Holiday mood food…what’s a dieter to do?

Are you in the holiday mood for food? Isn’t everybody, dieters included?

Here are the holiday hazards you face as a dieter.

• old holiday habits
• being easily influenced
• lacking confidence
• no prior practice
• no plan
• unrealistic expectations
• being tempted

Let’s take only a couple of these holiday stumbling points and see what you can do about them. The entire list, which is an awfully big mouthful, is too much to swallow at one sitting. (Is this bite-size piece of wisdom priming you for a dieter’s holiday?)

Let’s take unrealistic expectations
Do you expect yourself, I mean really expect yourself, to stay on your diet despite all the anything-but-diet food that will be there to tempt you? If you expect perfection and then you blow it, you might start the all too familiar process of getting disappointed and depressed. Of course, you can also get disappointed and depressed by restraining yourself and depriving yourself of those sumptuous holiday delights that everyone else is having no problem devouring.

Too much in the way of depressed feelings or disappointment may turn a diet lapse or dietary restrictiveness into the old you again. The old you is the you who might have been escaping difficult feelings by overeating or eating what was most fattening.

So what do you do? Is this a trap? Are you supposed to not expect yourself to stay on your diet? Not exactly. What you can do is be careful of expecting too much from yourself. That is a sure way to disappoint yourself. Put in food terms, don’t bite off more than you can chew. In other words, for the holidays aim low. Don’t go making your holiday one of those quests for excellence. Be satisfied with a C+ in sticking to your diet plan. After all, a C+ at holiday time is far better than an F.

Let’s take being tempted
When you are trying to diet and you give in to temptation, you could say that you are letting your short-term goal, which is the desire to indulge, win out over your long-term goal, which is to lose weight. This can spiral into things you don’t want to happen. You go for seconds after you’ve just eaten a full plate. You don’t wait long enough for the reminder “diet plan” to makes its way to the front of your mind. What you end up with is a self-control failure.

There’s no getting around it ―holiday time is and always will be filled with temptation. For someone who struggles with eating and weight, the biggest temptation is usually food. Long-term goals have trouble standing up. The situation isn’t designed for your long-term weight loss goal to prevail. It’s difficult during the food-centered holidays to keep your distance from tempting food, and stick close to (or even find) diet food. The “no-no” foods that you usually don’t keep in the house are directly in front of you on the table. The diet foods that you usually keep on hand are nowhere to be found.

So, what do you do?

Prepare yourself. You should carefully consider beforehand what your diet plan and your willpower are up against. Acknowledge the strength it will take to get through holiday celebrations in a good way. Then―very important―you can ease up on your self-control in other areas, for the time being. You can put all your self-control in one basket, the “I’m going to stay on my diet plan as much as possible” basket. Don’t use up your self-control in other ways. Go easy on yourself. Take the pressure off however you can. Save your self-control strength for your eating.

Here’s one more way to deal with temptation. Make a plan in advance so at those moments when you are face to face with temptation, you have something ready to do. You can practice a strategy until you know it like the back of your hand. Then it will take little mental energy to put it into play. It will be, in a sense, automatic, and effortless.

Here’s what our friend Samantha did. She practiced. She practiced and practiced way before it was holiday time. Her family helped. They all worked together making big, enticing meals, and they set all the fixings right out on the table under the very nose of dieting Samantha. She practiced not going overboard in whatever way she could think of. She got up and walked away from the table. She drank a lot of sparkling water with lemon. She excused herself and went into another room to write a paragraph reminding herself of her goals. She had one bite of two gooey desserts. Sound foolish to you? Not really. Practice made (almost) perfect. When the holiday actually came around, Samantha had lots of practice (not food) under her belt, and she sailed through the occasion with only a minor slip.

If you consider using these pieces of advice to advance your cause, remember to take them with a grain of salt. Make plenty of room for a modification or two that you’ll think of. It’s always best when the ingredients of any recipe suit your own personal taste.

© Maria's Last Diet. Maria’s Last Diet is an online weight loss support website for women. At Maria’s Last Diet, you’ll find the tools to fix the thoughts, feelings, and automatic habits that fight against you when you diet. Because it’s never just about the food. Visit www.mariaslastdiet.com for more diet tips and weight loss motivation.

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