No Diets

 

As might be expected, part of this journey of mine will be getting to a healthy weight. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't self-conscious about my weight or that I don't care about how I look. But more important than either of those things is the fact that the amount of weight I'm carrying is preventing me from being as healthy as I can be and from meeting my goals in terms of activity. Let's face it--it's a lot easier to ride up that hill without taking with me that additional 30 or 50 or 70 pounds.

And I may have thoughts about how much weight I want to lose, but I am not going to pluck an arbitrary number out of the air and make it my hard and fast goal weight. I'm going to slowly work toward getting into the neighborhood I want and see how I feel and where my body works and feels the best.

Whenever I have talked about this entire journey, I have had people ask me what kind of diet I'm going to use to lose weight. When I say I'm not planning to diet, they look confused and tell me about so and so who lost 70 pounds on keto or some other diet. But I'm serious about this answer and my reasoning for it is important. In theory, weight loss is simple--calories in versus calories out. You can do a whole lot of variations of this, but the bottom line is that simple premise. The real challenge comes with sticking to it and, as I have found out through many, many years of yo-yo dieting, keeping it off once you lose it.

So, I am not going to diet. Because every time I go on a diet I lose weight, and every time I stop dieting, I gain it back and then some. Instead, I'm just setting about to change my eating habits forever. That means not being overly restrictive or cutting out certain foods altogether, but just teaching myself how to moderate what I eat in a long-term fashion. It means making it a habit.

That said, I do have some thoughts in my head as to what moderation means. But these "rules" are adaptable to different situations and they necessitate me using good judgment. For example, since COVID started, I have been drinking far too much, and when I say it's too much, it's not because it's affecting my behavior or choices, but just because it's a lot of empty calories going into my body. So, I have decided that having a few drinks on the weekend probably makes more sense than drinking every day or almost every day. This week, however, I have a date to go out for drinks with some friends on Thursday and a wedding on Friday and realistically, I'm probably going to drink at both. 

I have also set up some guidelines for myself with food, but they're much less specific and still very flexible. One of them involves me just packing a lunch of healthy food. Since I've been back in the office instead of working from home, I've been eating out or ordering take out for lunch almost every day. Again, with this, if I get invited to go out to lunch with a friend or coworker, I have the flexibility to leave that lunch in the fridge until tomorrow.

I know these general guidelines will slow down my weight loss, but I think they will also make them more sustainable, which is much more valuable than losing weight quickly.