More Post-Holiday Detox Diet Suggestions

I've finished up one week of my two week post-holiday detox diet and have taken off a surprising amount of water weight, which is good news. It looks like one reason I gained so much weight over the holidays appears to be that using much more insulin than usual increased the amount of fluid in my body.

I hope you are doing well on whatever New Years diet you decided to try. But if you are having trouble getting back on track here are some more ideas that might help.

1. Keep it Simple! One problem with taking on a complex new diet is that it forces you to think about food all day long. You spend hours hunting up recipes. You look at pictures of delectable foods that fit your new diet scheme. You count the hours until you can eat power snack number 4 with its glucommanan noodles, coconut oil and flax sauce. You make a special trip to Whole Foods to buy some "must have" supplement or magical weight loss promoting food and end up surrounded by an ocean of foods you must NOT have which makes it that much harder to stay on track.

This is a great way to sabotage a baby diet. When you are detoxing from eating too much food, what you really need to do is to STOP THINKING ABOUT FOOD. The best way to do that is to decide in advance what you will eat. Buy what you need at the store. Decide what you'll have for lunch in advance. Make those choices non-negotiable for the two weeks of your detox diet. And then eat only those foods.

No new recipes. No new ingredients. No fancy "miracle weight loss" supplements. Just eat the stuff you decided to eat at the start of your diet and the essential supplements you may need for health: B vitamins if you are dispensing with grains or potassium if you are doing a diuretic diet.

Simplifying your diet this way makes it much easier to stop thinking about food and when you do that, you are more likely to succeed.

Once you are through your detox diet and have broken the cycle of overeating, you can adjust your diet and work in some new recipes. You can buy novel ingredients and even throw away your money on miracle diet aids if you want to, though I'd suggest you use that money for high quality veggies, meats, or cheeses instead.

2. Solve Hunger First Then Start Cutting Back on Portion Size. All weight loss diets succeed --when they do succeed which is not all that often--because they get you to cut back on how much you eat. Physiological hunger is the biggest foe you face when you start a new diet and the one that derails a lot of us. But the worst way to start a new diet is to cut way back on portions when your body is still in raging hunger mode.

If your diet is one that cuts back on carbohydrates--and if you have diabetes, I certainly hope it is--there is a very useful trick that will save you a couple days of misery at the start of your diet. The trick is to allow yourself to eat as much and as often as you want as long as the foods you eat do not contain more carbohydrates than your target amount. You probably aren't going to lose weight doing this, except for the water weight that is common at the beginning of most low carb diets.

But you will lower your blood sugars in a way that after two or three days will give you the flatter blood sugar curves that eliminate physiological hunger except when your stomach is empty and you really need to eat.

Once you get to the point where your blood sugar is not rocketing up and down, you will stop feeling inappropriate hunger and it gets a lot easier to eat less. Once you get to that stage, you will have to cut back on portions. But it is a lot easier to eat less when you aren't hungry and aren't obsessing about food.