I hate diets. They go right up there alongside such wonderful experiences as listening to a dentist drill, the smell of burnt popcorn, and writing on airplanes. Cutting out fat, or dairy, or carbs, or meat and replacing them with beet juice never really worked for me. I would bounce around trying one thing or another and then quit, always with the broken promises of miracle weight loss ringing in my ears. My weight went up and down for years but mostly it just went up. The most success I had was when I did P90X, I lost almost 30 pounds on that but eventually it came back.
Why? Why did all of these chia seed diets and exercise programs fail me? I’m supposed to be able to achieve these things, I’m the motivational blogger! Eventually it all felt a bit hopeless, I focused on eating better, but still gained weight. I would cram down all the pickle juice or apple cider vinegar I could stand and still not see any lasting change. This is why I hate diets. The broken promise, the get thin quick schemes, none of them did a lick of good for me. Why? Because they were not sustainable. Eventually I would have to travel for work, or get injured and stop exercising. The diets that tell you what you can or can’t eat don’t work well on a nine hour car ride, or a to month stay in a hotel room. I needed to find something that fit my super busy lifestyle.
We know what causes weight gain, and therefore weight loss. It’s all in what you put into your body, calories in and calories out. Simple. Easy. Until you try to do it. Exercise likewise only increases your metabolism and the amount of calories you can consume by a small amount. As a old friend once told me, ”You cannot exercise your way out of a bad diet.” One of my friends is a shining example of this. Jamie was constantly on the go, her job is to literally teach other people how to exercise. Still she found herself gaining more and more weight. As Jamie went about her day, she would snack on little Tasty Cakes, Sour Patch kids or other sugary snacks. She replaced those snacks with fruit and the results were dramatic. Seeing such a simple change have such a big effect really inspired me to start my own journey.
Weight loss is not something we do only once a year, we have to be able to maintain it throughout our life. This is why I focused first on making little changes. It started with having a vegetarian meal once a week. Then I clamped down on the amount of snacks I purchased. I tried to buy healthy versions of the food I love but I wasn’t seeing a lot of change. Then I began to weigh and catalog the food I ate. The amount of calories I was consuming really staggered me, I thought I was doing good! Instead I was consuming almost 800-1000 extra calories every day. No wonder I had gained so much weight during my transition!
I would cram down all the pickle juice or apple cider vinegar I could stand and still not see any lasting change. This is why I hate diets.
I lost forty pounds last year, not because I choked down Leek flavored water, or ate my weight in quinoa, it was because I started paying attention to what I ate and I cut out those extra calories. I exchanged fruit snacks for actual fruit, ate a salad every now and again, increased the amount of veggies I add to my recipes and drink a lot more water than Coke. Technically I am on a diet program right now, (since I am not one of their spokespeople I will not mention them) but it’s different than what came before. There were no miracle claims, just science, some psychology, and a consistent rhythm of weighing in, eating, and then logging calories. I did not increase my exercise, I still ate out while traveling, I still felt full and energetic and I could hang out with friends or family without having to pack a lunch. I cut down my calories in ways that were small and sustainable. It’s been almost seven months since I started and I don’t really see any reason to stop; after all I can still enjoy the occasional cheeseburger.
Our goals will fail if they require us to upend our lives, we will drift back into our old habits, our old way of doing things. How many of us have set a New Years resolution to exercise at the gym everyday! Then when March rolls around we realize that somehow we just sort of stopped going? I have! Many, many times! The changes we make, the goals we set and how we go about them, have to fit into our lifestyle. They have to be things that can eventually become habits, sustained throughout the entirety of the dream or a life. Something that we can keep on doing even after those initial goals have been achieved. We all want change to be overnight, and easy. More often than not major change is the result of hundred Major change happens in little steps and that is what we will talk about more next week!