Aspire Magazine: Inspiration for a Woman's Soul.(TM) Apr/May 2018 Aspire Magazine Full Issue | Page 68

WHY DIETS DON’T WORK:
It’s All in Your Head
BY CARLY POLLACK
T
here’s a point in the process of dieting,
usually close to the beginning, when we
experience hopeful euphoria. The diet is
working for us, we feel great, and we feel like
we’ve finally got it. It’s the point at which we
think about our past behaviors and exclaim
that we are never going back to that old way
of eating again! We are essentially high on
the diet, and we want to climb a mountain
and scream from the top, “I’m cured!” A
few weeks later, we leave our favorite
Thai restaurant feeling disgusted (and yet
somewhat impressed) with how much pad
thai we were able to shove down our gullets.
We think back to our mountaintop moment
and wonder why and how we have fallen
so far from grace. Does restricting our food
intake release some special endorphins that
make us appear more confident than we
really are? If we were truly that happy about
all the positive eating changes, then why did
we go back to our old patterns?
Because I have visited the mountaintop a
time or two (or ten), I have the answer to
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why we fall so hard from grace and directly
into a bag of chips. It is also the key to
understanding why diets don’t work.
CONSIDER THIS FORMULA:
Thoughts Emotions
Behaviors Reward or Consequence
Diets don’t work because they focus on
behavior modification and nothing more. Eat
this, don’t eat that; and if you eat that, you
break the rules of the diet, and that makes
you lazy, inadequate, weak, unlovable,
and [insert insult] here. If we are brave and
vulnerable enough to look more deeply at
what truly needs to be healed, we will have
success eliminating our negative behaviors
at their root. It is our minds that drive the
eating bus. In fact, our thoughts drive every
emotion we feel, and how we feel will dictate
how we act. Unless we change the original
thought/story, we will re-create the same
painful pattern, a nightmarish diet-induced
Groundhog Day.