A diet is okay when you’re one of those horrible people who want to take off five pounds so their adorable little girl six-pack really pops. A diet is a great idea when you want to take off fifteen pounds of beer fat so you can wear your wedding dress in a size four instead of eight. A diet is the perfect thing when your inclusion in the Mission to Mars is contingent on your weighing a stone less than you do.
But a diet is not okay for losing a large amount of weight and keeping it off.
A diet is inherently about tension and deprivation. A diet brings to mind living off grapefruit and a single lettuce leaf. It makes us think of plain celery sticks, and quite frankly, if you get excited about plain celery sticks you’re going to need to rethink things. Maybe some therapy. You’re not doing this “fat” thing right at all.
Anyway, a diet is about doing without until you go off the diet. That creates tension. There’s a tension between today’s suffering and tomorrow’s joy. You’re just waiting until you lose the weight, because then you can eat like a normal person again. Hooray!
No. Not hooray. First off, let’s look at some normal people. Have you seen the obesity statistics lately? Been inside a superstore and looked at the customers? Gone to the county fair? We are fat fat fat around here. “Normal” involves batter, frying, HFCS, batter-dipped and fried HFCS, giant portions, rich sauces, preservatives, and enough salt to replace what a fat girl cries into her pillow at night. When I go out to dinner and watch what people consider to be “normal” it revolts me now. I can’t believe they eat all that. Yuck.
Eating “normally” means being fat. Please take a minute and absorb that. Eating like our dominant culture eats means being fat like most of the people you see on a daily basis. One more time:
Eating “normally” means being fat forever.
You may get closer to thin for a while, on your latest diet. Your friends will politely tell you that you look great, and the more honest among them will actually say things like “You know you’re going to gain it all back again.” And then you will gain it all back again, and more. Because the pattern is to yo-yo steadily upward, and unless you make some serious changes, you’re not escaping the pattern. You haven’t yet, right?
How do we escape the pattern? We make a lifestyle change instead of going on a diet. Instead of thinking “In six months I can have this double-stuffed cheese-dipped chocolate-smeared goodness” you think “That is a disgusting mess that will kill me, and I choose not to put it in my body.” We embrace the idea that we are changing our relationship with food forever. We let go of the tension of deprivation, and welcome the rich goodness of simple foods.
Your taste buds can change. You can get to where simple, nutritious foods taste amazing to you. You can learn to like new vegetables. You can become a person who eats like a thin person.
The first step is letting go of “temporary.” Replace it with “this is how I eat.” If you’re a petulant defiant brat like me, replace it with “this is how I choose to eat today.” But move it into the present. Own it. Be the change you want to see in the world.
(Sorry about that. Couldn’t help myself.)
Create a new normal for yourself that hearkens back to an earlier time. Your new normal can be whole nutritious foods without a lot of embellishments. You can tell people you eat Paleo or you’re on a health kick or you fear cancer – or tell them nothing at all. But the crap we put in our bodies now is an invention of the last sixty years. Healthy food was a fad for a lot longer than that. You can never go wrong with a classic.
No comments:
Post a Comment