Because healthy eating is an ongoing series of small decisions, when you make a bad decision it’s important to be able to get back to making smart decisions right away. Follow these three easy steps and you’ll be right back on the wagon after a bad meal or a bad snack — or even after a bad week:

How to Get Your Diet Back On Track

1. State what you did without judging, exaggerating, or catastrophizing.
Just the facts here — something like “I ate a sweet roll for a snack,” or “I ate a bag of M&Ms.”

2. State why you did it.
This one can be hard, because you have to look past any story that you told yourself and reveal the real truth. The excuse you used may be, “I didn’t have time to eat something healthy.” The real truth is, “I was hungry, and I didn’t bring any good food with me, and I decided I would rather eat the sweet roll than stay hungry.”

If you want to add a more advanced technique here, go ahead and reality-check yourself: The fact is that it takes just as much time to eat junk food as it does to eat something healthy that you brought.

3. State what you intend to do next time.

“Tomorrow I will bring a healthy snack to work.”

FYI, Chapter 16 of Beating Sugar Addiction For Dummies is full of low-sugar, healthy snacks!

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