When you’re on a diet, you’re living life in a somewhat stressed state. It’s not just that your body is having to adapt to a lower calorie intake and compensate by using up fat stores. Your whole self is affected. Preparing special meals or measuring your food or choosing not to eat certain things you usually eat without thinking puts you under some degree of pressure. It’s like being a piece of elastic that is always in a somewhat stretched state.
While ever it is a pressure applied evenly, you feel you could go on forever in that mode. But should the pressure increase or decrease too quickly and too greatly, that’s when things are liable to snap. It’s like building up a head of steam. You can operate that way for a certain amount of time and then something has to give.
Unless we want to be on a diet forever, we need to be able to control this step between being on a diet and getting on with ordinary life. And the way to do it is to gently ease the elastic back instead of letting it snap back to its original shape. It’s not only the elastic that reverts to its original shape, unfortunately!
The thing is, we all need a little stress, a little discipline in our lives. So perhaps ‘letting go’ is not the most successful way to end the diet. Perhaps the secret is knowing how far to relax the elastic … so far and no further, otherwise you have to start way back at the beginning again.
Diets that teach you maintenance mode and which really concentrate on it are doing us all a great service. Let the elastic go a little, but keep control of it.
I think we need to get out of the mindset that we ‘go on a diet’ and then when it’s finished we can stop thinking about our intake of food. If we want our big reward of a slimmer body and a healthier attitude to food to stick around, we need to keep up the work that got us there.