TRY IT: Create a Psychological Profile Before Beginning Your Diet

Image: Thomas Hawk

If you read this blog long enough, you will definitely get sick of references to LifeHacker. I can’t help it. It’s the best site on the internet (yes, I’ve seen all of them).

This post is right up my hyper-individualized alley.

Basically, the author advocates figuring out the basics of your food preferences and triggers BEFORE starting on your new eating program.

Some of his suggestions (and I quote):

• Before starting your diet, try restricting certain foods for a few days and see how you react once you can have them again. Do you rush out to eat them the moment you’re able? If you find yourself in a moment of weakness, try to step back and figure out why you’re craving a certain food. Did something bad happen? Are you stressed? Are you simple just hungry and could avoid eating it by eating something else?
• When you start your diet, take a practice week (or at least a few days if you have a lot of self-control). Use this time to allow yourself to slip up so you can figure out why you’re doing it. You can use this information later to help you succeed in your dieting goals.
• When following the diet, if you find yourself having a strong reaction to a meal—good or bad—make note of it and assess why that might be. If you’re simply enjoying the food, it’s a good meal to remember and repeat. If you’ve had an especially good or bad day, however, it’s worth noting that your mood may be coloring your experience. You don’t want to assign too much praise or criticism to a meal when you’re in a heightened emotional state.

This is a similar tactic to keeping an eating journal – your feelings during the day and how that affected your food choices, instead of just a food journal of what you jammed in your pie hole.

What are some other ways to trial run a new eating program? How can you implement your findings to make changes in your eating habits more successful? What are some food and situational triggers that you have discovered?