How to Change the Way You Eat and Make Your Diet Last

For most of my life I was a size small. I am a small person, so when I began gaining weight and ballooned from a size 6 to a size 9 and then to a size 16, I felt miserable. My back hurt all the time. I felt terrible about myself. I had no energy, and my favorite clothes didn't fit me anymore. I tried to hide my weight with different clothing ideas or color schemes. It didn't work. I knew I was a bigger than I should be and I wanted it to change. I tried dieting, but it only worked for a short time and then any weight I lost I gained back plus more. This always happened without fail.

I don't like to cook. Because of this I ended up eating out a lot and buying prepackaged foods that just needed warming up. This is where I ended up gaining most of my weight. It wasn't because I was lazy. It was because I was unmotivated and was trying to avoid doing something I did not like, cooking. Then, my husband and I had an idea.

Instead of eating out, or buying foods that just went into the microwave (which we didn't really like anyway), why didn't we cook large volumes of food and freeze it in portion sizes so that we had good, nutritious foods available to us that we could just warm up the rest of the week?

We tried this and found that we loved it. At every meal we cooked we made three times as much food that we would need and froze it to have it later. It was delicious and it kept me out of the kitchen the rest of the week except to take one meal out of the freezer to put in the refrigerator the day before we wanted to eat it.

This really helped me to begin losing weight: eating healthy homemade meals at home as opposed to greasy, unhealthy fast food meals.

We also began making a large salad to keep in the refrigerator to snack on during the week. We found a large Rubbermaid bowl with a lid and made a salad with all the key ingredients we liked. Instead of using salad dressing, we used plain yogurt mixed with garlic powder.

I was happy with this new diet, but I still yearned for junk food and restaurant foods. To help with this I picked one day a week to be a splurge day. For my splurge day I could eat anything I liked, I just had to make sure that I only ate until I was full and didn't gorge myself. I could ice cream, hamburgers, Chinese foods, even buffet. I still lost weight. The wonderful thing about splurge day is that I have that one day of the week to look forward to where I can enjoy my meal and treat myself after a week of treating myself to healthy foods. Over time I began to actively choose the more healthy items because I had developed a taste for it and preferred it.

The idea behind changing your diet is not to go on a crash diet or make yourself miserable because of the food you force yourself to eat. You won't stay on the diet and you won't keep the weight off. But, if you allow yourself to eat healthy foods during the week and then splurge that one day a week, you'll change the way you feel about food, lose weight and feel much better about yourself. You can even enjoy birthday parties and holidays meals and know that you are still losing weight and not miss out on the delicious meals you look forward to.