New Year, new hopes!

It’s that time of year again, when we yearn to get in great shape … finally! There’s a whole slew of diets to choose from, of course, and every publication worth its salt is quick to list all the ways we need to change our diet for the better (including cutting back on that very salt!). I’m not a big fan of diets. I think the lesson of time has taught us that diets, by and large, simply don’t work. That’s not to say that they never work, or they can’t work. Just that, for whatever reason, they’re more likely to end in tears than in smiles. If you’re going to go down that route I think you need to do it with your eyes wide open.

Look into your dietary requirements

Find out more about your dietary needs first. One of the major problems with diets is that many of them fail to fully address a person’s dietary needs, so you end up feeling hungry all the time, or actually becoming unwell. It’s really not difficult to become malnourished just by getting the constituents and proportions wrong. Not a great way to go about entering into a new, and hopefully long lasting, dietary regime! So spend some time learning about proteins, carbohydrates, and fats, and all the various micronutrients, some of which are absolutely essential. Arm yourself with knowledge! Know, for example, that fat is not your enemy; in fact, fat is an essential part of a healthy diet. You just need to know which fats are healthy and which are likely to cause you problems. And to have an idea of the correct proportion of fats to carbs and proteins. It’s not rocket science, really. Do a bit of reading on dietary requirements, there’s lots of information freely available.

Choose your diet carefully

Then choose a diet that seems to offer a sensible approach. Steer clear of fad diets, or any that promise to help you lose 10 lbs in a week, or any such extreme claim. Even if a diet that promises that can deliver (and some can), it’s highly likely that the loss will be followed by regaining the weight soon afterward. You need to lose weight at a sensible rate, and by eating a sensible diet. One that you can carry on long term and be comfortable with. And, of course, you need to take some exercise! But maybe most important of all, you need to adjust your attitude to … well, everything really. You need to stop seeing food as something you simply must have, all the time. If you carry on with that kind of attitude, it makes no difference what diet you choose, or even whether it’s successful or not. You’ll always end up overeating, and the weight will inevitably creep back on. It would be very helpful if you could see yourself as a person who gladly accepts smaller portions. And gladly chooses to eat healthier choices. If you can willingly forgo that second, or even third slice of chocolate cake, and if you feel quite content to eat a salad from time to time without it feeling like self-inflicted torture, then there’s hope for you. There are other changes in attitude that can make losing weight an achievable goal, but I’m not going to go into them all here. What I do want to focus on for a while is what might be, for you, the most important attitude adjustment you could make. It concerns how you see yourself.

Change the way you see yourself!

I just watched a woman on breakfast TV, a very successful dieter, and she looked the absolute picture of health. She was in great shape! She didn’t look underweight or drawn, and she had a healthy, curvy figure. And images flashed onscreen from time to time as she talked about her transition to her present state. She had been a grossly overweight teenager, and carried it through for many years afterwards. Still, she managed to diet successfully, and she’s not shy to admit that it’s still a struggle for her; she has to watch what she eats, and she has to be aware that the weight can still creep on if she strays from her chosen dietary path.

But the reason she’s been successful, and the reason she’s managed to keep the weight off long term, is that she has drastically changed her attitude to herself. Where once she felt fat and ugly, and unloved, and unappreciated, she now sees herself as a worthwhile person. She doesn’t hate herself anymore. She doesn’t blame herself. She knows there’s nothing to be gained from that approach, and it was probably based on all kinds of bad assumptions anyway. Things had gone wrong in her life (and she can hardly claim to be unique in that!). We all have problems and issues to deal with. Maybe you’ve split from a partner or had a close friend betray you. Maybe a parent died, or a child. Maybe you lost your job. Maybe a dozen things all went wrong in a short period of time, and when that kind of thing happens in your life the cumulative effect of all those individual losses can feel devastating.

We let problems change our perspective

The problem is that we allow all this to affect the way we see ourselves, and the way we see the world. No matter what happened to you (and the list of potential disasters is endless), you are still a worthwhile person. You are still a decent person. You are still a person who deserves to be healthy, and to care for yourself. You are deserving of respect, from yourself more than anyone else. And until you respect yourself, you may not even be able to perceive that you are respected by others. Start to see yourself as someone who is slimmer and healthier, even before the image in the mirror backs this up. Start to vividly imagine yourself the way you want to be. See yourself beaming with health, and able to comfortably fit into clothes that you’d struggle to get into right now. Take that leap, right into your slimmer future, and really be there, right now! Start to see yourself the way you would ideally want to be seen. And not just physically. See yourself as healthy, and happy. See yourself as relaxed, well balanced, content. Do away with the old ideas you might have had of yourself. Did you see yourself as big and fat? Unattractive? Someone nobody would want to know? That type of thinking causes more weight gain than anything else! You end up comfort eating, and trying to fix yourself by piling on a protective layer of insulation to seal yourself off from the rest of the world. While you’re thinking that way, no diet in the world can help you.

Rethink your attitude to yourself, then start to diet!

Take the time to rethink your attitude to yourself. It’s probably the most important attitude you have. See yourself in a bad light and things can only get worse. And as they get worse, it becomes a progressively bad situation – you see evidence in the mirror that you’re gaining weight, and so your comfort eating increases … it’s a spiralling descent into ever-increasing weight-gain. Break the cycle! Stop seeing yourself as miserable, unloved, and unlovable. See yourself as healthy and happy, and eager to make friends. See yourself interacting with people in a healthy and easy going way. This kind of vivid imagining packs some real punch! It can change your attitude to yourself, and it can change your life. See yourself the way you want to be, and things are changing for the better already.

Value yourself, and feel comfortable with yourself!

So diet, by all means, if it will help you. Stay well away from silly diets though, and silly exercise fads. Choose to diet sensibly, and to exercise carefully and properly. But most of all, and before you choose to do anything else, take a close look at your attitude to yourself. You need to value yourself, and to choose to feel comfortable in your own body. You need to be able to think of yourself and smile. Stop hating yourself! Stop blaming yourself! Stop beating yourself up! Strive to build a healthy self image, and to build up your self esteem. Confidence isn’t some wonderful thing that some lucky individuals are born with. It’s a state of mind that you can create. It might take time. It might take some effort. But you can become as confident as anyone else. Affirmations can help, and there are lots of free applications available to help with them. And yes, you can learn to love yourself, and respect yourself.

And the truth is, until you do, diets just won’t make that much difference, whichever one you choose.