The Good Enough Diet by Tara Diversi

Author:Tara Diversi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-03-29T00:00:00+00:00

Emotions control our motivation

Our desire to stick to any lifestyle change is controlled by the emotion we relate to that task. Have you ever set your alarm to get up early and exercise, yet stayed in bed?

What emotion do you feel when the alarm goes off? Most likely apathy, sadness, anguish, disgust and irritation. So — you stay in bed! Then you feel guilt! But the logical part of your brain comes to the rescue and justifies why you should stay in bed: ‘I’m having a hard week’, ‘I deserve a lie in’ or ‘Is that rain I can hear?’

‘Actually tomorrow would be better for me, yes, yes, tomorrow I will definitely get up tomorrow. ’ Compare this scenario with the day you fly to Italy for a holiday and you have to be at the airport at 5.30 am. How easy is it to get out of bed that day? You wake up every hour on the hour thinking, ‘Is it time to go yet? Should we get there four hours earlier just to be safe?’

What is the difference? The emotions you have attached to your overseas holiday are elation, happiness, excitement and enthusiasm. The emotions you attach to getting out of bed to exercise are the complete opposite.

The problem with trying to be perfect and going on extreme diets is that you’re creating a terribly boring and unenjoyable experience. You can only do this for so long until the emotional part of your brain demands some attention — by getting revenge from taking you to a pizza joint for a blow out. This is the beauty of the good enough approach, as it stops you from feeling those huge emotional swings.

Unless you attach some sort of positive emotion to your activity, you won’t be as motivated to stick to it. The following case studies describe this perfectly.

Become a team player

Keith Taylor loves weight training. He could lift weights all day. The challenge with Keith is that he is a little slack with his diet (he loves alcohol and isn’t willing to compromise). This is fine because he lifts weights four times a week and therefore his weight is stable and he’s quite healthy. However, he is carrying about 5 kilograms more than he would like. In the past the only thing that would help him drop weight is doing cardio exercise three times a week.

This is where we run into trouble. Firstly, Keith has old football injuries that make running impossible and walking not much fun. He also detests doing any form of indoor cardio training — the bike, cross trainer and step machine are all out. We finally discovered that he really enjoys swimming. Keith trekked off to the local pool to pump out some laps. He enjoyed being in the water but after 10 minutes he became very bored and wanted to get out (nothing with Keith ever went easy). In a last ditch effort we signed him up for a swim squad, a group that gets together three mornings a week and swims with a coach.

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