Why Diets Fail (Because You're Addicted to Sugar) (30 page)

Goal setting is a strategy used across a variety of disciplines, from athletes to physicians and their patients, to help people succeed. Goals provide reference points for progress and are useful for self-discipline and self-regulation. There is a plethora of smart phone apps, books, and websites that incorporate goal setting, each with its own special features and organization schemes. There are many options for developing and keeping track of goals, so let’s start with some of the basics involved in goal setting.

KNOW YOURSELF
. First and foremost, consider your personality traits. What motivates you? How do you like to tackle new situations—alone, in a group, with a friend, or with a combination of these? How do you respond to stress? How do you hold yourself accountable for your actions? Taking an honest look at yourself and writing down information about your strengths, weaknesses, habits, and lifestyle will enable you to design personalized and realistic goals. After answering these questions, answer these two as well: Why do
you want to change your lifestyle? How do you define success in regard to this diet plan?

THINK ABOUT THE PAST
. Most people agree that to know where you’re going, it’s helpful to know where you came from. What has led you to succeed? What has made becoming successful a struggle? How have you dealt with adversity or challenges in the past? By examining and learning from previous events and experiences, you can apply this knowledge as you look to the future.

USE POSITIVE PHRASING
. A vital aspect of attaining your goals lies in how you phrase them. Try to use specific and concise language. This will help you clearly define your goals and remember them easily. For example, let’s say you want to lose ten pounds. An effective way of phrasing this goal would be “I will lose ten pounds in eighteen weeks.” In doing so, you have set a time frame that gives you some flexibility to adjust to your changes in lifestyle, you’ve only used a few words, and you’ve used positive, determined language that suggests that you believe in your ability to achieve this goal within the given time frame by saying “I will lose” instead of “I hope to lose” or “I would like to lose.”

MAKE YOUR GOALS SHORT-TERM
. Select two elements from this book and turn them into short-term goals. For example: “This week, I will not drink sugar-filled soda.” Make sure to include a small time frame and to set a goal that involves a small change. At the end of the allotted amount of time, check in with yourself to see if you were successful in achieving your goal. If you were successful, congratulations! Now set another short-term goal, and keep setting them until you reach your long-term goal (see below). If you didn’t reach your short-term goal within the allotted time frame, spend some time evaluating where you went wrong and use this information to help you achieve the next short-term goal you set.

LOOK TO THE LONG TERM
. You have set a series of short-term goals, and now you can to look at long-term goals. Once you have decided on a goal, try to set a realistic time frame. The time frame is entirely of your choosing—one month, three months, one year, five years. This goal might sound something like “In six months, I will lose X pounds.” As you know, you define success, so your goals can reflect what you want. Be confident because you have the knowledge it takes to set realistic and informed goals.

TIP 7: BE CONSISTENT

The idea that these modifications in your diet are meant to result in a lifestyle change has been mentioned many times throughout the book. This means that you can apply what you have learned about the neuroscience and psychology behind eating today, tomorrow, and for years to come. It persists across birthday celebrations, dinner parties, and holidays.

All of this change will likely take some time. You may need to adjust to eating different foods, increasing the amount of hours you sleep, or thinking before eating. You may end up tweaking some of your goals to make them more realistic as you find what works for you. All of this is fine! Use this knowledge in ways that work best for you.

The key is to be consistent. There is evidence that people who maintain their diet throughout the week are more likely to maintain their weight loss over the following year than people who diet more strictly on weekdays.
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Upholding consistent behaviors helps to serve as a baseline; that means that you can easily identify when you deviate from your normal behavior so that you can make a change to get back in the direction you want to go. By consistently focusing on your goals, you can achieve them in the face of slipups, food pushers, and any curveballs that life throws at you.

The Final Word: Eating and Living without Your Addiction

As mentioned in the introduction, this is much more than a diet book. It involves much greater change in your life than just a way to lose weight would. If this book were
only
about losing weight, it would still be a good thing because excess weight may contribute to several health problems and can wreak havoc on self-esteem and confidence. But this book offers much more: it really presents a new way of living. It may sound hokey, but the results can be that dramatic.

These pages suggest changes to your diet that really can have a meaningful impact on how you feel and live. You’ll have more energy, and you’ll feel better after adopting this plan. You’ll have fewer mood swings as you will have normalized your blood sugar and insulin levels, instead of living through constant surges and dips brought on by overeating sugars. You’ll probably also feel less anxious and depressed when you are no longer suffering mini withdrawals between your dosages of sugar.

Maybe the best part of this diet plan is that you will no longer feel guilty. Guilt is the addict’s worst friend. Addiction has the ability to alter our thinking processes. And it can impair our rational thinking in the short run, but even addicts have periods of self-reflection when they realize their lives are not going in the direction they want them to. They may blame their addiction, but this doesn’t minimize the guilt they feel. People who are addicted sometimes feel enormous guilt because they feel they should be able to control their own actions and behavior. This guilt can prevent people from gaining the self-confidence and inner strength needed to really conquer addictions. Guilt can be self-defeating. Guilt can keep you down.

There will certainly be skeptics, and some may say things like “What fun could there be in life if you get rid of sugary foods?” So is this a boring life? Let’s look. Your old addictive life may have been full of processed foods, stress, and wasting a great deal of time on nonproductive behaviors revolving around food. What about your new life? Now you’ll be eating healthy. You’ll be more active and more energized. You’ll be happier with the way you look and feel, and this will rub off on to how you interact with others. Once you regain your ability to decide your life plans and goals for yourself and pursue them without the damaging influence of your addiction interfering, life is definitely not boring. In fact, there is a whole new world out there to be discovered once you kick your addiction.

To emphasize how dramatically your life will change on this diet plan, let’s take a minute and describe what a typical day in your life might look like before and after you adopt this diet.

Your typical day before adopting this way of eating might read like this: Your alarm blasts in the morning and you hit the snooze button at least twice so you can sleep an additional ten or fifteen minutes. You finally wake, but you feel terrible. You have no energy, and you don’t feel like getting out of bed. Your whole body aches. You eventually pull yourself out of bed and run downstairs to put on coffee and eat some Cap’n Crunch cereal that you bought for your kids. On weekends (when you aren’t facing your usual morning rush), you might treat yourself to pancakes, waffles, or French toast with lots of syrup, but after eating it, you feel even sleepier and wish you could just head back up to bed for a midmorning nap.

Later, you eat some M&Ms and wash them down with a cup of coffee, but you don’t feel any better. You go out to lunch and eat an entire plate of spaghetti or lasagna and wonder if you can fit under your desk for an afternoon nap. You come back to the office, but you don’t feel like working. So you do a mediocre job with the assignments you are given. Then you feel guilty because you realize
you didn’t give it your best. You head home as soon as you can, whip up a quick meal (maybe tonight is macaroni and cheese night, again), and retreat to your television. You retire to your bed but never seem to be able to get a good night’s rest (perhaps because you are wired from all of the sugar you have been eating).

Now, let’s contrast this with your new life after having adopted this diet. You won’t believe this, but now you might even wake up
before
your alarm. You’ve left the shades up in the bedroom and as soon as the sun comes up, your eyes open. But instead of feeling lousy and wishing you could sleep more, you literally pop out of bed and feel like a million bucks. You don’t know what to do first. You can’t wait to feel that wonderful shower on your face and back, but you also know that if you exercise each morning, you will feel better throughout the day. Exercising is no longer a prison sentence; you are not chained to a treadmill. Now you get to go out and enjoy nature, the fresh air, and the natural beauty. Because you’ve gotten out of bed so early, after you work out, you have plenty of time to cook a good breakfast and eat it at a leisurely pace without worrying about being late for work. You cook up an egg omelet with sausage, cheese, and mushrooms and wash it down with a tall drink of water.

You get to work on time and you feel great, and it’s reflected in your productivity. Sure, your coworkers still have their funny personality quirks that used to drive you crazy, but now for some reason they no longer bother you as much. For lunch, you go out with the girls in marketing and find a restaurant that serves you a beautiful piece of fish with butter and almonds on it with a small side order of broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots.

You have a snack in the afternoon, not of raisins or dried fruits glued together with sugar and honey in the form of a bar, but instead a small bag of almonds and cashews. You come home and decide to have your favorite meal, barbecued spareribs with sugar-free barbecue sauce. There’s a side dish of green beans with butter and pepper,
and you top it off with a beautiful slice of melon for dessert. After dinner, you don’t want to flop in front of the television because you still have lots of energy; instead, you decide to do some of those things that you’ve been wanting to do in your spare time.

You probably think this is an exaggeration, but this is what testimonials from people who have changed their way of eating and broken free from their addiction to sugars and other carbohydrates convey. Try it for yourself—why not? What do you have to lose, besides weight and an addiction?

APPENDIX: SUGAR EQUIVALENCY TABLE

Sugar equivalence is a concept that John first came up with to capture how much sugar and fast-digesting carbohydrates are in a food as a percent of its total weight. You can see from our table that foods vary enormously in their sugar equivalency.

The Sugar Equivalency Table was compiled using data provided by the USDA, which lists nutrition facts for thousands of foods. The simple formula used to create the values you see in the table takes a 100-gram sample of food, measures how many grams of sugar are in that 100-gram sample, and adds 75 percent of the nonfiber, nonsugar carbohydrate grams to account for the fact that starches, like sugar, can also cause an increase in glucose levels and thus insulin levels (to break down the glucose).

A general rule of thumb to use when reading the Sugar Equivalency Table is that the lower the sugar equivalency in a food, the better it fits this way of eating. For example, most meats and poultry have sugar equivalency values of 0 because they have no sugar and no carbohydrates in them, but candies and cakes have sugar equivalency numbers in the 50 to 70 range, and so are to be avoided on this plan. As a general guideline, foods under 5 are acceptable on the diet, foods scoring between 5 and 10 can be consumed but their quantity should be monitored, and anything over 10 should be fairly restricted or avoided. The food items in the table are sorted generally by type of food. If you want to download a copy of the table so you can sort the items in other ways, such as from highest sugar equivalency to lowest, please visit
www.whydietsfailbook.com
.

It’s not enough to say that you shouldn’t consume foods with high sugar equivalency. You also have to be mindful of the amount or weight of the food that you’re consuming. We are all human, and at times, we might give into our impulses to eat foods that we’re trying to avoid. If you regress one night and have a small plate of spaghetti, all is not lost; cooked macaroni has a sugar equivalency of only 14. It could be worse. It’s important to note, however, that the size of your portions does matter. It’s not a good idea to have a one-third portion of pasta whenever you want because of thinking that a one-third portion falls within the “safe range” in terms of sugar equivalency. The Sugar Equivalency Table isn’t designed to work like that.