Have Your Cake and Eat It Too

Stay Off the Wagon by Never Getting on It

Psychology and the connection to our dietary behaviours reveal clear problems for maintaining a healthy diet. Eating a healthy diet — or at least one which creates an energy/deficit for those wanting to lose weight — is not so much of a problem. Sticking to it and staying with the same diet?That’s somewhat trickier…

Over many years of working with people who are attempting to manage their weight and/or have disordered eating, I have noticed there is a clear relationship between having ‘glitches’ in behaviour and this leading to all-out ‘relapse’. Say, for example, I have decided I want to eat very healthily during the week and save my treats, booze etc. for the weekend. Then I eat cake on a Wednesday morning…

This may start an internal conversation relating to how I’ve just broken a contract… which leads to a cascade effect where essentially my thinking is:

“Screw it, I may as well forget it now and eat whatever I want.”

In my part of the world, this is referred to as throwing the baby out with the bath water. If this sounds familiar, you have maybe had the same situation occur. Continuing with the cake analogy above:The fact is, you’ve just eaten some flour, fat, sugar etc. and it’s done. Perhaps we will consider that a healthy diet is not one where we meet a stringent set of rules that are never broken — e.g., the cake rule!

As we all know, if I eat cake every day or even several times a day, I am increasing the probability of weight gain and perhaps illness. But this is not caused by one piece of cake. Unless we let that one piece of cake signal failure… then it becomes much more. This is relapse management 101. But the difference with ciggies, booze, drugs etc. and diet is that food is distinguished from these substances as we must have it every day and cannot live without it — although we also use it for pleasure and comfort in the same way as those other drugs, of course.

Here’s the antidote:

Create a structure for an essentially healthy diet — e.g., 3 meals a day, at least 5 veg and fruits on most days etc. Maybe you have intentions to “eat clean” during the week and relax more at weekends (many of us do) and that seems like a reasonable plan. But in this way of thinking, you need to notice the thoughts you have when you eat outside of the plan:

“What an idiot, why did you eat that!”

Now try to disconnect yourself from that thought by making up a replacement thought like this one:

“It’s one piece of cake, I don’t need to throw the towel in, I can get back to eating healthily for the rest of the day…”

And remember — if you are going to eat cake, eat a good one and always, always give it your full attention to enjoy every single morsel…

Dr Trevor Simper was a registered Public Health Nutritionist in the NHS, a Senior Lecturer in Food and Nutrition at Sheffield Hallam University, and is now a practicing Psychotherapist.