Turning Dieting Failures into Food Management Success…(Part 1)
I’ve done what a year ago I thought was impossible! I am successfully managing the food that I eat so that it contributes to my bodybuilding goals.
Before writing about how I am doing this, I thought it was important to review where I have come from, since our life experiences contribute to how we act in the present. Thinking about my experiences so I could write about them in a coherent manner has helped sharpen my focus and motivation even further. Putting my thoughts into cyberspace is sort of like talking to a therapist!
I’ve written 4 blog posts talking about my dieting failures and struggles with weight during my whole life up to 2007. I’ve taken important lessons away from all of these failures, and they have helped form the foundation for the success I am enjoying now.
Please understand that the attitudes, motivations, strategies and practices I have developed are all very personal things. What I do is what works for me, and I’m in no way suggesting that it is suitable for anyone else. Some aspects of what I’m doing may be helpful to others, and if that’s the case I’d be very happy to have helped contribute to someone else’s progress.
Where to begin? I’ll talk about the specifics of what I’ve been doing over the past 12 months, but there’s something more important to write about first. Over the past 45 months my body has undergone a transformation thanks to lifting weights. Over the past 12 months, my eating habits have undergone a transformation thanks to a radical change in my attitude towards and relationship with food and eating. Put simply, a change in my thinking has allowed me to effect a change in my actions. I have arrived at the place I needed to be mentally to make a permanent change. Here’s how I got there:
I hate the work ‘diet’ and refuse to use it anymore! For me, the concept of ‘dieting’ has become permanently linked with many negative emotions caused by my past failures. In my mind, there’s a negativity associated with this word so strong that I believe that the moment I consider myself to be on a ‘diet’, I’m setting myself up for failure. I look at it this way: You diet primarily to lose weight. You try to stop eating many of the foods you are used to. You have to eat less. You feel hungry and crave foods you’re not supposed to have. It’s all about trying to take things out of your life so you can lose pounds on the scale, and when you inevitably do something wrong you feel like a failure, you feel like it’s your fault you can’t follow the diet. Your self-esteem suffers and it’s only a matter of time before you give it up, only to probably try again later, perhaps going on a different kind of ‘diet’. It’s happened to me, and I’ve seen it happen to many people. Wake up folks! The problem is not with us, it’s with the whole concept of dieting! Human beings just aren’t built to do it! When we cut back on food, our bodies think we don’t have access to food so it begins to slow our metabolism and try to hoard our fat stores so we can survive longer if food remains scarce! Dieting by cutting back on food changes our bodies in a way that makes it more difficult to lose fat!
I am not eating to lose something. I am eating to get something! I want long-term good health and a lean and muscular body. Now, I know what you’re thinking. I’m just using different words to describe the same dieting activities. But I’m not. Eating to achieve my goals, both those general long-term ones and many specific short-term ones I make as I progress, has been a powerful motivator for me. How I eat now is not how I would be eating if I went on a traditional ‘diet’. When you think about it, most of the things we do in life are designed to achieve the goals we have set for ourselves. Life is all about doing positive things for positive reasons. It is against our nature to do things to ourselves that make us feel bad, and put us at risk of experiencing other negative emotions, in order to lose something. That’s what dieting is and I don’t do it anymore. INSTEAD, I PRACTICE FOOD MANAGEMENT!
So, now you either think I’m a total crackpot, or you think I may be on to something!
Another critical thing I’ve changed my attitude towards is food itself. This is a big part of my new way of thinking that warrants its own blog post, so I’ll pause for now and gather my thoughts for my next instalment!
