12 Reasons You Can't Diet Tomorrow

It's the oldest lie in the book: "Just one more bad day. I'll start eating healthy tomorrow!" I call this "The Last Supper Syndrome," and it comes in a myriad of different versions. If you've read this far, you probably already know tomorrow never comes.

However, in my work with overeaters, we've identified an additional 11 reasons. Knowing how to combat them helps overcome this pernicious pattern for good so you can more easily accomplish your health and fitness goals. These insights are primarily derived from analyzing thousands of client emails and coaching sessions.

Without further ado, here are 12 reasons you can't start your diet tomorrow:

• Reason #1 — Tomorrow Never Comes. What "tomorrow" really means when it comes to your diet is "someday." Someday I'll start eating healthy, just not today, right? Play now, pay later. "Start tomorrow" is the food version of charging up a storm on your credit card. The interest keeps piling up and you never pay down the balance. Go ahead — look at a calendar right now and confirm for yourself there's no "someday" listed on it. "Someday" is not a day of the week. Tomorrow doesn't exist, only today. Tomorrow it will be today again.
• Reason #2 — You're Always Either Reinforcing or Extinguishing Your Food Patterns. There Is No Standing Still! By the principles of neuroplasticity, what fires together wires together. Your lizard brain says it's just as easy to start tomorrow but the truth is, if you binge today, it will be harder to ignore the cravings tomorrow because you reinforced them! Every bite is an opportunity for self-love vs. self-harm.
• Reason #3 — Every Bite Counts. Every Last One. "Start tomorrow" is just a way of fooling yourself into believing today doesn't count. But there’s no such thing as a “day off” for your body. Everything you ingest becomes a part of you. You are what you eat!
• Reason #4 — "Making Up” for Overeating Today by Being Super Good Tomorrow Is Harmful. People who struggle with overeating are almost inevitably also very good dieters. It's kind of like that old nursery rhyme by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: "When she was good she was very, very good but when she was bad she was horrid!" We aren't just addicted to feasting; we're addicted to the feast and famine cycle, forever keeping ourselves on a roller coaster that alternates between dieting and overeating. This kills our metabolism and creates an ever deeper quicksand trap from which it becomes progressively more difficult to free oneself. If your body thinks you live in an environment poor in calories and nutrition (e.g. a "diet") it only makes sense that it will try to hoard food the moment it is once again available. Don't do this to yourself! Instead, consider flooding your body with nutrition at a slight caloric deficit until you reach your goal. Work with your doctor and/or licensed dietitian to determine the right pace. Because even if you are super-good tomorrow, you'll still be perpetuating and reinforcing the feast and famine cycle. Step off the roller coaster and into a more even-keeled, peaceful existence with food!
• Reason #5 — Tomorrow Is Meaningless to the Lizard Brain. Time perception doesn't really exist in the primitive part of the brain which drives overeating. It understands now. At a very primitive level, it is only ever asking, "What should we do now with that thing we see? Eat it? Mate with it? Kill it?" If you want to be healthy you simply must train your lizard brain to use the present moment to do so. Now is all there is. Deciding to eat healthy tomorrow really only ever means you've decided not to eat healthy right now.
• Reason #6 — Research Suggests the More Confident We Are That We Can Eat Healthy Tomorrow, the Worse We Will Eat Today! (Wilcox, K, Vallen, B., Block, L., and Fitsimmon, G.J., 2009). The more confident we are we actually will start our healthy diet “tomorrow," the more indulgent we will be today! So even developing true confidence in your ability to start tomorrow only makes it possible for you to do more damage today. Plus, how likely are you, really, to have more willpower, more time to make decisions, and more time to plan out your healthy eating tomorrow? Don't start tomorrow. Repeat whatever element of yesterday’s behavior was healthiest, add to it, and stop swearing tomorrow will be different.
• Reason #7 — Your Word Is Sacred, Especially to Yourself. Your word is your bond. Knowing you can keep a promise to yourself means everything. It’s the foundation of integrity — which allows you to do everything else in your life. My clients feel infinitely more confident in the rest of their lives when they know they can make a food promise to themselves and stick to it. Try it and see what happens.
• Reason #8 — Give Your Lizard Brain an Inch and It Will Take a Mile. One bite can be a tragedy. As one of my clients who was addicted to cookies said, "If I don't have one cookie, I know I won't eat the whole box." Put the cookie down now. Tomorrow it will be now again, so you can rinse and repeat your way to success.
• Reason #9 — If You Keep Putting Off the Decision to Eat Healthy, You Will Endure Hundreds of First Days. Let's say you do want to stop eating cookies. The most difficult day you will ever experience will be your very first cookie-free day. That first day is torture. But if you keep changing your mind midway through it, you'll become like Sisyphus forever pushing that boulder uphill, suffering hundreds of times when, really, you only needed to endure one very difficult 24-hour period. So bite the bullet and get it done today. The only way out is through! And you can only ever use the present moment to be healthy.
• Reason #10 — Eating Healthy Today vs. Tomorrow Is the Key to Overcoming Emotional and Impulsive Eating. I teach my clients to create a list of rules which govern their most difficult health behaviors. For example: "I will only ever eat chocolate on weekends," "I always exercise before breakfast 5x/week," etc. The idea is to learn to make intellectual decisions about difficult behaviors so you're not constantly changing your mind due to impulse or emotion. Then you make intellectual adjustments to the rules themselves to balance satisfaction, enjoyment, and health goals. See, the primary addiction is not to the food itself, but to acting on impulse based upon one's emotional state and immediate desire. Beat that, and you've beaten the problem. So, accept the notion that it's fine to change your rules when you really want to, provided you spend 20 minutes writing down exactly what you want to change and why you think the new rules will be better. Save a backup copy in case the new rules don't work, and then let it sit for 24 hours before they take effect. This way your lizard brain can't force immediate, impulsive, emotional changes and you remain in control. You can eat anything you want to if you're willing to deal with the consequences. You just can't eat it now.
• Reason #11 — Eating Badly Today Builds Momentum in the Wrong Direction and Puts You Doubly Behind Where You'd Be Tomorrow If You Ate Healthy Today! Let's say you're driving from NYC to Los Angeles this week. You're averaging 500 miles per day. Then, on Tuesday something possesses you to turn around the drive 500 miles back towards NYC. Where will you be on Wednesday? One thousand miles further away from Los Angeles than you would've been if you just kept going. So it's not just one bad day even when it is... it's two!
• Reason #12 — When You Eat Badly Today After Thinking "I'll Start Again Tomorrow," You'll Be More Likely to Say the Same Exact Thing Tomorrow! The problem with looking at that donut, saying "oh well, I'll start eating healthy tomorrow," and then proceeding to eat it is that the dopamine reward which ensues from all the sugar, fat, and oil actually reinforces the thought itself. In other words, when you say "I'll start tomorrow" and then eat some junk you're making it more likely you'll say the same thing tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. You'll be building more "start tomorrow" pathways in your neurological makeup, teaching yourself to forever start tomorrow... and how many more Last Suppers are you going to have?

I hope this helps!

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