Tweak it before you delete it...

When it comes to diets and eating more healthily, I have coined the term "tweak it before you delete it."

Many, I would assume, would have the same tendency as me in this situation.  You give up eating sweets, everything seems fine for a couple days, you miss the sweets but you've been good enough to stay away.  A week goes by, you are still running strong and sweet free and feeling pretty good about your accomplishment and then here you are at a family get together, right in front of the dessert table.  Then it happens....you binge on the sweets like you've never binged before, not even taking notice to exactly how much you just ate.  Now you are full....of empty calories and regret.  You just ate more sweets in 10 minutes than you probably would've eaten in the past week had you not even given them up.

This is what can happen when you deliberately deprive yourself of something, you come across it and cannot control yourself due to removing it from your diet so suddenly.  That's why you should start changing your portion sizes, amount of servings, habits, and eating times gradually.  This will slowly condition you to not want or rely on something so much that you can't control yourself when it is readily available like in my example

I realized this worked for me when I changed my coffee habits.  At a couple cups a day (with cream and sugar each time), I realized the excessive amount of extra calories I was putting in my body each time.   So I started making slow changes: milk and sugar, milk and less sugar, reduced fat milk and splenda, skim milk and splenda, now just skim milk.  I have slowly deconditioned myself from thicker creams, flavored creamers, and sugar to the point that I prefer the taste of black coffee, and have been drinking that ever since (about 4-5 years).

Do I see myself going back and binging on cream and sugar?  No, but I'm sure I would have if I had just tried to go to black coffee right away.

Making small changes before big ones is always a safer approach if you want to seriously accomplish something.  That's why diet "fads" are just that, a fad, a short term solution that does not last in the long run.  True dietary changes will most certainly require some lifestyle changes to go along with it. This is why you should tweak it before you delete it.