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Haven’t we all been there? We want to be good and stick to our diet or healthy eating habits and we have done so for a while but then somehow it hit us and despite off all the good intentions we start eating an extra bowl cornflakes, adding a chocolate bar to our grocery shoppings and can’t stop thinking about that ice cream container (the family package size!) in the freezer.

What is going on here, why do we suddenly get these cravings for things that we normally won’t eat. Well, at least not all in one day. An ice cream here and there, or a chocolate bar a few days later won’t hurt if apart from that occasional treat we are keeping to our calorie limit and are eating healthy. So, why are there these days where we simply can not stick to our diet and more importantly, how can we get back on track?

I noticed that happening to me in the following situations:

• Hormones: if you are female you might have noticed that a few days before your period your appetite is growing. That doesn’t make me binge eat but certainly I eat more these days and especially carbohydrates, preferably the high GI ones. I shall never know what evolutionary benefits that has, but that is how it is.

• Just a few good days: meaning because of a holiday, a special weekend, staying at your parents house for a few days or on whatever other occasion, we started to eat more that usual because these were special days that we didn’t want to keep to our usual eating patterns and we would just resume with our diet after that weekend or after that holiday. However, after a few days off track it is often quite difficult to get back to more restrictive eating habits, especially if we had been overeating for quite a while before starting our healthy eating habits. It is just so easy to fall back into the old bad patterns!

• Frustration: usually bad things are happening in a row. Something does not work out the way we wanted, then we get a letter with a notification on how many taxes we have to pay in (of course that is higher than expected) and then someone makes a bad comment about us and that sends us straight into the next shop’s aisle with all the cookies and sweets! And of course the next good thing that happens to us won’t undo this, we will have to experience a row of good things to get over our frustration and into a better mood.

My survival tips:

• Recognize the above situations: Once we know what triggers our eating behavior to go wild, we are better able to prepare and respond once we get into one of the above situations. And that could mean that at a certain time of the month we better do not stock a big box of ice cream in the freezer, but allow us some raisin bread and jam to satisfy that sweet tooth without going too much over board.

• Work on your motivation: once we are in a state where we have lost the grip of eating less and eating healthy it is often quite hard to force yourself back to do so. Applying will power can only take you so far and will power might even be the one thing that you do not have in certain situations, especially when you just experienced something frustrating. But what we can work on is putting us into a better mood and increase our motivation of going back to our previous better eating pattern. Any motivational methods that works for you is fine. “Kick in the but” methods can work quite quickly and literally kick you back on track, like for example: yourself just in underwear in a fitting room asking if the person in all of these mirrors deserves and ice cream or should rather stick to green lettuce for a while! If you are already frustrated this won’t help, the better way is then to reduce the frustration level using EFT and then concentrate on the positive outcome of the healthy eating habits.

• Exercise: Working out really helps you to be better able to stick to you healthy eating habits or to your diet plan if you are restricting calories! And not just for the obvious reason that exercise of course burns more calories so the damage is not as bad and therefore we won’t feel all that bad about cheating on our diet. I found if I do some exercise first thing in the morning, preferably strength or resistance exercise, then I’ll experience an energy and motivation surge proportional to the muscle soreness that I will have later in that day , 15 – 20 minutes will do. This is probably due to hormones, like human growth hormone, that get released when you train your muscles. The positive side effect of this method is that these hormones will also have some fat burning and muscle building properties!

There you have my favorite methods to get me back on track to my healthy eating habits. Have you experienced something similar, situations where all you could do was eat and eat and eat? What did you do get back on track, please comment and let me know!