If I’m not strict with myself I feel that I will lose all control and never be able to stop eating. What do I do?

This is a fear that many people have. They fear that if they let go of their rigid dieting ways that they will compulsively eat forever.  However, the data doesn’t support it. In practice, when people work on letting go of their restrictive rules of dieting that tell them they cannot eat certain foods and that they are bad if they break a rule, the opposite happens; their compulsive eating goes away. As you get rid of the psychological deprivation that you have set up through constant, rigid dieting, you become more and more of a normal eating person who’s body signals when you’ve had enough and tells you that it doesn’t want any more. It grows to be satisfied with less and less food until it reaches a normal appetite level. In my book, Mind Over Fat Matters: Conquering Psychological Barriers to Weight Management, I explain what psychological deprivation is, how we create it through rigid dieting and rules, and how to eliminate it so that you can follow through with eating in a way that will cause fat burning instead of leading to compulsive eating.