*Disclaimer: I'm not a nutritionist. I have a body and a historically messy view of food. This is by no means the only way to be healthy. But hopefully it's the wittiest.
A Step by Step Guide to hopping off the diet treadmill without it throwing you into a wall, thus humiliating you in front of all those ambitious 6am gym people.
- Weighed yourself more than 28 times
- Googled the caloric content of communion wafers, human sexual fluids, or chapstick
- Considered Diet Coke to be the healthiest beverage choice
- Ate only carrots during the day because you were going drinking with your friends that night
- Punched someone because they tried to share your carefully portioned mid-day nut meal
- Woke up, ate breakfast, realized you have to run a marathon to break even in terms of calories
- Become paranoid that there was a labeling error and you are actually purchasing 2% milk
- Defeated your natural hunger response and live in a constant state of "is this an ulcer, or should I be eating?"
- Defeated your Deity-given metabolism and managed to gain weight despite eating under 1000 calories per day
- Defeated your gag reflex and, well, ya know.
If you answered "yes" to enough of the above questions to make you feel a little crazy, a lot hungry, and mostly terrified that your body will just spiral out of control if you don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of the nutritional value of your foods, take a few deep breaths, and continue to step 2.
Step 2: Look yourself in the eye (using a mirror probably) and say, "It will be worth it in the long term to stop dieting now. Bodies are malleable and if you gain or lose weight, it can be changed in a healthy manner"
This might take convincing. Here are some fun activities you can look forward to after you quit dieting:
- Going out to eat and ordering something other than the lowest calorie item
- Going out to eat. Period.
- Eating when your hungry
- Thinking about more effective ways to built a lean-to rather than what your next meal will be
- In an unexpected turn of events, feel like you have control over your body, not your diet
- Not having the metabolic rate of a 200 year old sloth
Step 3: Get rid of all that shit they gave you at the start up meeting
Don't fool yourself. Never again will you need that specialized calculator that converts carbs, protein, fiber, and fats into point values. Just chuck it now. Besides, you know you've got all that memorized anyway. Hide your scale, measuring tape, whatever crazy fat calibrators you have. Put them somewhere incredibly difficult to reach. Like duct taped to the inside of your chimney or under your territorial cat's favorite pillow.
Step 4: Put your skinny jeans in the way back of your closet
Dieting freaks out your metabolism. When you stop, your metabolism will re-calibrate and you might gain or lose some weight. Get ready, it's gonna be okay. This is 500 times harder when you're shaming yourself because your clothes are fitting differently. Accept these changes (as all weight fluctuations are) as temporary.
Step 4 and 1/2 (the most important step, despite not getting its own number): Accept that the size you want to be and the size you are most healthy at, might not be the same. If you've been dieting hard, you might have pushed your body below where it should go. If you stop dieting and eat healthy, your body will probably go back to it's baseline. That might be a few pounds more or less than you would prefer. You have to accept that you won't look the same as you did at the peak of your diet.
I repeat: You have to accept that you won't look the same as you did at the peak of your diet.
One more time: You have to accept that you won't look the same as you did at the peak of your diet.
Time hop is a thing? Uninstall that shit: You have to accept that you won't look the same as you did at the peak of your diet.
Got it? Good. Moving on.
Step 5: Figure out how you want to eat now
Personal anecdote time (she says nearing the end of an obviously personal blog): I couldn't sustain 20 hours of dance a week, 16 miles of biking a day, and full time food service on my feet under 1200 calories. But I also couldn't do it eating exclusively carbs and fats. It helped me to keep it simple initially. Eat when you're hungry, stop when your full. Resurrect that food pyramid and try to eat from all the major food groups every day. Some structure is okay. It's hard to go from tracking everything to tracking nothing, so don't worry if you flounder a bit.
This takes time. Sometimes you eat a whole bunch and get really sick. Sometimes you don't eat enough and get really sick. Sometimes your digestive tract takes a while to adjust to eating normally and you feel like garbage for a few weeks. Sometimes you get stressed out an calculate everything you've eaten over the past week in a matter of minutes. Don't let this getcha down. It's okay to not be perfect.
The End. Good luck. God Speed. Happy Wednesday.
