READING TIME: 4 MINUTES

I know, you’re an all or nothing kind of dude. If you’re doing a diet you have to do it all in. Having just a little bit of something naughty doesn’t work for you, you have to completely abstain from it or not at all. If you are doing it, you’re doing it!

In fact I bet the only time you lost any proper weight on a diet in the past is when you were dead strict and nailed it. No cheating, no lapsing, the right food, at the right time, in the right quantities, with the right exercise, everything all in it’s place, doing it, all or nothing!

Oh but hang on a minute, if that were actually true then you wouldn’t be reading this now, because you would have lost all of your weight on your last diet, and it would have stayed off, meaning the diet was a complete success and actually the all or nothing approach really did work for you?

But you are reading this, because the all or nothing approach works for NO ONE. Without exception. Even the most hardcore dieters, stepping on stage, Hollywood actors with deadlines to meet, they all have a ‘cheat’. 

By cheat, I mean eat food that is classed as non-diet food. Food that is typically seen by the general public and media as being ‘bad for you’. Chocolate, alcohol, biscuits, junk food. Whatever it is you see it as meaning, you have failed your diet if you eat it. 99% of people feel that way. But here is the problem with that attitude….

Depriving yourself of anything you love only leads to one thing: CRAVINGS. Yes you can be strong and resist them for a while but eventually you will give in, everyone does. And when you do, because you think you have ‘failed’ on the diet you will binge eat (thinking “well I have blown it anyway so I may as well eat more and have a day off the diet”) in preparation for going back to your all or nothing diet (usually the next day, or the next Monday).

It’s a roller coaster of being ‘all in’ for a few days, then a period of ‘nothing at all’ and so on. Typically this cycle ultimately means you consume more calories than you would if you were not trying to diet and that is why most dieters, over the long term, end up actually weighing more.

The next problem is that if you love a certain food or drink and it is a regular part of your life the chances are it was one of the foods you tended to overeat which contributed to you being overweight in the first place. So you see it as evil and the enemy when it comes to losing weight. Because you love it you will also have it associated with certain things in your life, like celebrating, or stress, or habit.

If you remove that from your life completely, the first time you feel stressed, or happy, or encounter the regular habit scenario you are immediately faced with not only the ‘stress’ of being on a diet, and quite likely having started a new exercise regime as well, but also you now don’t have your ‘crutch’ to see you through. It’s a double whammy on your motivation and now you really are in trouble….

Don’t completely cut out the foods you love. Those foods on their own did not make you overweight, it was not their fault, you simply ate too much of them that’s all.

But those foods are so entrenched into your way of life that to remove them completely will be like giving up smoking (and everyone knows how hard that is). Yes you may think “But I want to stop eating them I know they are no good for me” and I completely understand that but one thing at a time tiger.

Lose the weight first, doing whatever you have to do, eating whatever you have to eat, to get the job done. The simple act of losing a ton of weight will make you so much healthier on its own. THEN worry about trying to remove those foods from your diet if you want to, but don’t try and do both at the same time. Give yourself a fighting chance at the weight loss first….

On The Switch Plan members still eat all the treat foods they love (and if it isn’t on their individual plan they ask for it to be added, and I do) and yet they still lose weight (lots of it). Why? Because I simply control the overall picture and manage how much of the treat they can eat. Completely removing it would never be the answer. THAT is the main reason members do so well on this diet (and my support of course lol).

So think carefully about any diet you are following. Make sure you factor in some of the stuff you love, because if you don’t the chances of you succeeding long term, and keeping the weight off are, well, zero basically.

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