If you were to go on a diet what would be the first thing you would do? If your answer was, “Well I’d stop having that Mars Bar for breakfast and the white chocolate cheesecake with frangelico cherries for morning tea would have to go too,” then according to a new study you might be on the wrong track. It’s not that chocolates and cheesecakes should be part of your daily food intake, it’s just that denial is not a particularly successful strategy.
To reach the new findings researchers conducted three studies involving 542 subjects. They found that the success of a diet depended on a person’s level of self-control and the approach they took to choosing the foods that they would eat.
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Firstly, they found that when asked to list rules they might use to guide food intake a majority of people provided rules that involved restricting certain foods. This was especially true for people who showed up as having low self-control. These low self-control people are also those who generally have less success in achieving their goals. People who were more likely to have success with their diets were those who listed foods they should eat.
A second finding was that when asked to think of foods they should forego as part of a healthy diet, low self-control people tended to mention foods that they really liked. By contrast, high self-control people tended to list foods that they could do without.
Lastly, when asked to list healthy foods low self-control people tended to think of foods they not like whereas high self-control tend to think of foods they would enjoy eating.
In other words when you think of designing a diet for yourself you should be thinking about the foods that you will happily be saying yes to, rather than the ones that you will be forcing yourself to avoid; after all, negative attachment is still attachment. So when you think about dieting think about having yummy strawberries and delicious fresh kale.
