Tag Archives: cheating

I don't know anyone who hasn't cheated on their diet. I'm not talking about just low carbers here, but about all dieters. Everyone I have spoken to, written to, or heard from has cheated on their diet at one time or another. Why do we do this to ourselves?

I've been on low carb many times in my life, but when I started trying to lose weight in 1996, I finally stuck with it. I weighed 208 when I started. In December 1998 I got down to 137. I've been maintaining ever since then.

After so many years of following Atkins, "falling off the wagon" over and over again, but learning from my mistakes each time, and ultimately coming to a very Zen place with my acceptance of this diet and the food that I eat on a daily basis, I can't believe that all my hard work has been undone by a simple scheme of the Marketing Department.

Well, the holidays are over, and for many of us, that means "getting back on track" with our eating. Maybe it was that fancy dessert at the in-laws', or maybe it was something savory and nibbly at the office holiday party that led you to eat too many carbohydrates, but now it's the new year, and you're recommitting to a new you.

As I have indicated in past articles, I have a tendency to stray from the righteous low carb path of life. But I'm sure that everybody cheats every once in a while, right? Well, maybe if you're some sort of Stepford-Wife-Alien-Robot entity who is bent on world domination through manipulation of the worlds fat people. Maybe you don't. But for the rest of us, we cheat occasionally. And, unfortunately, I've been cursed with the unbearable gift of rationalization.

I went off my diet temporarily one Thursday this summer, and didn't stop being off until the following Monday morning! It all started innocently enough at a companywide lunch meeting. It was the last lunch meeting of the year that we'd be having outdoors, and my coworkers convinced me that I should go ahead and have a burger on a real bun with real ketchup, since this was the last time this year it would happen. And what good is a burger without potato salad and Fritos? Luckily, I was able to rationalize this cheat by remembering one of the golden rules of dieting: food eaten at an official company function doesn't count. So I figured I was safe, and vowed to start anew the next Friday.

If we're so sure we want to be thinner, why do we so often do things that are counterproductive to that? Why do we cheat? Why do we refuse further tweaking of our low carb way of eating when we suspect it would help us get thinner?