Aversion Methods

The reason I did the bread thing isn't because I'm masochistic, it's because I like to eat bread.

When you like something and have it every day, it's hard not to eat it. In fact, what you end up doing is seeing it, really wanting it but going 'No, I shouldn't have it' and then saying 'screw it!' and having it anyway. Then you end up feeling guilty that you gave in and so you stop or at least pause your efforts to change what you eat. So, to try and bypass this, I did the nasty bread thing.

Paul McKenna has a thing with visualisations in his book I Can Make You Thin. He gets you to visualise some thing you'd be repulsed to eat, such as hair. Then you visualise the food you crave, smelling, tasting, feeling it and then visualising the craved food covered in hair. Well, this gave me the idea of the bread thing because I thought that actually covering the food in something nasty (but edible of course) might be even better than just visualising it.

I'm working out how I'm going to progress this now. I'm deciding between making myself eat something like a fresh hot chili pepper whenever I eat a fast-carb or making myself put £10 in a jar every time I eat some thing containing wheat, sugar etc. I think I'm siding more with the £10 thing because I can't afford to pay away £10 all the time so I can't in theory afford to eat fast-carbs.

Another method you could use is highlighted by Tim Ferriss in his post Real Mind Control: The 21-Day No-Complaint Experiment. In it he uses a wrist band to stop himself complaining:

Will designed a solution in the form of a simple purple bracelet, which he offered to his congregation with a challenge: go 21 days without complaining. Each time one of them complained, they had to switch the bracelet to their other wrist and start again from day 0. It was simple but effective metacognitive awareness training.

I'm sure this could be adapted for changing what you eat if you wanted to.

As a side note, this is not a no-carb diet its a slow-carb. I don't cut carbs out, I still get them by eating plenty of vegetables and legumes, I just don't take them in quickly absorbed forms.