Another day, another diet. When is enough enough? Every day another expert pops up with a new diet: a life changer, a different approach to food and eating, a license to eat all and whatever you want until seven, or an endless source of prohibitions with the side effect of robbing your meals of their pleasure. Half hopeful or fully crazy, you buy, do, and try until you explode with a ravenous hunger from deprivation and feast like a beast. Let’s get back to basics, folks.
What if “they” were all wrong? The doctors, the gurus, the dieticians or the nutritionists, the nurses, and the self-proclaimed experts on every screen and every platform of all the devices you own pitching you their self-proclaimed science-based secrets. There is a plea to listen to all of this, a soft sell and its supposed solid results which you are expected to believe and then follow blindly.
There’s a price once you are all in, mind and body. It could be a monetary commitment with a money-back guarantee. But at what price are you willing to trade your body image acceptance for a quicker and lower BMI, a gamble that if it was true, would transform what you see in the mirror and be worth any sacrifice to be thin, not thick, all health concerns aside?
Time is of the essence to get the deal and get started ASAP, so you dial again as you have before with different numbers but the same expectations, repeating the cycle of yo-yo dieting, each time bouncing back bigger not better. You act now and wait for one fulfilled promise or for proof beyond sales and marketing persuasion. Days, weeks, and months pass.
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Your feelings for the umpteenth diet are growing more and more lukewarm. The results are not happening. You have options, however. You can either deal with customer service and demand a refund or nurse the wounds of your latest dieting failure, chalk it up to experience and learn from your mistakes, vowing that there won’t be a next time.
But who’s fooling whom? You have an uncatalogued library of diet books and exercise DVDs, a medicine cabinet full of weight loss supplements, and a kitchen pantry of shakes, pre-packaged meals, and snack bars for you to replace who you were with who you want to be.
Most healthcare providers give the sage advice of eating all things in moderation, a great encouragement to eat more fruits and vegetables, and a reminder to get regular exercise appropriate for your health and fitness level.
But that doesn’t sell on late-night TV when you’re in the living room surrounded by a half-eaten pint of ice cream, chips and dip, and your choice of diet soda, as though this beverage could subtract your consumed calories, fat, salt, sugar, and carbs by drinking it.
TV has before and after photos of people in worse shape than you or who are your size and after trying this latest and greatest fad diet become an even better version of their previous self.
Access your logical side when it comes to this behavior. What if you gave up chasing after dreams of magical weight loss? What if you permitted yourself to stop the unrealistic expectations and focused on long-term and long-lasting health not short-term and short-lived “successes”?
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What if you set yourself free from not liking who you are with the extra weight and waiting for a future without it, post-weight loss? Could you accept yourself if the diet revealed a lighter, lower number on the scale but with your same heavy hang-ups? Could you achieve internal goals that come from working on the inner you with better results than fruitlessly seeking an unattainable, external image?
You could become more confident and stop working out for others’ brief then faded situational respect. You could change your goals into more reasonable ones with equal or less work to be your best self in better health. If you adopted this mindset, small changes would lead to big victories fueled by your new, yet balanced and ongoing efforts in pursuit of total health inside and out, a you to be proud of independent of size or shape.
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