I find that willpower is only on a short term lease. It’ll keep you going for a while, and then it all seems to fizzle out. The obstacles stay though and you have nothing left to fight them with.
My plan was to move the obstacles so that I wouldn’t need to test my resolve too often. I know what I’m like. I usually know the things that make me eat, and once I’m at that point, no end of reading lists….have bath, read book, etc, will work. If I am at the point of wanting to eat, I will eat. So I had to make sure that I didn’t reach that point in the first place. I had to anticipate the hurdles. I knew I could completely blow the diet in such a small window of time, so I had to rearrange my day to make sure that window wasn’t there. I planned it ahead.
I knew that with one bunch of friends, I could stay strong, and with another bunch, I couldn’t, so the ‘other bunch’ just had to wait for me to finish the job. Okay, it was putting my life on hold, but in the grand scale of things, it wasn’t going to be for long, I just wanted this too much and I am not strong enough to fall off the wagon for an hour or so.
I also know that I get bored very easily. I can rarely watch a whole programme from beginning to end, my concentration span is just way too short. So I’d start to watch something that I was really looking forward to, and within 15 minutes I’d be thinking about food. It was no good waiting until this happened, because once I was there, I just couldn’t fight it, so I had to plan everything in advance in my head.
There is usually a fair amount of food hanging around the place as I live with 3 ‘men’, so I had to keep it pretty much out of sight. If they left things out (which they often did), I put it away before I had the temptation. Generally speaking, I didn’t consider food an option to have to think about. It wasn’t a case of ‘I really shouldn’t eat that’, but ‘its not mine to eat’.
Some obstacles I couldn’t move, but I needed to get my emotions and environment in the best possible place so I could move forward when my willpower was mysteriously mislaid.
The lack of willpower showed itself in many different guises. For me, it meant eating, but it was also that little voice in my head that said
You’re close to target, what does a few pounds matter
It’s only for tonight, I’ll start again tomorrow
It’ll only be water weight, it’ll soon come off.
I’ve done so well, I deserve a treat or 5. etc etc.
I found that when I had these thoughts, I needed to ask myself what answers I would have given right at the beginning of the diet, because that was when I was really reading the right map. I just forgot to read those instructions sometimes during the journey. I get easily confused
We also have different resources and talents so we all need to work out different strategies to suit us, but work them out we must. The diet won’t do that for us. Finding the right strategy takes time but unfortunately we often quit when the strategy isn’t apparent straight away. Problem comes when we don’t change what didn’t work the first time and then wonder what is up with us, and why on earth are we failing yet again.
Better stop there.
Good luck on your restart. Make this the one that works for you.