Now, I know plenty of dieters who have made that decision and succeeded. But I know plenty more who have failed. Here’s why they fail: phase I isn’t meant to be a long – term eating plan. You’re limited to a fairly small palette of foods grilled lean meats and fish, vegetables, low – fat cheeses and salads, all either steamed or prepared using good fats such as olive oil and rapeseed oil. For snacks, nuts and chunks of low – fat cheddar, and that’s about it. From a culinary point of view, it’s a perfectly acceptable diet – for two or three weeks. After that, it gets a little dull. That, we find, is where the trouble starts.
That’s when dieters begin to improvise; only they do so improperly. They mix in their bad old habits – just once in a while, mind you. They follow phase I but they add in a handful of bourbon biscuits every night. Even that’s not exactly it. They add in one biscuit after dinner, realize it tasted pretty good and probably did no harm, and then increase it to three every night. Three biscuits a night with no noticeable harm make it easy to allow a small bag of corn chips at 4 o’clock one afternoon. If you’re doing all right with three biscuits and corn chips, it doesn’t seem so unwise to indulge a craving for pizza and beer on the weekend. Before long, you’re cheating more than dieting. When you realize how badly you’ve strayed, you may do what lots of our people have tried: you’ll revert at once to the strict phase I plan. But when you do, it seems even more monotonous than it did the first time.
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