So there you are doing some good dieting, or so you think. You’re definitely working hard at it. You’ve even had some dieting success: sticking to it, eating the right diet food, shedding pounds. You’re feeling proud of yourself for getting yourself to do something that you really hadn’t been able to get yourself to do. So what could be wrong?

You could be dieting with too much restraint. In other words, your dieting may be too restrictive for you, too severe for your own good. You may have selected a diet that is too limiting in the number of calories or in the types of food. Or forget the food part. You could be too strict or too unforgiving or too anxiously preoccupied with dieting thoughts and diet strategies.

What’s the downside of so much self-restraint and self-control? This kind of more rigid restraint is associated with a tendency to compensate for the severity of restraining yourself by overeating and being unable to sustain your dieting.

Remember, when you are clipping along on your dieting plan and successfully shedding your unwanted weight, check yourself to see if you are being too restrictive, too rigid, too restrained. You don’t want weight cycling and weight regain to be the result of your method of dieting.