Dieting! Dieting! It’s just a bore!
I try and fail, then try some more.
Limited portions and watching fat,
Counting calories and things like that,
But all I ever really do
Is seem to gain a pound or two!
I grew weary with diets several years ago…here are my top ten reasons to ditch the diet:
Number Ten: Being on a diet is like carrying around a 70-pound backpack full of loud little gremlins who are always poking you in the back and sides reminding you that “you can’t eat that!” You carry that baggage with you everywhere you go.
Number Nine: You can’t relax at a party and enjoy socializing because you hear the party food talking in one ear (“Remember how good I taste!”) and the diet snickering in the other ear (“Hahaha!! You can’t eat that!”)
Number Eight: You don’t enjoy a meal out with friends because your diet-mode brain churns the whole time. Brain waves bounce from “Which entree is the safest choice?” to mentally berating yourself because you made a not-so-good decision. The rest of the meal is spend having conversations in your head with every bite about how you get back on that diet tomorrow.
Number Seven: Tomorrow rarely comes. You wake up one day and realize you’ve spent your whole life on a diet, thinking about a diet, or breaking a diet.
Number Six: When tomorrow does come, you pick up the backpack and repeat the process, often eating foods you don’t even like.
Number Five: Food rules you because your life is centered around the calories, fat grams and carbs, with the hope that this is the diet that will finally work, and you’ll be all it promised you would be.
Number Four: Dieting makes you believe that you can accomplish weight loss quickly, so you weigh every day only to find yourself discouraged because the scales are barely moving, or going up instead of down. Then you console yourself with comfort food.
Number Three: Being on a diet takes away the reality that averaging a 5 pound loss a month is 60 pounds in a year…which is far better than failing on 5 or more diets, and ending the year with a gain of 15.
Number Two: Beating yourself up for breaking your diet cannot be counted as exercise.
And the Number One Reason to Ditch That diet: It never worked before…I can’t see Diet Number 1,152,484 working, either.
When you realize you’ve dieted for years and still find yourself in bigger clothes than last year, it’s time change your focus. It’s not about the weight. It’s about the focus. Come visit me tomorrow…we’ll talk about that.
UPDATE: I started watching the State of the Union address, and lost my focus… Hopefully I will have the post read on Friday!
In Quest of Truth 
Now today I got this email notification. Weird. Anyway, looking forward to your thoughts you will be sharing tomorrow. Having dumped the 50 pounds last year, I have FINALLY come to the realization that it is not a diet but a lifestyle choice to eat the way we are eating. I can’t go back to the way I ate before and not expect the weight to regain so now its the art of balancing healthy eating with times of indulging in luxuries. My mindset was always I’ll lose the weight and then I can get back to eating luxuries all the time. Wrong, especially at my age (61). Now we eat modestly during the week and splurge a bit on the weekend or on special occasions and weigh weekly, which was my downfall last time. It is easier to deal with a few unwelcomed pounds back on then to deal with a lot like I found myself. For what it is worth, our fitness pastor at church talked a bit the first of the year for healthy guidelines. He said do these 3 things. Cut out all sugar and especially sugar 3 hours before bedtime. Walk 30 minutes first thing in the morning on an empty stomach (your body will need calories to do the task and you’ll burn more that way) and walk 30 minutes in the evening. Not all of us can do that much walking in a day but I thought his advice was reasonable, especially the cutting out sugar.
betty
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I’ve now lost around 190 lbs. But it’s taken a long time… as in YEARS. Because like Betty, I had to learn it was not “a diet”, it truly was that overused word, a “lifestyle”. As cliche as that is, once truly embraced, it changed everything for me. It was not something I HAD to do; I CHOOSE to do it. I occasionally make exceptions. But they too are choices. I honestly don’t feel that packpack you described. Instead it’s more like: why didn’t I find this sooner!? Anyhoo…it’s not the center of the world now. It’s just the way I handle nutrition. Just a part of my life. I sure agree, though, that there was that frustrating time when I felt exactly the way you wrote about… how it seems like I had been on a “diet” all my life, taking up too much time and focus from really living. I look forward to what you write next about Focus.
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The poem is great! I am 88 kgs and I need to lose at least 10 kgs. 😦
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