Is Your Diet Over Managed?

Do you try to over-manage your diet in hopes that you will have more success? Is this how your typical weight loss attempt looks:

1. Decide what to eat for the week, including snacks
2. Get to the grocery store and stock the house with "healthy" foods
3. Read every food label
4. Buy a food journal
5. Measure all the foods you eat
6. Record the carbohydrates/proteins/fats of each food
7. Count every calorie, including chewing gum and coffee creamer
8. Avoid too much sodium
9. Avoid sugar like the plague
10. Give up, "Who wants to live like this, I would rather deal with the weight."

You have been taught how to act when on a diet but trying to do too much can easily lead to overwhelm and you are likely to quit in frustration vowing to never go on a diet again!

The problem with diets in general is that they are based on a temporary mindset. The mere fact that you have to "go on" a diet means that you will eventually "go off" of it.

You are willing to go on a diet and do what is necessary to make the diet a success but the whole time you might be thinking, "I can't wait until this is over."

In order to create a mindset that supports long-term weight loss success you must look at dieting not as a collection of annoying tasks but as an action you are taking to improve your quality of life. This requires a focus shift.

When you over manage your diet you are very focused on the one thing you want to think less of - FOOD. Food becomes the center of the universe on a micro-managed diet because every bit of it is analyzed, measured or weighed. This is a problem because you get what you focus on, if your approach to weight loss is keeping you laser focused on food you will always want more food.

A better solution is to focus on what you will get once you have lost the weight. This creates a target for you that becomes clearer the more you focus on it.

Let's say you would like to lose 40 pounds, what you want to do is focus on what life will be like without those extra pounds. Put yourself in a movie and look at the world through the eyes of you at your goal weight. What are you wearing, how are you holding your body, how high is your confidence level when you walk in a room.

Make the pounds real to you, pick up something that weighs 40 pounds and try to walk up a flight of stairs. Then put the item down and climb the same stairs, note how much easier it was with less weight, now focus for a moment on how effortless climbing those stairs will be when your body is lighter.

You will still find it necessary to monitor your food intake and plan meals but by shifting your focus away from food and onto the great possibilities that are to be you will find your motivation actually builds and you are much more likely to see your plan through until your goal is reached.

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