Successful Dieting: Changing Your Eating Habits One Ounce at a Time

Whether you are trying to lose weight or simply change your diet to eat healthier, it seems that many are destined from the very beginning to fail. It doesn't seem to matter whether the diet you try is the latest fad or a well planned diet based on years of research, sticking to it for more than a few days or weeks seems almost impossible.

Failing attempts at dieting often leads to the lowering of self esteem for many people. They dwell on the failures and see them as a lack of will power. The truth is most people have difficulty changing their diet not because of lack of will power but, because physical, mental, and emotional factors make the all or nothing approach impossible to stick to.

Stop and think what happens when you begin a diet. You throw out all those chips, cookies, ice cream, and other fattening foods, stock up on rice cakes, lean meat, and lots of fruit and vegetables. You sign up with a gym or plan a course of daily exercise and then begin your new healthy lifestyle. You are ready to go for gold, no holds bar, full steam ahead. Only to crash and burn. Why? Because as a generation of people we have come to expect everything “now.” Instant everything including instant weight loss or instantaneous health. We expect to be able to take that lifestyle we have built over a lifetime and change it in a single day successfully.

Forget it. Rome wasn't built in a day and changing your diet is a major lifestyle change that you shouldn't expect to change in a day either. In fact, once you quit thinking about diets, weight loss, and instant results changing your eating lifestyle and even your exercise routine becomes much easier. Here is a simple way to make those changes in a healthier more successful way that not only allows you to succeed but, allows you to build on small successes along the way.

Forget The All Or Nothing Approach

Forget about changing your entire diet all at once. Instead concentrate on making one or two small changes in your diet. For example if you are used to eating a 16 ounce steak for dinner, don't give up the steak, simply shave two ounces from it. Instead of eating an entire large baked potato eat half of one and substitute a serving of vegetables or fruit for the other half. While making such dietary changes won't allow you to lose 5 pounds in a week it will be a beginning to eating healthier without feeling either physically or emotionally hungry.

If you make small changes to each meal you eat a day you will be lowering your calorie intake by small increments. Once your body has adjusted to the initial changes then cut down that meat portion by another ounce and Try putting fresh fruit on that morning pancake instead of syrup. As your body adjusts to each new change, then institute another small change in your diet. Either by decreasing portion size, if that is your goal or substituting healthier foods for less healthy ones. It could take several months or a year or more to reach the healthy diet you want but, you will make slow and steady process and before you really notice you will be eating better, feeling better, and may well have lost a few pounds.

What About That Exercise?

Don't worry about starting an exercise regime in the initial stages of changing your eating habits. Within a few months of making dietary changes you will begin to feel more energetic and want to do more. That is the time you can begin exercising and have some success here too. Just remember that like with changing your eating habits changing from a passive lifestyle to a more active one will be a slow and steady process. You might want to begin by taking a short 5 minute walk just because you want to or decide to go dancing for an evening. Go for it but, don't force yourself into a regime to begin with. Once you start to become more active you will discover all the fun you are missing and want to do more. After you have begun to spend more time being active on a regular basis that is the time to start an actual exercise regime if you want. However, try to choose ways to exercise that are fun and hold your interest or you will soon find better things to do with your time.

In the end it may take a year or two or even longer to lose all the weight you want, or to see the real benefits that your dietary changes have brought about. But, keep in mind that by staying the course and making these changes slowly you are more apt to be more successful over this period than you would be with trying to diet two, or three times only to meet with failure because your body and mind could not make these changes all at once.