Learn How to Cope with Social Pressure 
When You're on a Diet
by Elie Chaftari 

If you intend to go on a diet or embark on a new fitness program, you should expect some aggressiveness from your friends and family circle. How should you behave to cope with this major hurdle?

After oneself the biggest difficulty that is encountered as soon as one wants to change any habit, eating included, is the others. Don't think that it's a matter of objective malicious intent that aims at you in particular, but people, and you are an integral part of them, need to define you before accepting you. You often act in this same way without noticing it: this person is kind or aggressive, fat or thin, dynamic or lymphatic. This rating enables you to integrate her more easily in your living space. 

You may already have met somebody that makes you feel ill at ease because you can't really make him out. In much the same way, when you change your habits you first unsettle your family circle and people close to you, and to a lesser extent anyone that will consider your new behavior is anomalous.

Our society, just as the human body, lives in constant homeostasis (tries to keep a constant equilibrium). It fights any change, especially if it's a sudden change, because it's destabilizing. When you will begin changing your eating habits and showing an unusual behavior, you'll no doubt be "attacked" with a lot of genuine advice, and mainly by your circle of friends. Accept their behavior from the outset because in fact you are the aggressor, you are the one who is disrupting their habits, you are the one who is destabilizing their traditional behavior, the only one they learned to accept as universal truth. You are changing and they are not going to wonder whether their behavior is wrong.

It is much easier to tell themselves that you are mistaken, to protect their inner cores. You would have acted the same way with them. Does this mean that you must get on the wrong side of your friends and the society just because you want to change your eating behavior? Not in the slightest, if you understood and accepted that any living organism has its own momentum, human society in this instance. Try instead at first to form a protective filter around you, made up of some family members and true friends, maybe even some office colleagues. Tell them about your plans, ask for their help, and more than anything to do you the favor not feel sorry for you or to tease you about your efforts (you know the type: "poor child! It hurts me to see you eat that"). Ask them to encourage you instead.

Carry out this experiment; if you humbly ask a "normal" person for her help and advice, she won't refuse it to you. On the contrary, flattered, she will forget her aggressiveness and will become your best ally in your plan.

Try to convert people to your ideas; it is when you have to explain a subject to others that you learn it the best. It is as a couple or as a family that you can best manage to achieve your goals. As the saying goes: united we stand, divided we fall. Even if your friend, husband, wife or family doesn't have to slim down, a change for a healthier diet and lifestyle can only be beneficial to them. Involve them therefore in your project for their own good. 

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