Starting a diet is the easy part; staying on a diet is the hardest. If your diet is restrictive in what you can eat and/or allows you to feel hungry at any time throughout the day, then it will be very difficult to stay on this diet long term. In a study of 184,450 adults it was reported that nearly 83 percent of people who start a diet pick one that is virtually guaranteed to fail. (JAMA 2001, 286: 1195-1200) So what does it take to stay on a diet and be able to manage your goal weight long term? Remember that someone successful at losing and managing their weight is consistently practicing a greater number of strategies. To get yourself to this point you have to learn to work through diet fatigue by learning to tolerate the feelings and events that keep you from meeting your daily and weekly weight loss goals. You have to practice the successful strategies in spite of our environment. Our environment is not supportive of weight loss. So you have to learn to continue on your diet week by week, focusing on your strategies and planning in advance.

Weight Management is a skill. These skills have to be consistently practiced over and over to become proficient at managing your weight. Practicing “elements” of your diet may have a positive effect on weight, but your very best results will always come from pushing yourself to fully practice all of the components of your diet. Success becomes the difference between “sampling” a diet and making concrete plans to practice 100 percent of the diet program.

In the HMR (Health Management Resources) weigh loss programs we instruct our patients on increasing their environmental control strategies in dealing with what we call “decision anxiety” and “third alternative thinking.” Decision anxiety is finding yourself having to make a decision to stay on your diet or to go off of it. Some examples might be the following:

You find yourself in a meeting and someone walks in carrying a box of pastries and soda to feed everyone. You are getting hungry and now you have to make a decision on whether or not to eat the pastries and drink the soda or politely decline and ask your boss to excuse you to run to your office to grab some fruit?

You are running errands on a Saturday morning and they are taking longer than you expected, so do you go through the drive thru of one of the many fast food restaurants nearby or do you stop by a grocery store and pick up a healthy option?

You have been trying to walk the two miles around your neighborhood and this morning you notice that it is raining. Do you forget about walking or do you have a back up plan and go to the local recreation center to walk around the gym, indoors?

These are all legitimate decisions that put you in the situation of possibly, if not highly likely, going off your diet program. Where the waters get even murkier is when you start to rationalize your decision to go off your diet. This becomes what we call “Third Alternative Thinking.” First of all let me state that there are only TWO alternatives, you either choose to stay on your diet program or you choose to go off your program.

The first alternative is the successful approach. This is where you choose the option that keeps you on your diet. By practicing 100 percent of the components you will experience consistent weight loss and be more successful in maintaining your weight.

The second alternative is to not practice all of the variables of your weight loss program. This option, ultimately leads to weight gain and no long-term success.

There is NO third alternative that will allow you to practice components of your diet or to substitute off the diet foods for some of your “on the diet foods,” and still be able to somehow, someway keep losing weight and/or to manage any previous weight loss long term. Even though there is no third alternative, we have all tried to rationalize eating that Quarterpounder with cheese as a protein, grain and dairy. Not to mention that we convince ourselves that the large order of French fries is one of our vegetable servings. Third alternative thinking is a normal response to decision anxiety.

Successfully losing weight is making the commitment to plan ahead and to problem solve to stay on your diet and to meet your goals. Just do it. The more you plan in advance the easier it will be to stick to your program. If you haven’t already you should have written down a plan for two different days, being very specific on what you are going to eat for breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner, snack and what you will be doing for your physical activity. I suggest putting them on 3x5 cards and keeping them with you or attaching them to your refrigerator. This way if you ever do have trouble staying on track with your diet, you can immediately take these two cards and you have at least two days fully planned to get you back on track. This way you are not faced with more decision anxiety of starting back on your diet. The decisions of what to eat, when, where and how have already made.

If you do find yourself off your diet and want to get back on track, but feel that you have been off it for too long or have eaten too much food (calories) off your diet, you can still be successful in losing weight. Start immediately planning for the very next day. Forget the past and move forward to reaching your weight loss goals!