Think And Feel
If you think you ought to be on a diet or you want to lose weight, the first “diet for a day” idea is to THINK and FEEL what it is you really want. Think about WHY you want to do this, what you will get from it, and especially, how you FEEL about doing this. Are you happy, excited, terrified, worried, what? And why do you feel this way? See Worksheet 1 and try writing this down in your journal, if you have one, or print out the worksheet and save it somewhere.
Plan
Once you know WHAT it is you want to do (eg, lose 10 pounds or 10 Kgs or put on 3Kgs, etc), we have to plan HOW to do this. It might mean making changes to the food in the house, to the weekly menus, to preparing others for changes too. It might mean deciding what diet plan to follow, if any, or finding out what it means to be “mindful” of what we eat. Many times, dieting is all about the mind, not the body.
Prepare
And once the plan has been made, it’s time to prepare ahead for getting started. If your plan says you need to remove certain foodstuffs from the house or buy others in, then make those preparations. Get others to help by not expecting certain “treats” to be constantly available for instance. This may require enlisting the help of your “inner child”. Everyone has one but not everyone knows about them.
Why is your inner child important to whatever you want to do, whether it’s weight loss or learning a new language? Because your inner child is the one who will tear you away from your well-laid plans to go and “play” or will whisper “just one won’t hurt” in your ear at your weakest time. Your inner child is the one who buys ice cream in gallon tubs, maxes out your credit card, wants the last slice of chocolate cake on the plate and eats the leftovers from the kids plate “so they won’t be wasted”. If you have never met your inner child and would like to do so, Pam Young’s “The GOOD Book”, which is about getting out of debt, introduces your inner child as a brat; and her book “The Butt Stops Here” develops the inner child from brat to a creative, energetic helpful inner “you”. Both of these are very funny, as is the video below, “Funeral Of A Credit Card”.
Preparing might include finding recipes that meet your new needs and perhaps also satisfy others in the house who may not be following any particular eating plan. It might include giving away all the ice cream in the freezer and buying in some eggs. It might also mean planning meals ahead of time, so you don’t have to get a carry out on busy evenings.
Do It
If you have found a chosen way to move forward and have planned and prepared, then just do it. Don’t overthink it, you only have to do it for one day, you can do this, so just do it. May be you want to measure your achievement in some way? It might be counting the calories you consume or even the ones you chose NOT to eat. It might be the number of glasses of water you drank or even your weight on the scales. You could even create a journal page on this to help you chart how you did. At the end of the day, review what happened (see below) and decide whether to try it again.
Review
If you tried your diet for a day, what happened? Did you stick to it? Did you take any measurements, count any particular parts, such as calories or glasses of water, or weight? Think about what went well or not so well. What was hard or easy? How did you feel at the end of the day? What was best about it? Would you do it again or not? These answers are yours alone. It is for you to decide whether your day’s diet is one you would repeat or not.