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.

How I Knew I Had to Quit Sugar and Flour

The one question people ask when I tell them I no longer eat sugar and flour is, "How did you know you had to quit? Wouldn't it be enough to just cut back?"

I understand. Moderation is what all the "experts" say is necessary to keep from feeling deprived. Moderation, they almost always say, is critical for weight-loss success.

And for someone in my situation, extreme measures didn't seem necessary. I was overweight -- more than just a little overweight -- but not obese on the healthy weight charts. I could still shop at department stores, and I didn't have diabetes.

But I did get to a point where I knew it was time to quit. How? Here's how I answer:

First of all, I had no idea whether or not quitting would "work." I still don't, not long-term. But I did know that after years of dieting and trying restraint and struggling to moderate, moderation didn't work. Not for me. I didn't know if quitting was actually necessary. But I was open to trying something new.

Even more than that, there were a lot of red flags that my behavior around sugar and flour wasn't normal. A lot of red flags. I can't point to one big incident of hitting rock bottom, but I do recall many little clues that built up over time. Here are the ones that come to mind:

1) You cannot "cut back" on sugar and flour long-term (you make a plan to eat sugar and flour only on one “cheat day” a week, you set a limit for how many treats you’ll eat, you eat these things only on special occasions — but none of that works consistently for the long term).

2) You cannot go one full day without eating sugar or flour. The thought of it is scary or unimaginable.

3) You wait until you're alone to eat sugar and flour (when you’re in the car, when someone else takes the dog out for a walk, etc.)

4) You hide wrappers and containers (in the car, in the bottom of the garbage can, etc.)

5) You hide extra food (in a special cabinet, above the refrigerator, in the garage, etc.)

6) You worry constantly about whether there was enough sugar and flour in the house (and whether others will eat it first)

7) You are constantly aware of sugar and flour at parties, receptions, get-togethers, and while there, you plan what and how much to have

8) You get upset when something disrupts your eating plans (when the dessert runs out before you get a piece, when the store doesn’t have the particular something you want)

9) You buy healthy food at the grocery store along with junk food so the clerk won't think you are only planning to eat the junk

10) You realize that these things are escalating

Anyone else have thoughts about the red flags that signaled to them it was time to live without sugar or without flour?

[This blog post was inspired by a June 2014 post from the sober blog "UnPickled" about living alcohol-free. You can read the original post HERE. ]

Ten things that did not help me lose weight

One of the biggest hurdles in giving up sugar and flour is getting past the mental block that says it would be easier to just cut back, rather than give them up altogether.

If you've ever tried losing weight, maybe you too got caught up in the temptation to say, "I'll just cut back on my eating" or “I’ll have a cheat day” or “I can have anything in moderation.”

The more I live my life without sugar and flour, the more I realize how much moderation did not work.

Here are ten “moderation” things I tried that never, ever, even a bit helped me lose weight long-term:

-- Eating treat foods (desserts mostly) only on weekends

-- Eating treat foods only on a designated weekly "cheat day"

-- Eating only a certain number of treat foods (think, only 2 of something, or only 1 scoop)

-- Eating a mini version of a treat for dessert (one tiny square rather than a whole bar)

-- Eating an "it's healthy!" version of a treat

-- Buying only single-serving packages of treats, never an entire package

-- Taking two small bites of a favorite treat, then give the rest to someone else.

-- Getting an favorite restaurant treat to share with someone (I usually ended up eating most of it)

-- Buying a kind of treat you don't like and having that in the house for your family to enjoy (but I usually ended up eating anyway because, hey, it’s still a treat even if it’s not my fave)

-- Using a smaller plate so that my portion looked bigger.

Sound familiar? They all sound so logical and common sense. A bit of a release valve. The perfect way to avoid feeling deprived. Some commercial weight-loss programs are built around this enticing idea that moderation is the way to avoid feeling deprived and to make weight loss easier.

The problem is, I've never known any of these approaches to really work. Not long-term for someone with a real food issue. Certainly not one of those ten approaches ever worked for me.

For me, they just fed an insatiable obsession with thinking about food. After dinner, I'd obsessively think about my treat until I got it. At a party where I'd vowed to eat just two bites of something, I'd spend the entire time waiting for my two bites, trying to get the treatiest version of it, trying to convince myself I could have more than two bites (not much convincing was needed). At restaurants, I just lost it and ate the entire treat myself.

The more we know about the impact of sugar and flour on the brain, the most obvious it seems that these approaches don't work. 

They just give your brain a big ole zap of chemicals that make it go "zing" and want more, more, more.

The more we know about how sugar and flour affect the brain in much the same way as any drug, the more obvious it seems that abstinence, rather than moderation, is the way to go.

A major breakthrough in my journey came when I realized that giving up sugar and flour is so much easier than trying to cut back or moderate or have a cheat day.

Giving it up is much easier than trying to moderate.

My 3 Biggest Fears About Giving Up Sugar and Flour: Fear #2

#2 I HAVE A LOVE/HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH SUGAR (/FLOUR) AND AM TERRIFIED OF LOSING THE PART I LOVE.

It wasn’t until I was a few months into my BLE journey that I realized this. Long before I started to seriously consider cutting sugar out of my life, I knew something was wrong with how I ate. But the thought of never eating sugar again scared the bee-jeesus out of me.

And that’s because the thought of living the rest of my life without sugar and flour seemed to me totally unimaginable. My life was BUILT around sugar and flour. I knew all the best stops around town to get my favorite cookies and doughnuts and cake. Car trips were all about where I could stop to buy great food (OMG there’s a Culver’s here!). Visits with family members and friends were planned around restaurants and what we were going to eat. Vacations were excuses to eat everything I wanted. Holidays were all about eating certain favorites. I would drive miles out of the way to get a favorite food fix. The list went on and on and on.

Sure, I despised what it was doing to my body, my self-esteem, my time, my mental health, my emotional balance. I literally hated it. But living without it seemed like the end of the world. The thought of giving up the “good parts” of sugar/flour seemed unacceptable.

So I did what most people do. I tried to prove to myself that I could indulge moderately. I tried to limit my “fixes” to weekends or one cheat day a week, so I could keep sugar/flour in my life. Or I’d give up sugar/flour for a week or ten days. I’d try to limit the number of NMFs I’d eat in a day (“only 3 Oreos” or “only 5 of those tiny tea cookies I adore”). I even tried switching it up – eating “healthy” versions of my favorites so the sugar/flour would be diluted. None of this ever worked. Ever. Inevitably, I’d end up making exceptions or just throwing up my hands and going off the deep end.

No wonder some of the big weight-loss commercial plans appealed to me sooooo much. They’d say things like, “You can eat anything you want – just in moderation.” Yes! I didn’t have to give anything up. I just needed to learn how to moderate it.

The problem was, I’d already been trying to moderate my eating of crap for a long time. I’d spent years trying to “moderate” it and failing.

This is what has been so transforming about BLE for me – showing me that the only way to be free of my mess is to give it up entirely. The only way to eliminate the things I HATE about what sugar/flour does to me, is to give up the things I LOVE about sugar/flour. It’s that simple.