Here’s what usually goes wrong with dieting. You start to eat foods you’ve never tried before or prepared in novel ways that you detest. After a few days of this culinary torture, you sack the diet and opt to eat whatever you want again.
Taste buds do not change overnight. Learning to like healthy food is easier if you do it one food at a time like Jacklyn Marcus, 43, a Los Angeles mother of two and sculptor, did. While dieting to lose weight, Jacklyn did not use foul-tasting food as an excuse to give up; she used chaining instead.
In How to Make and Break Habits, Jhan Robbins and Dave Fisher describe chaining as breaking one simple activity into all of its component parts. Their theory is that by manipulating various elements of the chain, you diminish the possibility that a final behavior occurs.
Jacklyn didn’t force new foods on herself all at once. Such a change would have generated stress. Dieting stress increases the likelihood of failure.
In a Good Housekeeping article, Jacklyn commented that “The more healthful foods I ate, the better I felt, and the more energy I had to go jogging.”
We eat to live. We don’t live for food.
Bethany Carter-Howlett, Professional figure competitor and personal trainer
What are the elements involved in your food chain? The groceries you buy, the foods in your fridge and cabinets, and the foods you select when eating out or on the go are all a part of your food chain for diet success. You can manipulate your food chain by bringing new, healthy foods to your fridge and to your purse, for times when you’re on the move.