Are You Caught in the ‘Go-On-A-Diet’ Thinking Paradigm?

As a serial yo-yo dieter, I was used to just doing a quick diet to shift 10 pounds or so a couple of times a year. I thought that was normal. I had grown up with ‘going-on-a-diet’ modelled for me and had bought into that paradigm since my teenage years.

But when I started teaching in my 30s, I couldn’t sustain that pattern. I was too tired and couldn’t face feeling grumpy and deprived in a classroom of teenagers. So mostly I put off dieting until ‘tomorrow’.

When I did try, I’d give up and berate myself. By the time I had gone from a size 8 to a size 18, I was desperate. I made myself diet. I lost some weight. But I put it back on. And I blamed myself.

But then I started studying NLP.

Learning NLP requires you to become more self-aware. When you practice the techniques, you are asked questions to uncover your strategies, for example: What happens before that? What happens next? And is there anything else?

With those questions, I started to unravel my habits, my thoughts that drove my behaviours that meant I put on weight.

The first, and key, observation was my habit at the end of each teaching day. I would notice I was tired and go and make a cup of coffee. As I stood there waiting for the kettle to boil, I would look at the beautiful cakes my team had made and left by the kettle and think, ‘that will make me feel better’. Of course, it did, briefly, from the sugar high, and then I’d get a sugar low. And overtime, I put on weight.

I used the NLP tool called ‘Swish’ to change that thought to ‘maybe later’. And I didn’t have a slice of the cake by the kettle again. In fact, I lost 15 lbs. in six months without dieting.

From a motivation perspective, there was no deprivation. And it had a knock-on effect: my brain became confused whenever I went for coffee and cake. I found myself just staring at the cake and not being interested, or just finding them ‘pretty’. I rarely chose to eat cake. I still don’t, except for special occasions, and even then, it is not the draw that it was.