Turning Dieting Failures into Food Management Success….(Part 3)
What is this food management process that I’ve been going on and on about? For me, is it counting calories? Measuring food portions? Eating a certain number of meals at specific times during the day? Eating a certain number of grams of protein or carbohydrates? A loud NO to all of the above! This approach may work well for others, and it may be necessary for a bodybuilder training for a competition, but I know it would never work for me.
Food has always caused me stress, whether I was dieting or not. When eating poorly the stress came from feelings of guilt and disappointment. When dieting the stress came from worrying about counting calories, weighing portions, unexpected cravings, cheating, checking my weight, and then eventually binging and giving up.
Life has enough stresses without food adding to it. My strategy is to make food neutral in my life. I am making eating something I do the same as sleep, shower, use the bathroom, or any other routine things we do on a daily basis. Food has become stress free for me!
Dieters love to count calories, and counting grams of protein, carbs, fat, etc; is a lot more common now than it ever was. Doing this takes time and effort, adding to the stress associated with the actual food reductions and changes being made. Have you ever found yourself going 100 or 200 calories over your target amount? Remember the feelings of guilt and failure this caused? Negative emotions are a source of major stress not only on the mind but also on the body. In my blogs I am promoting a lifestyle change. Can I honestly say to myself that I will count calories and/or grams associated with the food I am eating each and every day for the rest of my life? Could you? Of course not. That’s not a realistic proposition for the vast majority of us. My food management strategy eliminates unnecessary stress and work, and I can follow it where ever I am, day and night.
A critical part of my strategy is to categorize food ingredients and prepared food items into three categories: ‘Anytime’, ’Rarely’, and ‘Never’. I categorize based on the nutrition knowledge I have gained from experience and reading. I always make sure I have plenty of ‘anytime’ foods available to me. I plan meals in advance made up of mostly ‘anytime’ foods. When I have a meal planned, 99.9% of the time I will follow through and eat it. When I didn’t regularly plan meals, I would find myself hungry and pressed for time and I would grab the easist thing, which was usually ‘rarely’ and ‘never’ foods. I’ll talk more about the items that are in my 3 categories and why they are there in another blog.
Another thing dieters love to do, and are encouraged to do by weight loss programs, is to jump on the scales at regular intervals as a way to measure success. The pounds you weigh mean everything, right? To succeed you have to reduce your weight to a certain amount and if your weight is not steadily decreasing that means you have hit a plateau and must be doing something wrong or not trying hard enough, correct? WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! Body weight fluctuates regularly, depending on your fluid intake and retention, what you are eating and when, and when you go to the bathroom! If you are trying to track your success by weighing daily, or even weekly, you’re guaranteed to be disappointed eventually! You can lose a pound of fat and gain a pound and a half of lean muscle mass and according to the scales you’re up half a pound! That is clearly success, not failure! My advice is to forget about the scales! What matters is losing body fat and having a strong, healthy body! The best way to lose body fat is by proper nutrition and exercise! When you exercise you’re going to tone up, build muscle tissue and gain muscle mass!
Worrying about how much I weighed has probably been the single biggest cause of stress, discouragement, and failure for all of the diets I ever put myself on. When I was on the Weight Watchers program, the weekly weigh-in was the most important thing in my life. Stepping on those scales was the time when you were judged as having been either a success or failure by all the others in the group. I would make sure I went to the bathroom and was wearing the lightest clothes I had before I weighed in! Talk about unnecessary pressure and stress! TV shows like ’The Biggest Loser’ reinforce this ‘losing pounds is all that matters’ mentality. My new lifestyle does not include scales. I don’t own scales. I weigh myself at the gym only on a very infrequent basis as a matter of curiousity. What the scales say don’t matter. I measure my success based on how I look in the mirror, how my clothes fit, and how I feel.
When I started working out, I weighed 220 and wore a size 42" dress pant. Today I weigh 225 and wear a size 36" dress pant. I think I look great compared to when I started. Now, if I was concerned about my weight, do you think I would have been motivated to keep working when it was staying at 220+? I knew I was building muscle while losing body fat, and my progress with that was how I measured success! In my Body Profile I say one of my goals is to lose 20 pounds. I only put that there since I figured it was a likely outcome of my long-term lifestyle change, as I continue to lose that last bit of fat on my stomach and over my abs.
My messages in this post are these: stop counting calories and using the scales to track your progress! I know these two pieces of advice are totally contrary to what many people are doing on a daily basis in their quest to lose weight, lose bodyfat, or just be healthier. For me, I have a lifetime of evidence to support my position that these two traditional and well-accepted practices not only have never helped me achieve any real long-term success, they were the primary sources of stress and discouragement that led to my inevitable failures. Now, I know I’m not unique, so if NOT doing these two things has helped put me on AND keep me on the road to success, I’m sure it would be the same for many others out there.
In my next post I’ll describe the transformation of my attitude during 2007 and how specifically I began using my food management techniques to accelerate my body transformation.
