The Glycemic Index Diet for Dummies - Meri Raffetto [128]
Chapter 20: From Goals to Habits: Making True Lifestyle Changes
In This Chapter
Differentiating lifestyle changes from traditional diets
Reviewing tactics for making healthy changes you can stick with
Getting your family involved in your new low-glycemic lifestyle
Creating true lifestyle changes is an internal process that takes time, practice, and commitment. This is the one area that can be more challenging than you may have ever thought. Although you may be able to follow some new dietary and exercise guidelines for a short time, doing so gives you purely short-term results, which is one big reason why so many people lose weight only to gain it back again.
The trick to losing weight and keeping it off is to embrace lifestyle changes that get you focused on practicing new behaviors until they become lifelong habits. To stick with a lifestyle change, you have to really want to make the change, which means you must accept that the positive side of, say, walking three days a week before work outweighs the negative aspects (like getting up 40 minutes earlier than you're used to). Of course, you can't forget about the external factors. Any new lifestyle change needs to work realistically within all aspects of your life, from work and errand running to family and friends. Clearly making such long-term changes can get complicated, but it's far from impossible. In this chapter, you explore what it means to make lifestyle changes and how to achieve those changes for yourself.
Making Lifestyle Changes Rather Than Going on a Diet
I can't tell you the exact number of people who go on diets each year or the exact number of people who fall off the dieting wagon. What I can tell you is why they fall.
The majority of people tend to get stuck in the "on again, off again" mentality of dieting. This mentality is often a result of trying to follow something rigidly, be it a strict menu plan or calorie counting. Real weight-loss success is found by taking weight loss one step at a time and developing habits you can live with that support your new goal weight. In other words, losing weight for good requires a commitment to making lifestyle changes.
In the sections that follow, I describe the true differences between lifestyle changes and diets, present the pitfalls of on-again/off-again diet plans, and reveal a simple strategy for making lifestyle changes so you can start off on the right path.
Knowing the difference between lifestyle changes and dieting
Have you noticed that lifestyle change is the hot new phrase these days? You see it in magazines, on television, and in the materials for popular diets. Plastering this phrase on products and touting it over the airwaves is a great marketing tactic because science shows that long-term weight loss is the result of healthy lifestyle changes. However, just because a diet program uses this phrase doesn't mean following the diet is equal to making a change in your overall lifestyle. Diet programs that provide you with menus you have to follow strictly often call themselves "lifestyle change programs" when in fact they're the traditional model of a diet that has been used for the last 50 years. These diet programs haven't really changed; they've just added the phrase lifestyle change to their marketing materials.
The small percentage of people who've maintained weight loss over a several-year period have made true lifestyle changes. That's the key to success, not adherence to fad diets. However, the phrase lifestyle change has gtten so muddy lately that determining whether you're really creating lifestyle changes has become difficult. Following is a breakdown of what distinguishes true lifestyle changes from diets:
Lifestyle changes aren't temporary. If you follow a precise low-glycemic plan, stop for a month, go back to your old habits,