Normal eating includes enjoying a good balance of wholesome foods, but not limiting yourself to only "health foods." That is, you don't need a perfect diet to have a good diet. A healthy food plan can include 85 to 90 percent "quality calories" and 10 to 15 percent "whatever." Some days "whatever" is an apple; other days "whatever" is a cookie.
Striving to eat a perfect diet commonly results in deprivation of foods you like to eat. You will inevitably end up binging on those foods. Think about it this way: If you put a little boy in a roomful of toys and tell him he can play with all the toys except for the green truck, what is the first toy he'll reach for? The green truck. Hence, if you like chocolate cake, but tell yourself you shouldn't eat it, guess what you will relentlessly hanker for?
More: Healthy Ways to Handle Food Cravings
How to Take Power Away From Food
The way to take power away from a "binge food" is to eat it more often, not stay away from it. For example, if you like chocolate cake, you should eat it every day until you get sick of it.
Don't believe me? Try this experiment: For one week, eat your binge food every day instead of your normal breakfast, lunch, snack, and/or dinner. (You will not die of malnutrition in a week.) Observe what happens.
More: 8 Ways to Control Your Cravings
Chances are that after three days of chocolate cake, you'll hanker for shredded wheat again. And even if you want to continue to eat cake, a recent study indicates you can still lose weight on the Chocolate Cake Diet. In this study, the subjects who enjoyed chocolate cake for breakfast had better dietary compliance and ended up losing more weight than the people who were instructed to eat "diet foods."
Ideally, you want to learn to enjoy a daily food plan that includes a variety of mostly wholesome foods that are satiating, health promoting, and tasty. You want to eat heartily at breakfast and lunch, to prevent energy lags and cravings for sweets. You want to plan an enjoyable afternoon "second lunch" that helps energize the end of your work-day and curbs your appetite for dinner.
More: Turn 5 Main Ingredients Into 25 Dinners
At night, you want to eat less—and lose undesired body fat while you sleep. The goal is to wake up ready for breakfast, and perpetuate the cycle of fueling by day, and dieting by night.
While these suggestions to eat "normally" are seemingly simple, many dieters find this advice hard to implement. They are afraid that once they start eating, they won't stop. This over-compensation is known as "diet backlash," strengthened by years of "last chance to eat cake so I'd better eat it all now before the diet starts again tomorrow." There is a more peaceful way to manage weight.
