Why You Shouldn’t Follow a Diet Without an “Escape Valve”

(Photo by maggyvaneijk on Flickr>/a>)

Don’t follow a diet that doesn’t leave you room to screw up or cheat once in a while.

If you’re picking up some kind of diet book or having someone help you draw up an eating plan, or just sitting there with a journal trying to figure out what the heck you’re going to eat while you try and get in shape — don’t pick something ultra-strict.

What Do I Mean by An Escape Valve?

An escape valve lets the pressure off once in a while. Are you just getting into fitness? If so, you’re the kind of person that’s most likely to give up on a life of healthy living and self-improvement.

The statistics simply bear it out — there wouldn’t be a “diet” industry without constant newcomers/giver-uppers. And for you guys, there’s no way you’re going to change 100% of your diet right off the bat.

So you need something that makes it a little easier to make those changes. A little bit of wiggle room, of give at the edges that lets you make appropriate-enough adjustments as necessary.

What Diets Are

Frankly, most “diets” as we know them, at least in the standard way we think about them, are fads, designed to give you a lot of false hope during those brief periods when you undertake a big-scale change in your life.

As such, it’s sort of in their interest to not include these kind of escape valves — to leave you no room for failure. Why? Because they’re selling a big change, a whole-scale change, a complete shift — and making even the slightest concession to the reality of how you live your life (and how you eat, and shop for food, and so on) might spoil the illusion of fast, amazing, incredible change.

And frankly, it’s hard to sell slow, steady, long-lasting results.

What Diets Should Be

It’s really simple — a “diet” should be the way you eat for life. That’s it. And the one thing that most diet books, most diet sites, even most articles like this fail to acknowledge — is that that kind of thing simply can’t fit into a book.

It’s bigger than that. It’s more varied, more flawed, and hopefully, more adaptable — than any one-off diet plan. It’s something you’re going to keep working on (but not in a boring, depressing way) for the rest of your life. And that’s not a bad thing. Your tastes will change, your interests, your location, the people you cook and eat with — and all these things make a fixed, firm, no-flexibility diet kind of impossible.

How You Get From One to the Other

So make sure you choose something realistic. Choose guidelines instead of a thorough, complete, world-changing plan that requires you to alter everything tomorrow.

Choose something with an escape valve. Something that lets you be a little more flexible than absolute zero. This is your life, how you eat — and unless you’re really eating awfully, it’s not something you’re going to be able to change in 24 hours.