Creating A Livable Eating Program

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The most important factor to consider when you begin to think about creating a livable diet is accommodating your own individual food preferences and your personality when it comes to food. If you don’t do that, you’ll be feeling deprived, you’ll be suffering, and you won’t stick to the diet you’ve chosen because it won’t be satisfying. In fact, the Journal of Nutrition reports that taste is the single most important reason people choose the foods they do, and that this is also an important factor for regulating “hunger, satiety, and voluntary food intake.” That finding is supported by the work of Lisa Sanders, M.D., a researcher from Yale University who has determined that finding your own food preference is a key factor in satisfying hunger and the diet’s success. 

Creating A Livable Eating Program

As we’ve previously discussed, most diet programs are prescriptive; they ask you to follow their program, which works great in the short term. But once you get tired of their program, you go back to your program. And your program of choosing what, when, and how much to eat doesn’t work. So what you’re going to do is come up with food choices that are acceptable to you, that you think you can live with. It’s going to be a negotiation process, but unlike most bargaining situations, you will not be negotiating with another person but with yourself.

Here’s an illustration of how you’ll be negotiating with yourself and still remain within your comfort zone.