure beats the diet!