Beyond Chocolate 'mistake' number two - worrying about 'falling off the wagon'.

Gretel Hallet, is a trained Chocolate Fairy and is running the Getting Started half day workshop in Norwich. If you live in East Anglia and want to know more about Beyond Chocolate, get in touch with Gretel. 


Dieting necessitates will-power. The serious dieter knows she has to stick to the diet to the letter in order to achieve the weight loss promised. This, as many of us know, isn’t as easy as it sounds. Life has a habit of throwing curve balls at the serious dieter – a sudden Wedding, or being invited to dinner or an outbreak of cream cakes at work. On occasions like these, the dieter can choose either to enter monastic solitude in order to avoid temptation, or throw herself off the wagon with abandon. This can then lead to a full scale binge as the (now ex) dieter thinks, ‘Oh well, I’ve blown it now, I may as well eat what I like. I’ll start again on Monday and this time I’ll stick to it.’


And so when we reach the point where we have decided NEVER to diet again, and have found Beyond Chocolate, we may bring with us all the fears and language of the serial dieter.


Worrying about ‘falling off the wagon’ often occurs around those binge times, when all the principles seem to have gone to the four winds and we find ourselves again at the bottom of a biscuit barrel (or 12 pack of crisps or whatever is your binge food of choice). As the wonderful ladies on the Forum will tell you, there’s no wagon to fall off any more. Every binge, every eating opportunity is another learning opportunity. We can observe ourselves with curiosity and compassion instead of beating ourselves up verbally or mentally. We can decide if we want to carry on eating like this or not. We can decide what we do next. Personally I shrug my shoulders and move on – it happened, sometimes I know why, sometimes I don’t ... either way, it’s been a valuable experience for me. It’s another success – at least now I know I’m bingeing!


Knowledge is power – knowing what I’m doing gives me the choice to continue or stop and do something else. I have found over the last couple of years that my binges have reduced in quantity and volume to the point where someone else might not consider them binges at all. Eventually I suspect they will stop all together, but for now I’m working with what happens as it happens, and I’m very glad to be totally ‘off the diet wagon’ forever.