The cost of dieting

One of the things that I used to find painful about dieting was the grocery bills. Every new diet, even the ones that let you eat "real food," required new grocery shopping. Every diet had something special that I needed, like certain vegetables or fruits or brown rice, that we didn't have in the pantry already. Or, the stuff we had was not quite right because it was not low-fat or high fiber or low-carb or sugar-free. And often, my new diets happened right after I'd alrady been to the store, so I had a pantry and refrigerator full of inappropriate food - most of which I'd bought for consolation after the previous diet had failed.

This was a vicious cycle that just added to my lousy feelings about myself. Commit to new diet, buy everything on the "shopping list" provided (except raw tomatoes, I just cannot eat those), stay on the new diet for three days, give up and decide to eat intuitively, buy the foods I really want, eat happy for a few days or a few weeks, feel fat again, go on new diet, start over from beginning.

When I felt very fat (in a bad way!), I would go on the more extreme diets that don't really let you eat food at all. Optifast was quite expensive every week, in addition to tasting blech and keeping me in starvation mode. And I still had to buy food for the other people in my house, so I wasn't getting the food "savings" that they use as part of their pitch. Jenny Craig was pricey, too, plus I seem to remember that I had to buy salad stuff and milk.

I found a note I wrote to myself in one of the many journals I have laying about that, among the things I think I've learned at least once is: spending big chunks of money is not sufficient motivation to me to make significant behavior changes. Not $3000 for Optifast, not $250 for the pool, not $40 a month for Jazzercise. Got that? The act of spending money does not motivate by itself, but it can certainly add to the guilt later.