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You Tips!

Adopt the YOU-Turn Mantra. If you’ve ever ridden in a car with GPS satellite navigation system, you know how it works. Plug in your destination, and the system -- using satellites to plot your current and final points -- tells you exactly what to do when. Turn left after 400 feet. Stay straight. Get in right lane. But let’s say you make a mistake and miss a turn or turn onto the wrong street. The GPS doesn’t berate you, doesn’t scold you, doesn’t tell you that you might as well drive off a cliff, since you made a mistake and missed First Avenue. Instead, all it says, very politely, is this: “At the next available moment, make an authorized U-turn.” You-reka! The GPS recognizes the mistake matter-of-factly and simply guides you back onto the right road. The GPS allows for mistakes and tries to help you correct them. That’s the kind of mentality we want you to have. You’re going to make wrong turns. You’re going to make wrong turns. You’re going to turn left at the hot dogs, make a right at the blueberry pie, and occasionally merge onto the interstate of banana-nut pancakes with a side order of sausage patties. Does that mean you should steer off the dietary cliff and fall into the fatty crevasse of destructive eating?

Of course not. What it means is that you need to pay closer attention to the road signs and the instructions about how to make it to your final destination. It also means that you can’t beat yourself up with a basket of croissants every time you lick a little whipped cream off your finger. So what you’re going to do -- right now -- is acknowledge that you will face obstacles. And instead of falling into the avoidant and defeatist mentality by drop-kicking healthy eating the moment you make one bad choice, you will confront it.

How? By repeating the YOU Diet Mantra: “At the next available moment, make an authorized YOU-Turn.” “At the next available moment, make an authorized YOU-Turn.” “At the next available moment, make an authorized YOU-Turn.”

Get back on the right road.

What kills any regimen of healthy eating isn’t the occasional dessert or slice of pizza; it’s the cascade of behavior that happens after the initial indulgence. Use this mantra to steer yourself back to -- to understand that you can make mistakes but that you can correct and overcome them with some nonjudgmental coaxing. Why does it work?

• It gives you a mental crutch to carry when you’re faced with difficult eating situations.
• It reminds you to be confident, to be positive, to know that the harm isn’t in the first mistake, it’s in not figuring out how to deal with it.
• It reinforces the grand scheme of this whole plan -- the reason why you’re trying to manage your waist. The long term benefits to your health far outweigh what you’re giving up in your Pyrex dish.


Excerpted from 'YOU on a Diet' by Michael F. Roizen, M.D. and Mehmet C. Oz, M.D. Copyright© 2006 by by Michael F. Roizen, M.D. and Mehmet C. Oz, M.D.. Excerpted by permission of Free Press, a division of Simon and Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.