9 Thoughts on Dieting

Dieting. It’s what happens when there are too many good things to eat and not enough physical activity to burn it off. Food is a drug that we have to consume. Eating is what we do in celebration, sadness, or just because we have to.

I’m a constant dieter. If I’m not dieting, I’m cheating on a diet. I know that it’s as much about your mental attitude as your physical dedication. But there’s so much temptation: fast food restaurants on every corner, grocery stores full of chips and ice cream and fried chicken, and bad days that demand a little (or big) dopamine rush.

There’s also the conflicting cultural attitude towards dieting. You don’t want to “get thin” to please other people, but you do want to look out for your health. You don’t want your self-esteem to be wrapped up in the number on the scale, but it’s embarrassing when you can’t climb a flight of stairs without huffing and puffing. You’re told to wear what you want, but really all you want to do is fit into the clothes in your closet.

There’s a lot to unpack in this topic. So, here are my thoughts on dieting.

Mental preparation

There’s a reason why people always announce that they’re starting their diet “tomorrow” or “Monday” or “on the first of the month.” They need the time to mentally prepare for what that will entail. Dieting takes up a lot of brain power.

Dieting means:

• consciously reminding yourself not to snack
• pushing away those thoughts that you’re hungry when you’re not
• bargaining (If I eat this cookie, I will burn the extra calories on the treadmill  tonight)
• rearranging your schedule to squeeze in exercise time each day
• removing all temptation from your fridge and cupboards and stocking them with healthy food options
• making sure that you have all of the ingredients needed to try a specific diet (shakes, dinners, etc.)

Even if you’re laid back about starting a diet, once you start, it will be something you’re always thinking about. So, what motivates you to dedicate yourself to losing weight?

For me, the time has come when I’m:

• Putting on my clothes in the morning and finding that I can’t button my shirts or zipper my pants.
• Looking at a photo that someone has recently taken of me and seeing a full shot of what I can’t see from my point of view.
• Getting on the scale and finding that middle number has increased by one digit, indicating that I’m now carrying another 10 pounds on this frame.
• Spending a day doing strenuous exercise and finding that I’m out of breath and unable to get out of bed the next day.
• Realizing I have a big event to go to and want to slim down for the occasion.

Whatever the case, the reason has to be meaningful and motivating in order to stick with it. And even then, there are going to be relapses.

Planning and preparing meals in advance

Everyone needs a game plan when it comes to dieting, but wrapping up too much of your life in the practice of dieting is a recipe for disaster. I don’t want to spend hours during the week creating meal plans and then my entire Sunday afternoon preparing them.

Feeling obligated to eat a specific thing that has been planned out for a specific day can cause you to mutiny and eat something that’s bad for you to make up for the fact that you ate a dinner that you just weren’t in the mood for. This is just one of many players in the tug of war mental game that is dieting.

However, sometimes you do have to think about what you’re going to eat in advance. That might mean taking frozen ground meat out of the freezer and sticking it in the fridge the day before. It could also mean making a dessert, like Jello, that needs time to set or get cold before you can eat it.

I also pack my lunches for the week the weekend before. That way, I can control calorie intake and keep myself from rooting through my stash to see what I can fill myself with for dinner.

When I do make too much of a certain food and freeze it, I freeze it in individual, single serving containers. That way, I’m not eating a spaghetti dinner for six or devouring a whole pizza just because it’s sitting in the fridge…cause I will.

Eating when you’re hungry/not eating when you’re not

Eating is not something that you can just quit cold turkey, like smoking or drinking. It’s an addiction that still requires you to consume it in order to live.  This is why I relapse annually.

Restricting your food intake can be uncomfortable, even when you’re doing it safely. At the very least, it’s a growling stomach. At the very worst, it’s migraines and Hulk-like rage.

That fear of pain and discomfort is where the struggle lies. It’s why you tell yourself, “I’ll eat now cause in an hour, I’ll be hungry during my meeting” or “I’m not hungry, but I’m going to go shopping now, and I don’t want to be tempted to grab something to eat that’s bad for me while I’m out.”

Intermittent fasting is all the rage right now, but it takes an extreme amount of willpower. I imagine myself skipping breakfast and then jiggling my knees while I watch the clock all morning instead of doing my work.

When I take on the dreaded military diet, I’m forced to eat only specific foods at specific times of the day for three days. The first two meals feel days apart, but the foods that I am able to eat are filling, and the idea of only having to do it for three days keeps me motivated.

Then, the sugar withdrawl hits, and suddenly, I’m a junkie in rehab, dizzy, sweating, and craving chocolate chip cookies like they’re the cure for cancer. This diet shows how dependent I am on food and how, despite not considering myself a junk food junkie, I see the depth of my unseen sugar addiction.

Distracting yourself from eating

Don’t you also find that the times that you are hungry vary depending on the day of the week? Boredom could have something to do with that. Sitting at a desk all day can get very monotonous, and eating is a nice break from that. But it also ruins diets. I’ve even tried hunger blocking pills to try to curb these cravings, but they were pretty useless.

Staying busy is a great ally in the fight against diet hunger. If I’m completely focused at the task at hand, I won’t want to eat. Simple as that.

Stress too can make or break your hunger. Day-to-day annoying stress can cause me to stress eat. But legitimate, tragic or life altering stress will hold my appetite hostage, a small silver lining in an otherwise terrible situation.

But our lives are dictated by our obligations, and we have no say over whether or not those obligations are interesting or immersive enough to distract us from our hunger. That’s when it takes a conscious effort to not eat. It may be agony waiting for that clock to change to the desired time when you can allow yourself to eat or your stomach giving you a legitimate growl to let you know it really is empty and that you should eat to recharge.

Telling yourself, “this is fuel, not fun.”

Despite the guilt, eating makes you feel better. Physically and emotionally. It gives you more energy and better focus. For some, eating may be your only joy in a particular day. It’s such an accessible and acceptable form of joy that it can be our go-to comfort.

To have my cake and eat it too, I tend to buy as many diet versions of certain foods as possible.  I drink Diet Coke, buy low fat salad dressing, pour sugar free syrup on my pancakes and dollop light Cool Whip on my desserts. Even when I’m not strictly dieting, I still eat as many diet foods as possible. It has become a way of life for me, the mindset you’re supposed to have whenever you decide to change your habits and maintain whatever weight loss you achieve.

Whenever I’ve mentioned this to others, I’ve been told that they’d rather not eat anything than those “nasty” diet foods. And that’s when it hits me: they’ve put too high of a standard on eating. It’s not fuel. It’s a fun activity.

Anyone who has watched a cooking show or read a celebrity cookbook has seen how important eating is to our culture. What would you do if our multitude of food choices were taken away? Better yet, what if you changed your attitude and stopped making food so important?

I’ve had to train myself to refuse dessert or a second helping if I’m full. I shouldn’t feel like I’ve deprived myself or that my day is ruined because I passed on a slice of cake. I’m not always successful, but if I’m really determined, I cut these overindulgences out more often than not. And when I don’t, all I can do is hope for a nice bout of the flu to teach me a lesson in portion control.

Finding time to exercise

Do you hate to exercise? A lot of people do, but I don’t. What I hate is taking the time to exercise.

My main exercise comes from my exercise bike. I like that best because I can multitask while I do it (read, browse social media, watch a movie, etc.).

I also try to exercise at the same time every day. What’s hard is when your routine has been thrown off by spontaneous or time-consuming plans. That’s when exercise becomes a challenge to squeeze in.

I aim to burn 500 calories on the bike in an average day, whether I’m actively dieting or not. Even if I’m not losing weight, it can curb how fast I gain weight.

There’s also the little things that you do in a day while you’re dieting to try to get a few more calories in, like taking the stairs instead of the elevator, take a walk at lunch, or getting up from your desk as much as possible. A desk job is a killer on a diet, but I look for as many excuses to get up as possible.

I can see why people who hate to exercise in general give up on it when they don’t see results. It’s just one more undesirable chore. In that case, the thing to be honest about is how your eating is affecting the time you are taking to exercise. Make it worth your while, and you might not hate it as much.

Not overdoing it at dinner

I’ve never eaten an entire bag of chips or a pint of ice cream in one sitting (okay, a quart of ice cream in one sitting). But I frequently overeat, and it’s gotten worse as I’ve gotten older. Maybe being one in a family of six kept me from gluttony when I was younger and we all shared a bag of pretzels. But now that everything that I buy is mine and mine alone, it takes a lot to hold back.

Dinnertime can make or break your eating for the day. That is usually my biggest meal, and it’s the one that I look forward to the most. By then, you’re tired, legitimately hungry, and it’s the meal that gives you the most variety.

It’s also the one that provides the most temptation to eat out. I never ate out as a kid, aside from fast food, and even then, we were a special occasion fast food family. So, as an adult, being able to go out to eat whenever I want is a huge pull.

One thing that has helped me to curb this is that, unbelievably, I do not pass one fast food restaurant in my current commute. So, I have to consciously turn off of my route to or from work in order to actively seek out a fast food restaurant. This gives me time to talk myself off the ledge and use the old mom adage of “you have food at home.”

And if you do manage to overcome the temptation to order out or stop at a fast food restaurant, don’t try to reward yourself with a big meal at home. Eat what you were going to eat, and reward yourself some other way, one that doesn’t involve sugar or grease.

Going to sleep early

The longer you are awake, the more likely you are to get hungry at night. Midnight snacks are a dieter’s kryptonite. And while the school of thought has changed that eating at night is worse than eating during the day, it’s still not a good idea to up your food intake just because you are awake.

Some of us have messed up schedules. We work strange hours, have kids keeping us up all night, and suffer from classic cases of insomnia. So, you can’t always keep yourself from staying up. But if it’s getting late, you have nothing else going on, and you find yourself starting to get hungry, go to bed. You may even find that you’re not hungry the first thing in the morning. You’ve slept the hunger away.

Weighing in once a week and tracking your progress

I know people who get on the scale everyday when they’re dieting, and if they don’t like what they see after a few days, they give up. They don’t take into account all of the many elements that make up that number on the scale. It’s arrogant to assume that just because we’re sticking to our diet that our bodies will react accordingly.

I weigh in on Saturday mornings before I’ve dressed or eaten. And if I know I wasn’t as disciplined as I should have been, know that I’m retaining water this week, or don’t feel up to confirming what I already know to be true, I’ll skip a week.

Some dieters warn not to look at the scale at all. Just take victory in the fact that you feel better and that you look better in the mirror. I’ve found this to be counterproductive. It can be tough to put in the work with no results. You look for any excuse in the book:

• The battery in the scale must be dead.
• The floor must be slanting.
• I must have put on muscle.

But weighing in and not seeing the scale move can give you the perspective that, at least you know where you stand. And if you’re not losing, maybe you’re not gaining or didn’t gain as much as you thought.

You can also record your weight each weigh-in. I used to write mine on a marker board on my refrigerator. Now, I just keep track of it in my bullet journal. But even if the weight is not coming off as fast as I’d like, I can look back to a previous high weight and take comfort in the progress that I’ve made.

What are your tips for dieting, and what has your dieting experience been like? Leave your answers in the comments below!

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