The funny thing about diets is that although they start at a specific point in time, they never end at a specific time. When you start a diet, a line is drawn in the sand. “By God I’m never eating a cookie again — starting tomorrow!!” But they never end that way, do they? I can’t ever remember saying, “starting next Tuesday I’m going to start eating crap!! It’s chocolate cake for me at every meal, baby!” It’s always easy to know when a diet starts, but it’s harder to tell when exactly you fell off the horse.
For a diet to work for me, you have to remove the “choice”. If a choice is involved, I’m going to make the wrong one. I’m never, ever, EVER going to pick steamed vegetables over chocolate cake. EVER. If there’s a choice involved over food, I almost always make the wrong one. The only way to correct that is to eliminate the choice. If you go to a salad bar for dinner or only stock the house with wheat bread, it gets tougher to choose poorly. But when I go to a Mexican restaurant for lunch and they serve free cheese, free chips, free tortillas, and free sopapillas with every meal … the only choice becomes, will I have seconds, or thirds?
You should look at it as *changing* your diet, not starting one. In my experience, encapsulating it by giving it a beginning implies that it will have an ending, and you don’t want that.