Many diets and weight loss programs impose strict rules about what you can eat and what you must avoid at all costs. They tell you when to eat and how much. They say fat (or carbohydrate) is the enemy of a slim body, and that it must be counted and limited. They tell you to avoid snacking or to eat every 2 or 3 hours, without fail. They specify cabbage soup every day for a week or allow you virtually nothing but grapefruit or eggs. And they want you to exercise 5 times a week when you haven't moved a muscle in a decade.

But you know that rules are meant to be broken. The very fact that they are rules imposed by an outside weight loss "authority" means that they will be.

Rules bring out the small child in you who wants to touch the forbidden ornaments on your aunt's hall table and stay up when its bedtime. You become the rebellious teenager who wants to party when there's homework to do.

During your weight loss program, nothing makes you want food more than forbidding it. "Can't have chocolate cake. Can't have fries" leads you to think of nothing else. Enforced salad or soup means that these are the last things you actually want to eat.

And when you do succumb, as you inevitably will, to the chocolate cake, you feel guilty rebellious pleasure in breaking the rules you feel have been unfairly imposed on you. "Why me?" you ask yourself "It's not fair. Why do I have to follow these rules? Everyone else gets to eat cake."

So forget the rules!

"Forget the rules?" you cry "I'll go mad and shovel in everything in sight. I'll be fatter than ever."

Somehow it doesn't work like that if you treat yourself as the adult you are.

Take responsibility for learning about healthy food and nutrition. And once you have the information you need, make your choices from the huge range of delicious food out there. Don't label any food good or bad. Just select from all that's available with a mindset of being good to you, good to your body and how you want to feel.

And yes, sometimes you will select the chocolate cake. But once you treat yourself as a responsible adult rather than a child to be kept in line and punished, you will find you enjoy the cake and go on to make healthier choices at your next meal, happy in the knowledge that nothing is banned, that there will always be more cake if you want it in the future.

Feed the adult in you and not the rebel child!

Copyright 2005, Janice Elizabeth Small