Diet Addiction

Have you ever met a diet addict? I wasn't really ever a diet addict because I don't like diets enough. But I sure have known my share of diet addicts - always onto the next trick & quick fix. I used to think it was just because they were naive but I found out from my own experience that it's much more than that.

Even though I don't like "dieting" I loved the pre-diet excitement - "This time it's going to be different. This one sounds like it might actually work." It's where anything is possible and you have the ability to forgive yourself from all your past food sins because it's all going to be erased in the coming months.

You can get addicted to the "start" because it's where you can have hope but no accountability. I used to think, "I'm starting my diet tomorrow so I can eat this now." Then I'd kind of start tomorrow and quit a few days after that and do the whole thing again a few weeks later. It was the pre-diet thinking that allowed me to forgive what I was doing right now.

When I began my therapy for emotional eating I actually craved going on a "diet" because it was more comforting and easier than working through my "stuff". I just wanted to follow a plan and have it work and not have to talk about mother issues. And I'm sure if going on a diet worked than I could have done that, but the problem is, I had to work through my issues before a plan COULD work! I asked my friend who had gastric bypass, prior to surgery, if she thought she should work on her issues prior to g.p. because it's really not the fix and you can gain the weight back. She said she had about a year after g.p. before the weight would start creeping back on and she was hoping to use that year to figure things out. Yep, sounds about right - it sure is easier to hope that the diet or the surgery will be the fix - but for most of us, it just isn't.