I have tried many, many diet programs. In fact at one point I spent up to five hours per day obsessively pouring over every scientific study I could get my hands on in an attempt to find the “silver bullet” for weight loss. Actually, I want to let us all off the hook a little bit. Our diet economy is really built around silver bullets, isn’t it?
In highly cliched fashion, each diet works miraculously at the beginning and then fails spectacularly in the end. I plan to “review” some of these diets in future posts, but for now let me lay out the diets that I once adopted in my endless weight loss mission: Body-for-LIFE, Weight Watchers, The Zone Diet, Atkins/Keto, The Weigh Down Diet, Myfitnesspal (calorie tracking), Fasting (5:2, Every other day diet), a medically supervised weight loss plan, and Intuitive Eating.
On top of that, I have followed the work of countless gurus in the hope that they might hold the magical keys to the weight loss kingdom. When each could not provide the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, I would cast them off as failures.
One of those gurus is my wife.
My wife lost about 100 pounds on Weight Watchers about 10 years ago and has kept it off ever since. She even became a Canadian spokesmodel for the company (I am not making this up!) and has coached countless women in the years since. She said something to me once that lead to the realization that I was blaming diets for my weight woes. I had been floundering on Weight Watchers for a few months and finally said to her “This program may have worked for you but I don’t think it is working for me”
And she would have none of that nonsense.
She replied with “This thing you are doing…it’s not Weight Watchers” Then she carefully stepped me through my errors and showed me how I wasn’t following the program’s rules in about six different areas. In reality, I had “gamed” the system (as I do) and was simply lying to myself about it. I was blaming the diet program, instead of taking ownership of my food choices.
I eventually adopted a way of eating that does not contain all of the nuances and freedoms that Weight Watchers does. One of the reasons that my wife did so well is that her internal architecture is already one of personal integrity. She doesn’t lie to herself. Her “yes is yes” and she keeps her word to herself and others; it’s baked in to who she is. She takes ownership of her food choices.
When it comes to food, my sense of ownership and choice resemble those of a three-year-old. I have come to realize that when it comes to my weight there actually IS a silver bullet: learning to accept your choices around food as both your absolute right and absolute responsibility (Gillian Riley does an exceptional job of laying this out in her thoughtful book, “Eating Less”).
Here is a good way to think about it. Your weight is the product of every single food choice you have ever made until now. Full stop. It is an inescapable reality that every calorie that is stored on your frame had to at some point pass through your mouth and down your throat. Unless you are currently in shackled in chains and are being force-fed by evil captors, you bear full responsibility for this.
Now, I know that you might be saying, “I feel out of control! I feel like I have no choice about what I eat! I have no self control!” Let me tell you that I completely empathize. That statement is actually the right thing to say because it gets at the heart of the matter: you feel betrayed by your own self somehow. You want, at the same time, to have control over food with all of its rewards and to eat the food with all of its pleasures. You are expressing a sense of duality with regard to your own will. You seem to want two things at the same time, but the law of choice makes this reality impossible.
That riddle is the subject of a number of future posts. Stay tuned.