Sorry, no cliché intended. Yet, as I mentioned before, I have a smidgen of things I’ve learned across my decade long battle with dropping 100 pounds. This is the first post directed to health & fitness and for good reason: it’s the most important one I’ve learned over the years: forget dieting, change your life.Trust me, I don’t say this like it’s an easy thing. I know from first hand accounts that this is by far the hardest thing in the world. I’ve even been known to draw similarities of eating to drug addiction. It’s one day at a time, for the rest of your life. Fighting the urges that drew you into becoming overweight and finding ways to battle those same urges for the absolute rest of your life (sorry, it lasts but it also gets easier). The gist is this: you have to change your life. It’s the only way to succeed. Crash diets, miracle pills, hormone injections, starvation … they all work. Yeah, I said it – they work. The problem is that it’s like punching yourself in the face to get a black eye. Not only will the black eye go away, but you will slowly punch yourself softer and more often to get declining results. Food is the same way. If you want to keep off the weight and be a healthy person, you need to find what works for you in terms of your life – for the rest of your life. In the long run, it’s easier to do anyways. Let me explain.
Every diet works the same. Calories you eat are less than what you burn. They usually take aim from one of two sides: starve yourself of calories or shoot your heart rate up so you burn more on an average day. You’ll lose weight, sure, but your body will cringe so hard it’s arguably less healthy to take any of these roads. How they get there, however, is of the utmost importance. To lose weight and be healthy, you just need to pay attention to what you burn versus what you eat. Don’t get me wrong, this is very hard to do. Not only that, calorie counting is perhaps one of the most frustrating and monotonous chores you could possibly undertake. This is the first step nevertheless. Now, I will add to this post with some follow-ups with some tips I’ve learned over the years. However, I want to keep this one short and to the point because it’s the most important. I can’t say it enough.
Forget all the diets. They will keep you hungry, wired, on edge or something else equally horrible, leaving you with massive binge urges and a lifestyle absolutely nobody would be able to sustain. Furthermore, once you do drop the diet (and trust me, you will), you have nothing to fall back on. Little can be learned from short fad and/or crash diets. All you have is the same road that got you to fatty-land in the first place and that’s where you’ll be again. Trust me, I’ve been there too. Whether it was the South Beach, Adkins, Diet Pills; you name it. They taught me nothing other than how hungry I can make myself and led me into the land of carb-binging. When I finally kicked them, I was quickly back to my 4000 calorie per day diet (which is impressively easy to do when you start paying attention). This is why it’s imperative you find something that works for you and is flexible enough to take the stresses of everyday life and elastic enough to grow with you. It’s the rest of your life, so it needs to be all of these things.
Again, that’s no easy task. But, it’s the first thing you need to keep in mind every time you make a decision. And it’s every time. For the rest of your life. Trust me. Overeating is an urge that still hasn’t fully gone away for me over the past decade even though I’ve been able to undertake a good, healthy and lean meal strategy (hence the previous point).
I’ll keep up on this topic with some of the ways I’ve been able to do it. They may or may not work for you, but it’s worth a shot. Regardless, in your parting, if you take anything out of this (or any other of my) writing(s), let it be those two points, in that order. I’m dead serious, it’s that drop-dead simple. When you consider it’s total calories burned over the rest of your life, it makes you think about your long-term health. Plus, it gives you some breathing room for those little midnight binges (which I still have.. and love, just not too often; maybe 3-4 times/year including the holidays) and good diner dinners that pop up from time to time.
This will be a long, hard road that will last for the rest of your life. But remember, you don’t have to be overweight. You don’t. It’s up to you, though. Becoming overweight is an easy thing to do. And most people who make it there will likely always remember how horrible it made them feel yet how great food made them feel at the same time. Food will always, always have the same draw. But you can change how it makes you feel. And when you feel better, it’s easier to say no to the things that draw you. This is where it starts.
Tags: Health