The Narrowness of Diet Fads is Why They Fail
Dieting Sucks.
Which is why you should stop.
I didn’t achieve weight-loss success until I stopped trying to lose weight. Contradiction? Nope.
Success in any endeavor requires a holistic approach. Dieting is never holistic — its failure is its narrowness.
“Eat this, not that”
“Eat less, exercise more”
“Calories in, calories out”
If only it were that sample.
The truth is sustained weight loss requires balancing physical, emotional, and spiritual human needs. That took me 20 years to figure out.
Why? The reason, I’m a recovering perpetual dieter.
I spent 20+ years trying to lose weight, only to gain weight each and every year — the harder I tried, the more I gained — topping out at 314 pounds!
That was back in 2018, and I’ve since lost over 70 pounds.
I attribute a lot of that success to stepping back and seeing myself as more than my weight. I have unique physical, spiritual, and emotional needs — when any one of those areas of my wellbeing is neglected it puts in jeopardy other, seemingly unrelated goals.
Some examples…
- Boredom (an emotional need) it a major trigger for me to binge snack
- A lapse in personal ethics (spiritual shaky ground) triggers a lapse in other convictions, such as eating in moderation (“to hell with it!” kind of thinking)
- Letting poor body image define my identity (spiritual issue) usually triggering disgust and more eating
- Social pressure (emotional issue) to drink/binge causes me to overdrink and overeat at happy hours, etc.
- Hyperfocus on exercise (physical), such as when I trained for a 1/2 marathon all the while gaining weight through the process (emotional, allowance for justification of uninhibited eating — true story)
- Etc.
I think the key is balance. We are more than what we ate yesterday. We are more than the 1/2 marathon we ran. We have values. Wants. Dreams. Emotions. These things, too, can work for and against us.
My faith, for example, can be a huge source of strength.
When I spend each morning in prayer, meditation, and Bible reading I’m that much more confident in who I am in Christ Jesus. Food failures don’t have to define me. Nor do I need to be a slave to food.
I call this my daily “reset button”.
Each morning I re-establish my identity… most days this stays with me throughout my day and my choices.
Even just basic meditation helps me reset. It helps me strengthen my mindfulness — awareness of self — which helps me to be more self-aware of my eating choices and all choices for that matter.
Otherwise, it’s all too easy to jump into the day and get lost in the busyness of life, and this lostness is also a losing of convictions, mindfulness, and self-control, too.
Some days (even weeks) when I don’t do this, I sort of just “fade” away… almost like losing consciousness of my priorities. I get on a weird auto-pilot.
Only after getting back on the scale and seeing I gained another 10 points do I realize how far off I’ve let myself go.
This is what I mean when I say a balance of spiritual and physical goals has helped me achieve sustained weight loss. There are many other examples I will share another day — sustained weight loss is an extremely emotional, spiritual, and physical endeavor.
In the meantime, consider a few quick tips on what you too could try on to possibly bring a bit more balance into your whole-health pursuits:
Start each day with a resolve — forget what happened yesterday and resolve what today will bring. Make daily resolutions across all three categories, for example, 1) physical — such as incorporating leafy greens at all meals, 2) emotional — such as limiting social media for the day, and 3) spiritual — act out your ethic — such as resolve to call your mom since it has been a while since you’ve talked.
Add meditation/prayer — mediation and/or prayer have helped me increasingly develop eating mindfulness and sustained healthy habits by connecting my mind to myself… or put another way, move from the unconscious to the fully conscious… it’s hard to explain, but it works
Understand your triggers — emotions and environments can be powerful triggers of sub-conscious habits, do your best to catalog yours so you can be more aware to avoid and/or address them healthfully
In the end, my goal is to achieve the most healthy version of myself.
There are a lot of facets/examples to explore here. I don’t have the time.
The bottom line is a myopic focus on a single number or the latest diet fad never worked for me. Quick results led to even faster rebounds (such as when I lost 30 pounds on the Keto diet only to gain it all back within a few months). Reason? My core behaviors and attitudes never changed.
I didn’t address the emotional and spiritual elements of my health. All I did was stopped eating X and Y and ate more Z — for a time, and surely those resolutions faded into the background (you fill in the blanks with whatever fad diet you prefer).
I now realize there is no silver bullet to weight loss.
No quick fix.
Achieving my health goals took daily behavior changes over months and years. It’s lived out in day-to-day life. And it’s not just about what you eat or how much you run. Those are just the symptoms.
Often my root disease was lack of motivation, depression, bad company, and/or perpetual unconscious mindless “living”. To address those elements took widening my lens, so to speak.
I started making sustained progress toward my weight-loss goals once I started widening my perspective on what “health” even means.
Cheers,
Phil
