Just One Bite—Destruction Testing

“One bite won’t hurt.”  Well maybe, maybe not.  The problem is, you can’t know if it will hurt until it has already hurt you.

You’re on your plan, you’re through the worst of the withdrawal, and you’ve lost some weight.  You’re starting to feel like you’ve got your legs under you again and you can do this.  Then there’s that food.  That delicious food.  One bite—what could that matter?  It’s hardly worth putting in your food log it’s so insignificant.  You eat it, and it’s delicious.

What happens after that?  For a small percentage of people, you say “yay, that was good, now back to my food plan.”  I won’t say there aren’t people who can handle one bite like it didn’t matter at all.  But are you one of them?

Handling Restaurants Like an Entitled Princess

“OMG what am I going to order at this restaurant there’s nothing on plan on their menu??!”

We can try to avoid restaurants, or only go to restaurants of our choosing, but eventually we will fail.  There will be a work function, or fat relatives in from out of town who reject your healthy eateries, or a first date who picks the restaurant and you don’t want to act like a freak about food.  What do you do then?

Don’t panic.  Bring a towel.

Just kidding about the towel.  But don’t panic.  The mental shift you need to make is this: a menu is never a list of dishes to choose from.  It is always a list of ingredients they have in their kitchen.

Know Thy Enemy—Understand the Science of the Plan You’re On

All weight loss plans are not created equal.  All of them that get any popular traction work, at least for some people who go on them.  But why do they work?

Low carb plans get ketosis working for you.  When you keep your daily carbs below a certain level, you enter a fat-burning state that speeds the process along.  If you’re on a low-carb diet, eating a lovely “healthy” piece of fruit can throw you off for 3 days, but eating some bacon would barely cause a blip.  Carbs are the enemy.

Calorie-restricted plans work a little differently.  The basic equation is: when (calories in) < (calories burned), you lose weight.  Calories are the enemy.  But you have to stay within certain parameters.  I could eat 900 calories a day on Medifast because it was nutritionally enhanced and kept me in ketosis.  But if someone ate a different 900 calories a day, it would shut their metabolism down into starvation mode and they wouldn’t lose weight at all.  There’s a calorie and nutrition threshold you have to stay above on a straight calorie-restricted plan.