Change your diet plan, change your perspectives, and with patience, and better choices even the greatest of dietary temptations will eventually fall away.
You would agree that succumbing to temptation when on a diet is a sensation that is most likely all too familiar for most people.
We go out to eat with friends, we attend a family birthday celebration, or our housemate left a pizza out on the counter with a sign on the box that says “Free to a Good Home”.
Whatever the excuse, we give in to these temptations and cheat on our diet. We overeat at restaurants, or we decide that yes we will have the large slice of cake at the birthday party.
That free pizza on the counter?
Nobody just eats one slice of pizza. Right? Right.
Sadly, these moments of weakness slow us down on our journey to our goal weight, and all too often one lapse becomes another, then another, until we are off our diet indefinitely.
Even with the generous and varied nature of a CSN diet program and supplements, many of us still find it very difficult to make the best choices when it comes to sticking to our diet plan.
There is hope though. Just as many people struggle with overcoming the temptation to cheat on their diet, so also many people have developed various methods for beating the temptation and staying on their diet. Here are some excellent points to ponder the next time you are tempted to cheat on your diet.
#1 Focus on Benefits
Overcoming temptation, like much of the fat loss process, is all about mindset. It is essential to alter how you see food, personal activity, and weight loss as a whole.
Rather than focusing on all the unhealthy but delicious junk food you are giving up, you must alter your mindset to focus on the healthy choices you are making instead.
For example, you can focus on how the healthy alternative foods you are eating are good for you, how they are helping you take control of improving your overall health, and that every healthy food item is helping you shed excess weight while making you look and feel better every day.
More often than not, that slice of cake looks a lot less appetizing in comparison.
#2 Add Tasty Toppings
Fighting temptation often requires us to conduct a little self-imposed psychological warfare.
One of the best ways to accomplish this is to add better flavourings and toppings to our healthy food to helps us crave healthier dishes over junk food. Different cooking styles, adding sauces we enjoy, or even changing up the seasoning a little can take your protein and greens on a flavorful trip around the world.
Another technique that works very well is using a slow cooker to prepare our food in order to mix things up a little and add some new flavours we might not have experienced before.
Don’t like broccoli? Stop steaming it and start boiling it with oil and garlic. Tired of plain chicken or beef? Add some salsa, hot sauce, or spicy mustard. Smother your vegetables in herbed Greek yoghurt sauce and Parmesan.
Search up some recipes online, get fresh ingredients, and get cooking. You will quickly find that your temptations become fewer and farther between when you have healthier and tastier alternatives available.
#3 Rid Your Life of Triggers
What sparks your cravings? What things in your life trigger those temptations? Everybody has triggers when it comes to eating – people, places, and feelings that give us strong desires to indulge in unhealthy junk food bingeing.
All too often, we allow these triggers to draw us into overeating or eating even when we aren’t hungry.
Take control and rid your life of these triggers where you work, live, and play. Wherever you are experiencing the most temptation, you need to remove those triggers pronto.
If certain friends or family members who have a tendency to encourage you to overindulge, don’t eat meals or go drinking with them.
You don’t have to avoid them outright, just make sure that if they are a trigger influence for you that you choose non-food related activities for your to share together.
As you eliminate triggers from your life, you will find that those temptations pop up far less frequently than they used to.
#4 Be Smart About Substitutions in your diet plan
One of the downsides to eliminating triggers from your life is that it can lead to a general sense of deprivation.
As you try to eliminate those things from your diet that you know are triggers, you find it is harder and harder to stop thinking about them because you now feel deprived.
Therefore, as you eliminate triggers from your life, start finding healthier substitutions for your favorite snacks and trigger foods. For example, if you are a pizza lover, find a good recipe that you enjoy for cauliflower-crust pizza.
This recipe cuts a large number of calories, carbs, and sugars from a dish you already know that you tend to eat more of than you should. If it’s ice cream you crave, try making frozen protein pops that are lower in sugar and carbohydrates.
#5 Increase Your Protein Intake
It is important to consume lean protein with every meal and snack, and you should never go longer than three hours during the day without eating something.
Lean protein contains less calories while making your feel full for longer periods of time than carbohydrate rich snacks because protein takes longer to digest.
Better still, protein actually burns more calories during digestion, making it ideal for promoting that calorie deficit you need to burn fat. In fact, for every 100 calories of protein you consume, 25 calories are consumed just to digest and metabolise the protein.
Get your protein every three hours, and you will find that your cravings and temptations have begun to vanish more and more over time.
#6 Check Yourself Before Eating
The majority of dieters cheat on their diet when they aren’t in the right mindset.
Most of the time, people aren’t even hungry when they cheat on their diet, but instead are coping with emotions or stress. Comfort food soothes those feelings, and so we often turn to food in order to deal with our feelings.
Next time you are feeling the need for some comfort food, stop and do a quick self-evaluation. Are you truly hungry? Can you hear or feel your stomach rumbling?
No?
Then it’s time to go do something fun and productive that is non-food related until that urge to eat passes. Most successful dieters say it takes anywhere from 2-10 minutes of positive distraction to overcome cravings or temptation.
Another technique that works well is to drink water to see if your body is actually hungry or just tempted by comfort food. Many times people experience thirst like hunger, and they find after a glass of cold water that they aren’t really hungry after all.
#7 Drink More Water
Every doctor you will ever meet will recommend that you drink plenty of fluids, and if you don’t drink water throughout the day that you start doing so.
Not only is it good for your overall health, but it helps you eat less, too. One of the best ways you can fight the temptation to cheat on your diet is to drink a tall cold glass of water. Water is non-fat, no-calorie, and necessary to sustain your life.
People can go several weeks without food, but no more than three days with no water. As an added bonus, drinking cold water burns calories since your body needs to warm it up in order to use it. Regular hydration is definitely key to overcoming temptation when it strikes.
Conclusion to the Temptation to Cheat on your Diet Plan
Experiencing temptation is a normal part of changing your lifestyle to lose weight. If you never experienced temptation along the way and everything came naturally to you, then anyone would be able to lose weight.
Many times people set off on a weight loss journey and do not realise all of their bad eating and lifestyle habits until they start to make a change.
Gearing up mentally makes a huge difference regarding long-term success or failure and learning to overcome temptation as it can be a major component of any long-term weight loss program.
All in all, you must decide to live that healthier life and say no to your temptation. You must choose to remove those triggers from your life.
You must make those healthier choices of what you eat and how you spend your time.
Fat-loss will not happen by itself, and you cannot reach your goal weight without the necessary changes in your mindset that will help you achieve what you have set out to do.
Remember to focus on the benefits of everything you are trying to accomplish with your healthier diet and weight loss. Your CSN diet plan goes a long way making your journey easier, but that will not remove the daily choice to stick to your diet any less difficult if you have an unhealthy mindset.
Change your thinking, change your perspectives about food and exercise, and stay committed to your CSN diet.
With time, patience, and better choices even the greatest of dietary temptations will eventually fall away.
2 thoughts on “Working through the Temptation to Cheat on your Diet Plan”
Hi Karien, can I eat something on the list during meal times when I am on phase 2? Marise
Hi I weigh 120kg what products would I take to lose 30kg