8 great ways to screw up your healthy eating plan

Adapting to a no-sugar, no-flour, no-snack lifestyle is a marathon, not a sprint. If you keep relapsing, it might help to pay attention to the moments when you trip up. What actions or beliefs contributed?

Here are the most likely culprits that have tripped me up in the past:

1. Believing that I only have a real problem with one substance (e.g. sugar) so I can continue to use others (e.g. flour) to get me through.

2. Thinking it will be easier to just moderate my eating, rather than giving up sugar and flour entirely. For me, abstinence is much easier than moderation. It’s taken me a long time to really believe this.

3. Continuing to ignore how much any deviation from my food plan hurts my progress. I know that no-sugar/no-flour/no-snacking momentum is hard to achieve, but my brain tells me it's easy to do so it’s OK to have “just one bite.”

4. Expecting that I can just do healthy eating for a while, till I get my weight down, and then I can go back to "normal" eating. There is nothing normal about eating tons of sugar/flour and very little produce. Freedom from food issues is a permanent lifestyle change.

5. Taking little or no responsibility for my own recovery. I have a tendency to get mad that phone calls and food buddies aren't the best supports for me. It's up to me to try lots of things and find the supports that do.

6. Believing that therapy will "cure" my food issues. Therapy is a life-changing, empowering process that can be transformational in your food journey, but it didn't make me magically, suddenly never want to eat addictively again. Therapy is one tool among many others.

7. Expecting that my experience will be the same as others. Successful people can provide helpful roadmaps and guidance, but I can’t expect my journey to be exactly like theirs. My journey is my own and it will be unique to me. That's normal and it's fine.

8. Believing that I can skimp on serious self-care. I absolutely must make self-care (saying no, taking time for myself, taking naps, going to bed early, enjoying free time to read or walk in the woods, taking warm baths and meeting with friends) my top priority in my tool kit. Extreme self-care is the number one thing I do to heal my food issues.

These beliefs are very seductive and have pulled me in over and over again. Giving up these beliefs is my daily practice.