Friendships can be fantastic when it comes to keeping you from making a dieting mistake. The support you get from those who are closest to you can provide you with the motivation you need to keep going, while strengthening you to sidestep many of the temptations you face, such as overeating or skipping workouts. At the same time, even when you have fantastic, supportive friends, and are taking the right diet pills, you can still hold back your dieting success if you make the same dieting mistake I do on a regular basis: comparison.

I’ve managed to push myself not to compare my body to my friends (as much) anymore. We’re different people with different shapes and sizes. I can accept that. I know that some of my friends struggle with weight as I have. I know that some find it easy to keep the pounds away (grumble, grumble). Some of us are more prone to weight around the middle while some loathe our butts and thighs. We all have our points that we like most about ourselves and that we struggle to accept or that we’re always trying to improve.

That’s not the type of comparison I’m talking about this time, though. As destructive as it can be to make the dieting mistake of comparing your body to someone else’s it’s just as bad when you compare your diet to those followed by other people. You chose your diet for a reason – because you think it’s best for you. It suits your schedule, expectations, taste and health needs. You have your beliefs about how to provide yourself with nutrition and how to manage your weight.

So why is it such a bad dieting mistake to compare your diet to someone else’s? To start, they’re not you. They like different things, know different things, have their own challenges with nutrition and their bodies and may have eaten entirely different choices from you before you sat down together at the restaurant, and she decided to have only a salad when you were hoping to go for a burger.

Your food choices need to be based on what you want for yourself, not what someone else is eating. The fact that your friend is ordering a salad when you go out to dinner should have no bearing on what you select from the menu. If you’ve been saving up your calories all day and craving that burger, go for it. You will only be disappointed and will start to build a negative relationship with food if you start questioning your choices based on what someone else is doing. This dieting mistake could actually lead you to overeating later, when your friend isn’t around to keep you accountable.

Enjoy your food, know what you want, be mindful when you eat and perhaps you’ll find that your friend was only ordering a salad because she thought that’s what you’d be doing since you’ve had such great results with your diet so far!