Temperance

In my book How to Survive Your Diet, I talk about greed. Greed for food, greed for the perfect body, greed for certain numbers on the scale, greed for all our problems to be fixed right now.

Clearly this is not the religious kind of moralistic greed. After all, what's wrong with wanting to be thin? Is that immoral? Of course not.

The greed that Diet Survivors are helped in understanding is the obsessive need to have everything they want right now, and to an extreme.

Folks learning to ditch the diet need to learn some other principles along the way, in addition to intuitive eating. They need to recognize that greed is a normal trait of human beings that is best resisted.

Why must we have the whole cake? Ask yourself that question today. Is one thin slice enough? Greed is a habit that is fueled by fear (the cake may never be here again) and extreme thinking (I must get underweight so I don't get overweight.)

Normal eaters need to simply recognize that greed is probably not doing them much good. They can learn to resist greed, not because it's the moral thing to do, but because it helps us place reasonable, livable constraints on ourselves.

And what do we replace greed with? Temperance. Temperance in all things. It's a good word to commit to memory, and perhaps meditate on a bit. Here's a definition from Answers.com: Moderation and self-restraint, as in behavior or expression.

Temperance will help you ditch the diet for good.

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Find out more about Linda Moran's book, How to Survive Your Diet.