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Master Diet

Getting Started

Trying to lose, gain, or maintain your weight?  Monitoring your diet for medical reasons?   Maybe you are  training for sports?    It  makes  no difference why you are dieting,  it is always true:   Getting started is the hardest step, especially  if you have never seriously dieted before.   It's like learning how to eat,  what to eat, how much to eat, all over again.

After eating the way you have all of your life, you find yourself faced with trying to break the hardest habit you ever had to break. To make it worse, you have to do it in a world that encourages you to do it all wrong.

It's important that you read these next few pages.  You might even consider printing them so you can refer to them as you plan your diet.

You may also email me to discuss any questions you might have at: John@Masterdiet.com

- The "Mind Set" -

You have to make a conscious decision that you are going to do this, and that you will not develop a negative attitude about it.

People usually say something like, "That's great!" when you tell them you are on a diet, but they act like they are offering their condolences.

Many of us feel like we got caught and now we are being punished for being fat.

Don't fall into that trap!  Training yourself in Proper Dietary Habits is like going to school/college.  It is for your future good.  It's like fixing something that is broken.

You should look at dieting as though you're taking a class in nutrition and collecting lab data.

Now take the computer, this program and all the resources available to you and enjoy this real life experiment.  It will make you look, feel, and perform better. Don't worry about failures, don't worry about mistakes, and don't act like this is medicine.  Play with it to learn about you.

Positive attitudes equal SUCESS,                               Negative attitudes equals FAILURE.

Learn what you can eat, not what you can't eat.

- Simplicity vs. Consistency -

Simplicity is the key to starting a diet.  It is the old K.I.S.S. theory in action, (Keep It Simple Stupid). However, if I had one perfect food that would meet all of your nutritional needs and gave you the quantity required to maintain your desired body weight, and if I instructed you to eat nothing but this one food three times a day, experience has shown us that you would probably not do it.

A recent survey showed "Diet In-Consistency" among the top reasons for diet failure.  The same survey showed "Diet Consistency" was among the top reasons for diet success.

There are times when simplicity is needed and other times when it is not easily tolerated.  Consistency certainly can make things simpler, but it can also make things very boring.

Humans don't want variety, they need it!  So what do you do?  Compromise is the wrong word.  What you do is carefully balance consistency with variety.

Simplicity is needed more in the beginning, when you know the least, while you are still learning what to do.  At that stage you are too busy learning, to be bored, besides, you are probably at your highest state of motivation then.  Later, as you learn more, you can experiment and enjoy more variety without risking the success of your diet.

You can also, mix consistency and variety in the course of one day by being very consistent during one part of the day and enjoying variety in the other.  For instance, you might eat the same things every morning, lunch and snack, but vary the supper meal a lot.

- Learning the Basics -

If you are like most of us, you don't want to use scales, books or charts at home every time you eat.  And who can measure how much less you want to do it in public.

You can avoid all of this by simply learning how to recognize what a serving looks like.  With Master Diet, once you learn what a 1/2 cup of green beans looks like on the plate, you won't have to measure it.

It's easy to learn how to estimate servings and I've found, that a little practice (in the privacy of your home) is all it takes to get pretty accurate.  Then, check yourself every once in a while to keep yourself sharp.

In actuality it doesn't make a lot difference if you are a little off.  Sometime you are little over, sometime a little under but overall things tend to even out.

- Relax -

Don't get all up tight about your diet.  There are so many variables in the nutritional values of food that it is impossible to know exactly what you are doing anyway.  Relax and enjoy your diet.  If you are out eating somewhere and you don't know the size of a serving, don't panic.  Take your best guess and enter it into the computer.

Although accuracy is important, it is not worth getting all upset over.  Honest estimates and guesses seem to work almost as good as precise measurements.

Relax - you are dieting for your health, and your mental and emotional health is important too.  Don't get excited the day you lose a whole pound or depressed the day you gain two pounds.  The body works on 72 hour averages, not single events.

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