Falling off the wagon when you’re changing your diet is a normal, and actually very useful thing to happen.

So, you embarked on an important change journey: you changed your diet to reduce the severity of your Endometriosis symptoms. You worked out which foods to stop eating and which foods to eat more of. And you started well. And now you've fallen off the wagon and slipped back into those pesky eating habits you wanted to stop. What now?

The key element of dealing with falling off the wagon is to accept it as a normal part of any change journey. Accepting that changing your diet is hard and that nobody does it without falling back into old eating habits at times (it happens to me, regularly!)

The eating habits you’re trying to change have probably been your normal way of eating for a long time. They’ve become automated, it’s behaviour you do on automatic pilot. It’s hard to change something you do when most of the time you’re not aware you’re doing it. So, when you are going to change your diet, it helps to assume that falling off the wagon is a normal part of the learning process. And think about some strategies you can implement when it happens

And when you've fallen off the wagon, you’ve slipped back into the old eating habits, what then?

• Start by having an internal conversation with yourself, along the lines of: “Okay it was to be expected that I'd be falling off the wagon at some point. It will take some time to break out of my old eating habits. The new diet isn’t a habit, yet.
• Then look at it as a powerful learning experience. Allow yourself to reflect for a few moments on what factors may have led to fall back into your old diet habits. It could give you some good insights into the triggers. Once you’re aware of these triggers, you can either remove them or start to watch out for them so they don’t take you by surprise. Often we fall back into old eating habits when we haven’t planned for our new diet. Meal planning can be a powerful tool to get back on track. You may like to read this article on the power of meal planning.
• Another powerful strategy once you’ve fallen off the wagon, is to focus on small steps forward. You may have been doing well for a couple of weeks up till now. To get back on track, don’t set your sights too high, just focus on today, this morning, or even just this hour. And when you’ve stuck to your new habit for that period of time, take a moment to pat yourself on the back and to set another short timeframe. You want to focus on how often you are able to do your new behaviour, on what is going well. Visual charts can work wonders here: give yourself something to place ticks, smiley faces, or any other symbol to show how often you stayed the course

As long as you realise that you've fallen off the wagon, and that it is an opportunity to learn from and not as a reason to throw in the towel, you’ll be able to get back into your diet and will be able to stick to it better … until the next time you fall off the wagon.

If you’d like to have a personal chat about what your options are for managing your symptoms now that you have been diagnosed with Endometriosis, book a free Endometriosis SOS Call: https://theendometriosisnutritionist.online/endometriosis-sos-call/