How to Stick with Your Diet Plan: Tip 2

As I have mentioned before, the biggest factor influencing dietary success is compliance. So, what do to make sure you stick to your diet without making it so rigid that the chances of you sticking with it longer than a few weeks are slim?

Let's take a typical scenario;
You look in the mirror and decide to make a change with your physique. You are unhappy with the way you look and start by cutting the junk out of your diet. You get rid of crisps, beer and fast food but decide to keep one luxury. It might be a bar of chocolate a day or something along those lines. This is not the most effective approach to fat loss despite having good intentions.

The alternative is sticking to a diet plan 100%. It can result in falling off the bandwagon when you go and see friends and they are all eating a chinese takeaway, you feel rude asking for something else so you eat with them. You have already broken your healthy eating habit for the day so decide you may as well make a meal of it and add in dessert and alcohol.

Do either of these sound familiar? They are extremely common.

How do you stay strict while having enough wiggle room to ensure you create a long term change?

You plan your 'cheat meals' in advance and stay strict for the rest of the time. One cheat meal every five days actually has beneficial results in terms of fat loss, especially in low carb and paleolithic diets.

This allows you to concentrate on the task in hand and rewarding yourself with a more relaxed meal. You can put your chocolate off until Saturday when you permit yourself to be more relaxed and to eat more than you would on a normal day.

Think about it logically, you have the odd bar of chocolate every day or eat none and compound it together in one big sitting. Here are some advantages;
- You will undoubtedly eat less of it than you would if you ate it every day.
- You will stay much stricter for the rest of the week/few days.
- After your cheat meal you will tend to not want to eat it again for a while as you will be more inclined to overdo it.
- By the time you think about eating it again it is already approaching your next cheat meal.

Simple! This is the approach I use with myself and with my clients so you can rest assured that this works.