Do you freak about getting fat?

If you're like millions of women, you beat yourself up every time you grab a bagel for breakfast or have a little chocolate for dessert. Banning your diet-police attitude will get you leaner, healthier, and lovin' life.

It used to be that ordering a triple-layer chocolate fudge cake was the worst food felony you could commit in front of your girlfriends. Today, the forbidden-food list is as long as a Subway sandwich. Thanks largely to the Zone diet and the Atkin's diet (both of which condemn high carbohydrate counts), even chowing down on former "good" foods like bread, pasta, and rice can get you busted by your food-patrol buddies--or make you feel as if you've committed a crime.

And this, say experts, is a big problem. Women have become so hyperaware of every little thing they put on their plates and have added so many items to their list of no-no foods that they're seriously limiting what they can consume--and harming their health in the process. What's worse, when they do eat, women chastise themselves for hours or days over their "bad" food choices.

"If I eat foods I'm not supposed to, such as chocolate or even pasta, I feel bad for several days afterward," says Rhonda [*] 28. "It's hard not to dwell on it when I feel like I'm such a fat slob,"

Where does all this guilt come from? How did we develop such a warped relationship with food? Most women and health experts agree that a key driver of negative associations with particular foods is fad dieting, but the overwhelming amount of conflicting nutritional information that filters down to us through news reports, diet books, and the Internet doesn't help either. Are carbs evil or good for you? If fat's so terrible, should you eliminate it from your diet altogether?

Then again, a lot of us want to know how to eat healthfully and lose weight at the same time, an even more befuddling challenge. Experts believe that this is why some women latch onto the diet of the moment--it tells you exactly what to eat and tries to sell you on the notion that it's also the optimal choice for your health. The problem, however, is that such diets are often unbalanced and superstrict. "There's a lot of hype surrounding these plans," says Edward Abramson, Ph.D., psychology professor at California State University at Chico and author of Emotional Eating. "They have novelty value, which is what makes them interesting and exciting, but most don't offer strategies for effective long-term weight-loss."

And they're so extreme that most of us can't stick to them for long--which just leads to more guilt. "These diets leave people feeling like they've failed and have no self-control when they succumb to certain forbidden foods," says Rex Birkmire, M.D., associate medical director at the Florida Hospital Center for Behavioral Health in Orlando, Florida. In fact, some people give in and go hog-wild simply because a food is considered taboo.