This blog post is inspired by my fabulous twitter buddy, Shannon. She asked for input on a particular diet on twitter. Since I wanted to say more than my initial “under 140 characters” reply (“DON’T DO IT!”), I decided to share it here.
The diet program that caught Shannon’s eye was first popular about 12-14 years ago, right in the middle of my 4-year weight loss period.
I had lost about 65 lbs when I entered a 9 month training program. At that point, I didn’t think of my weight loss as tenuous and I was committed to the idea of permanence, but I still experienced lots of anxiety about it.
During our training, we had a lunchtime speaker come in and talk about fitness. “Oh, this will be interesting,” I thought. The man brought the book “Body for Life” by Bill Phillips and talked about how great it was. I rolled my eyes (kinda like this):
I was aware of the book and disagreed with several principles in it. First, I thought the idea of a “cheat day” was utterly stupid. I’d gone past the diet mentality, you see. Diet mentality says you’re “on or off”, “eating healthy” or “being bad”, etc. If you have a healthy relationship with food, who needs to cheat? And I didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that, one “free food day” can wipe out a week of positive eating.
Hello?
Second, the book recommends dividing exercise into upper body and lower body, alternating each day. I wasn’t a personal trainer at this point, but I’d been a weight lifter long enough to have many objections to this. There are a lot more muscle groups in the upper body and I think they are shortchanged by the upper/lower scheme.
Third, the diet was built around drinking protein shakes in between 3 meals. I knew the shakes popular at the time had been analyzed in a lab and were found to be very similar to a cake mix with some added protein. Yuck. More recently, Sports Illustrated did a study of protein powders, shakes and supplements sold over the internet and at vitamin shops, and found 70% of the random sampling contained anabolic steroids, or other illegal substances, which might account for some temporary results from using them. The point is that you can’t be sure what’s in these heavily hawked supplements.
At any rate, the speaker that day praised the book to high heaven, saying he had done the program for a year and loved it.
WARNING! RED FLAG APPROACHING!!!
Then, he said he had quit doing it and regained about 20 pounds so he needed to do it again. I refrained from raising my hand to tell him he’d had his shot and that diet wasn’t going to work again for him, but that’s another story.
At any rate, as he left, several women in my class began talking about doing the diet. As they talked, they got more and more excited and decided to team up and make a group effort. Off they went after class to buy their shakes!!
As they began their diet adventure, I was so jealous of their enthusiasm. But when I thought about the times I had been convinced a diet would solve my problems (you see, one of them wanted a relationship, another wanted to make her ex-husband jealous and regretful he’d left her and the third was just following along – none of these is a good reason to screw up your metabolism, perhaps for life, with a diet), I looked back at my experiences and every one of them had led to lots of regained weight.
I reminded myself that the kind of excitement they felt wasn’t necessary with a lifestyle change. They were trying too hard. And hard is not sustainable.
Since their current eating styles were unhealthy, they showed immediate results. Everyone around us began to comment. I sat quietly nearby and said nothing. I reminded myself that I had been successful and would continue to be successful.
Over the course of the next few months, one woman lost 35 lbs., another lost 25 and the third never lost a pound. She would diet one day, then move her “cheat day” or eat the program’s prescribed breakfast and 1st shake of the day, then mysteriously (or not, depending on your understanding of sugar metabolism), she’d experience huge cravings and go eat a pint of ice cream at lunch.
I reminded myself, “Keep doing what you’re doing, Pat. You know what’s best for your body.”
By the end of our 9-month program, the woman who lost 35 lbs. had regained 45 lbs; the woman who had lost 25 lbs had regained 35 lbs.; and the woman who never got started was at her same weight. She was still a little overweight but she had not gained a pound. Her cravings had saved her (cravings are always trying to help you, by the way, trying to save you from unhealthy blood sugar levels!). Though labeled a “failure” by the other two, she was the real winner of the three.
Where was I in this scenario?
At the end of 9 months, I had lost 9 lbs. In fact, that was my 4th year of weight loss and that 9 lbs. took me up to 74 pounds, a weight loss I’ve maintained (it will be 10 years on March 13, 2010). I often call it my most successful year. Why?
Because that’s the year I easily could have turned back.
That’s the year I stood with myself.
That’s the year I finally said “NO” to diets for good.
By the way, that’s also the year I lost 3 dress sizes! Success isn’t always measured by the number on a mechanical device!
Why does a diet fail?
A diet fails because it originates outside of us. Healthy decisions about what to eat come from the INSIDE. The body miraculously communicates its needs. It “talks” when it’s hungry, when it’s done eating, when it requires rest, and when it wants movement.
If we listen.
Now, I know listening can be hard, especially when we’re not trained to do it. Especially when the tiny, quiet (sometimes silent!) signals from the body are so easily obscured by the noise of our busy, messy lives.
But the ultimate intelligence is there, right inside us, every step of the way.
If we listen.
By the way, according to the National Weight Loss Registry, which follows weight loss participants long-term, over half of those successful at permanent weight loss (sustained 5+ years) started on a diet but quickly moved into a position of power where they took over their eating choices and designed their own eating lifestyle.
This blog was featured on “Prevention Not Prescriptions!” Find out more and share information for “Prevention Not Prescriptions” at The Kathleen Show here.
Pat,
This is very informative, thank you. I really agree with what you said about finding your own plan that works. That is the ultimate goal.
I am a work in progress and when I do finally find MY life plan you will be the first to know 🙂
XOXO
Just to tweak what you said a little bit, Shannon, try using the work “design” instead of “find.” We’d all love to go to the bookstore, pull a book off the shelf and have the diet inside fit. But it never does. It can’t take into account your lifestyle, your preferences, your unique body’s needs for energy. So, the answer is not out there, it’s inside you. It’s harder work to design your own life and approach to health/fitness, but much more fun and rewarding. It tends to stick around too.
Thanks for the post idea! You are truly my muse!!!
Aww you are an angel! I really appreciate you more than you know. Tweaking is my middle name when it comes to diet plans 😉
XOXO
That word “design” clicks for me. It is so easy, when one is so desperate to lose weight, to grab at the next thing that comes along. “Maybe this will finally be the thing that works” well, that may be true, it might be, but it So does have to come from within, looking for that inner knowing, that intuition. Our bodies can heal themselves ( ourselves) when we listen and let them. It ain’t easy, though.
Hmmmm. “It ain’t easy, though.” I actually found that designing for yourself, with your own needs in mind is a lot easier than trying to make sense of the junk info/diet routine that’s out there! True, we aren’t taught in our society to listen to our bodies. We live life from the neck up, trying to muscle our way through with our “big” brains. But, though it’s a bit of work to get in touch with and learn to listen to the body, it’s much easier once done. The body is always there, available to give eedback and info on what it needs. And, if we listen, it doesn’t have to SCREAM (as in get sick or injured) to get our attention.
Thanks for the comment Charity!
Love this post Pat! I totally agree! I actually dislike the term diet. To me it gives the connotation of something that is temporary. I’ll do this for a little while and once I reach my goal I’ll go back to my old ways. Hello! Then you’ll be right back where you were in no time.
My mindset is to eat and live a healthy lifestyle each and every day. Am I successful each day? Absolutely not! But there are more successful days than not.
One of the reasons I like the Weight Watchers (WW) approach to weight loss is that I didn’t have to limit my food intake. I changed how I ate the foods I liked. All may not agree with Weight Watchers, and that’s cool. It is what worked for me, and those tenants have been ingrained in me and led to my success of 60 pounds lost.
Drinking water, eating fruits & veggies each day, lean meats, and activity. That’s what I live by.
Great post, Pat! I love “Healthy decisions about what to eat come from the inside.” That is the key I think, and often hard to do as you said. I liked that sentence so much that I wrote it in my running journal!
Pat, this is such a great post. My favorite part is the pic of the woman rolling her eyes! (LOL)
All I can say is that I agree with you 100 percent. As you know, i’ve become a true believer in Weight Watchers. And one of the things about WW that I think makes it work is that it is NOT a diet. It is all about “designing” one’s own lifelong plan within a framework of intuitive eating, reasonable portions and healthy choices. I’ve been amazed this year at how unpainful and…undietish it’s been.
I got to a point in which I needed to lose weight, and I wasn’t sure how to do it. I had/have more to lose than most people can imagine so it was quite overwhelming to get started.
I considered (strongly considered) gastric bypass, but it was a very big risk. And I’ll be honest..I had not tried everything. I had tried nothing. And I had to try something because my feet were swelling so much (on a regular basis) that they looked like balloons. I also began visiting a podiatrist regularly because my feet hurt so badly when I was walking that I limped around.
In April of last year, I gave up soda completely. And soon after I began to eat at least 5 fruits and veggies per day. I learned how much I should be eating per day then I started figuring out how much fiber I should have per day…how much sodium. Then I started exercising (resistance training and cardio.) I started eating protein, making my meals much smaller, etc.
It took a few months of weight loss and more patience than I knew I had to feel changes in my body. And I couldn’t see them, but I started to feel them.
When you have as much to lose as I do (over 200 total) it’s hard to see changes physically right away. It is easy to want to believe that there’s a quicker fix. And, for many, it’s even easier to throw in the towel.
But the truth is that I have never been as happy with myself as I am now because I am becoming a healthier, prettier, lighter and more energized person one step at a time. And some days I still can’t believe how great I feel. There’s no more swelling in my ankles…no more hurting feet. In fact, now I can walk several miles without even feeling fatigued. I exercise until I’m drenched without pain. It’s incredible. And I absolutely believe that I never would have gotten to this point with a fad diet.
I know people who diet regularly. They lose then gain then gain more than lose again, etc. And while they might lose 15 pounds in same amount of time I lose 7, I’m not tempted to do it their way because I don’t want to have to lose that same 7 pounds more than once.
I lose an average of 2 pounds per week which isn’t fast by any means, but when i think about how quickly these 82 pounds have added up, it has definitely been worth my patience to get here. And I remind myself of that one days in which people say that I should do a liquid diet or join Jenny Craig.
I look at myself and my progress, and I can see that I have the best shot at keeping this weight off once it’s gone because I won’t have to change the way I eat when I’m done. I’m learning how to cook foods that are good for me as well as satisfying. And I’ll happily take the bumps in the road as opposed to a yo-yo lifestyle in which I’m always starting over.
I’ve accomplished the goals I set for myself outside of weight loss, and this goal is no different. To get to a healthy, comfortable weight I just have to keep eating well and exercising even when I don’t feel like it.
A magic pill sounds nice, but the truth is that fad diets set us up for failure. And failure is hard on the self-esteem. It can take years to regain confidence when it has been shattered, regardless of the reasons.
So, instead, I continue to lose weight the old-fashioned way. And while I may be slower to lose weight, I’ve quickly gained self-appreciation and confidence in myself. I know that I CAN do it because I am. And nothing has ever been so satisfying…ever.
Kenz – You are such an inspiration. When I read your post, I kept thinking of my mantra while I was losing: “never go backwards.” You will never have to lose those seven pounds again, or deal with the anguish of knowing you threw it all away… All of my medical research suggests that, the slower you lose weight, the less you disrupt the body’s defense mechanisms. In other words, assault it with quick weight loss and it will become threatened, fight back and shut down the metabolism.
I was at a medical conference talking with a representative from a major insurance company who told me their numbers show that 70% of gastric bypass patients regain their weight. (I was under the impression around 58% were regaining – I have coached quite a few clients who had the surgery and regained all their weight. It was only after the devastating regain they realized had to change some deeper aspects of themselves than simply the physical layer.) So, your choice may have been a more productive one because you have the chance to make the mental, emotional and spiritual changes along the way that will help you maintain a healthy weight.
It takes courage to come out of the fat place. I see that courage in all the posters here! Thanks so much for sharing your stories!
“Diet mentality says you’re “on or off”, “eating healthy” or “being bad”, etc. If you have a healthy relationship with food, who needs to cheat?”
EXACTLY!!! Great post as usual Pat 🙂 As I like to say, “if we view this as a struggle, as a war, that’s exactly what we’ll get.”
It has been hard for me to truly listen to my body. For years, I chose to cover up those feelings with eating, so couldn’t hear those “screams”. and there also was the chronic dieting, etc. that wasn’t really listening to my body either. I think now I am finally at t hat point where all those outside voices have quieted and I truly can hear my body speak. So, yes, when a person gets to that point it gets easier perhaps even there are days when it is easy. But it took a long time for me to get here.
I appreciate all the comments and the courage I see here.
That word “design” clicks for me. It is so easy, when one is so desperate to lose weight, to grab at the next thing that comes along. “Maybe this will finally be the thing that works” well, that may be true, it might be, but it So does have to come from within, looking for that inner knowing, that intuition. Our bodies can heal themselves ( ourselves) when we listen and let them. It ain’t easy, though.
It may not be easy at times, Amy, but it’s more rewarding than trying and failing for the rest of our lives. I know that’s where I was headed. Some of the work was hard, some was fun, some was absolutely exhilarating. But now, I’ve been at a healthy weight for 10 years. We can heal ourselves from the inside out. In the process, we reclaim our power and our lives. Thanks so much for commenting!