Think of Your "Slip ups or Failures" as Eggs

Back in my dieting days, one of the toughest things for me was to know what to do to recover from a binge. To my way of thinking, I was either on the diet bandwagon or “off the wagon.” There were no in betweens. As a result of all that pressure to try to be perfect, it was so hard to stay on my diet. I was always teetering on the brink of my last failure, feeling so pressured to be perfect. That pressure only made me want to give in to whatever temptations presented themselves. I swore that I had no control around food.

My Weight Watchers leader used to call that all or nothing thinking the ‘what the hell effect.’ Here’s what she described. Imagine you’re in the kitchen and you’re bringing a dozen eggs from the refrigerator to the counter top. As you walk, you drop one of the eggs.  What do you do?

In dieting, you’ll notice that what people tend to do when they've slipped up is that they say, “Oh what the h---, I’ve already screwed that  one up, I ate that cookie that I shouldn't have eaten, let me just start my diet on ___. “

Now let’s just put that back into perspective with the eggs. If you’ve already dropped one egg, do you grab the other 11 and start tossing them at the floor? Does that make sense? You are probably shaking you head saying, “No.”

But that’s what diets teach us to do. We’re conditioned to think in terms of black and white habits, behaviors, eating choices and feelings about our bodies. If you eat cheesecake for breakfast, you think of yourself as undisciplined, or bad. If your clothes are too tight, you tend to think, “I’m a fat pig.” It’s the all or nothing thinking that drives you to sabotage yourself because the unspoken message that is getting reinforced is that I’m not good enough and I don’t deserve to be happy. Who can live under that pressure, deprivation and guilt? Tomorrow we'll talk about the difference between formula vs. process thinking. Diet vs. no diet. You decide!

What do you think? What’s been your experience with dieting? How did you react to a slip up? Share your experience with our readers and let’s get a discussion going.