A Diet: A Year In Review
Last December, after a usual round of Thanksgiving and Christmas gorging, I spent New Years with my friends Chaney and Sam. Chaney and Sam had been dieting for a few months and had had remarkable success. They were doing the South Beach diet (which is a form of low-carb dieting), and one I had done a couple of times before. However, last December, I was motivated by Sam and Chaney’s success, and finally, in annoyance at myself, broke down and made the first New Year’s resolution of my life that actually stuck. So I have basically not eaten since January. Haha, no, not really (kind of feels that way though…) I started dieting seriously on January 4 of this year. I’m pretty well still on it, and I’ve learned a lot of things. This is a list of those things.
1) It’s not really that bad. I finally decided, look: I spent 27 years eating whatever the heck I wanted whenever I wanted, and finally decided that I had indulged myself enough. It’s not like I’m an Olympic gymnast, who has never tasted the sweet sweet nectar and ambrosia of chocolate molten lava cake in her life. I’ve had it. A lot of it. It’s awesome. I just don’t eat it anymore.* And I’m not miserable. I don’t think about cake all the time. It’s hardly even that big of a deal anymore, and I’m much happier not feeling like a big slob who everyone is judging whenever I eat anything.
2) *Regular diet-cheating will save your brain. I am pretty faithful to my diet. However, in the first couple of months, I would very deliberately plan cheating meals of my favorite things (this was usually Chili’s Southwestern egg rolls or Taco Bell because I am a cheap date), and I would allow myself to eat whatever, as much of it as possible, for like 1 hour. Then it was over. I guess this is a bit “binge and purgey” except I never purged. I just figured I would absorb the calorie hit and it would be worth it, both mentally and craving-wise. It might take me 3 months, instead of 2, to lose the same amount of weight, but I would not be suicidal at the end of it. It was also important to PLAN the cheating. If I knew I was going to cheat when I went for my friend’s birthday next Friday, there was no reason to cheat on Monday, and I had something to look forward to. It also kept me from impromptu cheating, which had previously been the scourge of any diet I tried.
3) My regular “cheating” has taught me a very important lesson that had eluded me up till now in my life: Eating high-calorie/high-fat/sugary food is okay, as long as it’s only every once in a while, and not after lunch, dinner, before bed, and for breakfast.
4) There’s no reason to cheat on a regular day when nothing interesting is happening. When I cheat, it’s usually on football weekends, or when I go to celebrate my friends’ birthdays, or for a holiday. I save the cheating for special occasions, and on, like, a normal Tuesday, there is no reason to have 4 cupcakes. This has the simultaneous effect of allowing me to just have a good time sometimes when I am cheating and not feel terrible about it, and also of not irritating my non-dieting friends and family beyond endurance. There is nothing more annoying than the whiney dieting friend who “can’t eat there” and “that’s not on my diet” and “well, I’ll just eat later.” Because ordinary work days outnumber fun special days by like 20:1, I am dieting like (complicated percentage) amount of the time. I figure that is a good ratio.
5) Cheating becomes less necessary, and actually more uncomfortable, as your body gets used to dieting. I used to cheat like once or twice a month. I don’t cheat as much anymore. Not because I don’t want to, but because it makes me very sick. The thing about surviving off of basic proteins, vegetables, fruit, and whole grain wheat breads and brown rice, is that when you all of a sudden devour a plate of Blue Cheese Gorgonzola Grilled Chicken Pasta, your body, which has not had to break down a complex refined carbohydrate in 3 weeks, flips out. I have found myself crouched in front of a toilet after indulging myself more than anyone needs to know, and often enough that the idea of eating really rich food is starting to become associated in my head with the sick, nauseous feeling that inevitably follows it. I’m starting to think that the “purging” half of binging and purging is completely involuntary. These days, when I cheat, I always regret it.
6) I (me personally) will not lose any weight if I don’t exercise AND diet. If I just diet, I just break even. I comfort myself with knowing that, if I can’t make it to the pool, as long as I don’t cheat, then I won’t gain anything; its just a zero sum day. Frankly, I’m okay with that most days.
7) The smartest thing is to start exercising first, months (in my case, years) in advance of dieting. Don’t try to START both at once. I’d been swimming several miles a week for several years before I even started dieting. And tip: even swimming 7 miles a week, if you are not dieting, will not cause you to lose any weight (if you are me.) You will get muscular shoulders, though.
8) But know that when you start dieting after being used to exercising when you weren’t dieting, you will feel much more tired more quickly. You are doing the same amount of exercise on like 10% of the calories, and it takes time for your body to adjust to having less simple fuel to burn when you exercise.
9) Don’t keep bad food in the house. (I know that seems obvious. But I didn’t realize how many like, bags of chocolate chips were just sitting around. It took months to finally get rid of all of the crappy Super-Choco sugar bombs I had laying around.) Here’s why. You will have a crummy day when you have no willpower, and the only thing that will keep you from eating an entire bag of Oreos is lack of access to it, and your unwillingness to go drive and buy it. It’s shocking how lazy I am when I’d have to get up and go buy a bad food just to indulge myself. And that gives you time to rethink your bad decision. As you are putting on pants (Do I really want an Oreo?), as you put on your socks (Do I REALLY need an Oreo), as you search for your phone (Am I really going through all this trouble just to gain 2 pounds?), as your get in your car to drive to the store (I’m actually doing this, I’m driving to Kroger just to gain weight.) Leave store with bag of broccoli and greek yogurt.
10) Life lesson learned finally: I have used food as a crutch in so many ways in my life. I have finally finally learned not to reward myself with food, not to console myself with food, not to entertain myself with food. It was, first, after I had a crummy day at work and got home and wanted a cookie or something so bad, and I finally thought, No, I’m not going to let [whoever annoyed me] WIN by making me ruin my diet, that I realized how much I did that. I know Cosmo has told us this a million times, but there are other ways to reward yourself: buy some pretty flowers for your living room, a new candle! Bath salts! A new bra! Watch your favorite movie! Disassociate your feelings from food. They do not need to be related at all.
11) Start every day fresh. If you cheated yesterday, that doesn’t mean you have to today, and it doesn’t mean you have to give up on your diet, just because you cheated once.
12) No skipping meals. When you are barely eating like 1,000 calories a day (I know that’s not enough, DON’T BOSS ME), you should not go long stretches without food, and you absolutely cannot skip meals. You will just start passing out (maybe in a really inappropriate place, like in the gym shower, like cough someone I know cough.) This is not healthy. No skipping meals.
13) “Not eating anything” =/=”victory.” The point of your diet is not to stop eating any food. It’s not like, “Oh, I ate nothing today, so I have defeated my body, fat, calories, food, God, and the reality of the human digestive system and caloric burning machine that is the human body. I WIN!” Dieting is unique from other forms of like, addiction control, because, as opposed to alcoholism, you can’t just STOP eating entirely. You actually have to learn to eat correctly and healthily and smartly, or you will never accomplish anything.
14) If you don’t eat enough, you won’t lose any weight anyway. If you don’t get your minimum caloric requirement, the least important thing is that you don’t lose any weight. Your body goes into, like, malnutrition mode and starts conserving fat and you can start losing your hair, losing bone density, just awful things. The point is to burn more calories than you consume, not to not consume any calories and thus by default burn more calories than you consume. God could simply not make it so easy on us as to make it possible to just stop eating. It couldn’t be that simple. You just HAVE to learn to control yourself and your appetite and what you put in your body. Don’t skip meals: eat good, healthy well-balanced meals. Don’t stop snacking: eat high-protein, healthy snacks.
15) If you are eating good foods, you can eat tons of it! If you are eating a brownie, you can only have a teeny square of it. If you are eating celery sticks with hummus, you can basically eat your body weight in it.
16) No one is forcing you to jam that brownie into your mouth. No one. You are doing it yourself. If you just STOP jamming brownies into your mouth, it is literally shocking how easy it is to lose weight. And I’ve had to just face up to reality, and stop just resenting it: I am me. My body is like this. It works this way, and not that way. Sure, my sister could eat a life-size replica of Lebron James in cake-form, and probably lose 3 pounds the next day, but I am not her. If I eat a slice of white bread, I get violently ill, throw up, and gain 2 pounds. I am not my sister, and my body does not work like hers, even if we have practically the same genes. The sooner I stop wasting my energy resenting that, the more productive I can be. I have bigger boobs than her. So there.
17) Fruit actually tastes goodI KNOW SHOCKING. I eat a lot of apples and oranges and berries, rather than trying to make like, Splenda brownies or low-cal cookies! That kind of stuff just exhausts me and tastes terrible. I’d rather have an ACTUAL food, like apples with natural peanut butter, for dessert than disgusting air-brownies. I wait till a cheat-day and have actual brownies if I want them so bad.
18) They say, “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” I try to pretend this is not true. But the biggest motivator and encourager to me in this has been the success of it. The biggest thing that kept me trying to lose weight was the fact that I was already losing weight. Also, having some of my best friends doing this also has helped. It’s easier to encourage each other and berate each other, and makes it harder to feel sorry for yourself.
19) That all being said, it is easy to plateau. Your body will fight you every single step of the way. I am in a long-standing plateau right now, but I’m much healthier. My big plan is not to tackle this problem over Christmas and New Years. That is fighting a losing battle. My New Year’s resolution this year was to just diet and control my diet. I did that, and lost like 35 pounds. This next year, my plan is going to be to exercise more regularly (my swimming schedule gets so erratic during football season, since I’m gone every weekend), and to mix in running with swimming, even though I loathe running. I just need to be more consistent with my exercise.
Anyway, hopefully, by next year, when I turn sideways, I will disappear. That is my goal. I will update everybody as soon as that happens! If I don’t slip through a crack in the floor first (fingers crossed!)
