As a follow up to my post earlier, I'd like to offer two other good reads courtesy of my friend Amy:
http://jcdfitness.com/2010/09/clean-eating-is-a-scam-and-why-you-should-abandon-it/
http://jcdfitness.com/2010/09/clean-eating-false-beliefs-and-pulling-the-emotional-trigger/
I'm well aware of how my brain and body work, and I know that I'm going to have to plan to include normal junk food into my diet in a reasonable way from time to time in order to make me successful. My favorite line that I took from the first post is:
“Food is neither clean nor unclean, but merely energy my body needs to function and survive.”
Hello mantra!
Anyway, I guess my frustration with the junk food diet guy and everything else is deep rooted in my past failures. I'd like to offer you a glimpse into my history with weight loss:
- Shape Up: Age 9 or 10
My earliest attempt at dieting. As I remember, we kept food journals and went in once a week to learn something new, try out a new healthy snack we could make at home, and then do some sort of activity like swim or play with the big parachute. My mom saw that I was starting to get husky (she kept having to buy me jeans with an elastic waistband, which probably tipped her off), so she decided to try to be proactive and nip it before it got out of control.
Excuse for stopping: I'm not really sure, but I'm guessing it had something to do with this complex mathematical formula: f(ail) = (cost of program) x (hassle of getting kids to Sioux Falls from Hartford) x (general lack of available nights with everything else we were involved with)/(Jeff ) - (effort)
- Grapefruit Diet: Freshman year of high school
I had gained a Freshman 15, but the problem was that it was in high school. The diet started when Mr. Guse, our freshman basketball coach and a personal hero of mine, told me there was no way that I was going to be the team manager and that I needed to get my butt to practice and join the team. The first day of practice I made it about ten minutes before I puked. Clearly something had to give. I'd estimate that I was somewhere in the neighborhood of 5'8" and 200 lbs when I started. The diet itself consisted of drinking lots of grapefruit juice, eating bacon and eggs, and well, that's all I really remember. Maybe some kind of tomato soup that my mom used to make in bulk. I'd have to verify that with her. It was kind of like an early version of the Atkins diet. Anyway, whatever it included worked. It was the perfect storm of an increase in exercise (besides basketball practice I was using a Nordic Track at night), a growth spurt (I managed to make it to 5'11", one inch short of only real goal at the time and probably my biggest regret in life thus far), and a crazy bacon-grapefruit diet. I whittled myself down to a lean, mean 165, and I managed to stay there for the next couple of years while going back to a normal teenage diet. It probably had more to do with puberty, but I'll give the grapefruit a little love.
Excuse for stopping: Being a teenage boy, it eventually became inconvenient to maintain that diet and lifestyle. My friends ate pizza, so I ate pizza. I maintained the weight loss for awhile with a junk food diet, so bye bye grapefruit, hello Mountain Dew!
- Weight Watchers: Off and on, but never officially
I don't want to drag other people's situations into the blog without their permission, but I think my mom would be okay with me saying that she has struggled with weight the majority of her adult life. She has bounced around on crazy diets, and as her food intake changed, so did the rest of the family's. As I said before, she did everything she could to help keep my sister and I off the same path. Weight Watchers has always been a favorite of hers. I think it works for her and my sister the same way this blog works for me; it holds them accountable to someone. I think it also works because it allows people to eat normal food as long as they keep within a daily amount of allotted points. I remember having the same frustration with this as I did with the guy from Kansas State. My sister would eat a Snickers bar in front of me and say, "It's okay, it is only 6 points and I get 38 today." This made no sense to me and my FDA programmed brain. "You can't lose weight eating Snickers bars," I'd always been told.
Sorry, I got off the point and almost went back into a Thanksgiving filled rant again. I never officially joined Weight Watchers because I didn't want the stigma of being a teenage/college aged guy at the WW meetings. When I went to a weigh-in with my mom, I didn't see people who looked like me. So, instead I would just hijack all of her materials and try to run the program on my own. This current effort is more or less my attempt again to change one of the most popular programs in the world into something of my own instead of just manning up and going to weigh in. I'm almost 30 now, and I know that there are people there that look like me. I'm just not ready to take that leap yet.
Excuse for stopping: Since I've never officially done the program, I didn't have the support group to keep me going. When I just needed to feel like I was making an effort, I'd resort to the basic methodologies long enough to feel better about myself, but then I'd go back to a 70 point a day diet.
- Nutrisystem: Age 25
I've got to hand it to Nutrisystem's marketing team. They knew exactly how to recruit males to buy a product. Dan Marino, Don Shula, Mike Golic...all of these football greats told me during every commercial break of every show on every channel about how they used this new product called Nutrisystem to lose 20, 30, even 50 lbs! The meals were designed for men and could be ready in minutes, and the pictures showed pizza, lasagna, chili, and cheeseburgers. Don Shula's elderly wife even wanted to have more sex with him! Not your traditional steamy tie-in, but hey, sports stars + convenience + greasy man food + increase in nookie = a winning marketing effort.
I decided to give it a try and logged online to make my own personal menu. The food options sounded fantastic! I tried to mix it up as much as possible to try as many different foods as possible. I waited a couple of days before I received a couple of large, heavy boxes. I opened those boxes up to find smaller containers with those same great pictures on the front of them. Unfortunately, after months of digging through those containers, I never found that delicious food. Everything tasted the same, like a Vienna sausage covered in brown gravy. Even the oatmeal had a funk about it. My first clue came when I realized nothing needed to be refrigerated, including the hamburger patties. Through a space-aged technology, all of the food had been vacuum packed and could sit in the cupboard at room temperature. If that's space-aged technology, I feel awfully sorry for the astronauts.
Still, I was a trooper. I got my first order in January (the Monday of months), and with the support of my friends at work I stuck with it. I even started getting active again and had regular racquetball games. I made it until the middle of March before I decided I could wean myself off and go to a normal, food pyramid inspired diet. All in all, I dropped somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 lbs in two months. After I started introducing carbs back into my diet, I gained back about 45 lbs over the next four months.
Excuse for stopping: What prompted my breakup with Nutrisystem was the blandness of the food and the cost. I was pretty hard strapped for cash at the time, and while my parents always help support me with healthy endeavors, it got to a point where I couldn't afford the over $300 a month in food. Also, my brain can only pretend for so long that dog food tastes like a filet mignon. I even tried keeping the picture of the food in front of me while I ate in hopes that by some magic of science my brain would ignore what I was holding and replace it with the food on the box. No such luck.
- Ideal Weight/Ideal Protein - Age 28
My latest attempt at following a corporate diet plan. I was inspired to try this one out after I saw tremendous results in a couple of friends. The amount of weight they had lost was astounding, so I figured I better get in on it. This program had it all: weekly weigh-ins for accountability, pre-packaged high protein bars, shakes, soups, and other foods for convenience, and a natural step back process to get you transferred from their foods to a normal diet. On paper it had it all.
I started this diet in mid-November last year, a tough challenge considering I had both Thanksgiving and Christmas ahead of me. I was best man in a wedding in January, and I was not going to be in wedding pictures weighing 294 lbs. That and a stable full of cute bridesmaids was the motivation I needed to weather Thanksgiving, a birthday dinner, and Christmas. The nice thing about Ideal Protein is that it allows you to eat vegetables and meats off of a regular menu, but just asks that you not take in any carbs. When we went to a steak house, I would be able to get an 8 oz steak, the steamed vegetables, and a trip through the salad bar. You topped that off with a night time granola bar that was actually pretty tasty. I was not starving on this diet by any means. The results came fast and in big increments. I was shedding pounds and inches like a mad man. I went from size 42 pants to a pair of 36 jeans (they were a little tight, but they buttoned and I sucked it in and walked around in pain with a proud smile on my face). I went from 294 down to 246 at my last weigh-in in February. I started working out again and with the help of my office full of angels, I was even training for my first 5k. Life was pretty good.
Excuse for stopping: I just lost motivation, pure and simple. The intrinsic drive to be a healthy person wasn't strong enough to make up for the extrinsic losses. The wedding was over and I struck out with the bridesmaids. I wouldn't have to photographed again in the foreseeable future. The 5k was in May, and I was convinced I could still run it in 30 minutes by only training for the two weeks before it (uh, not even close). Also, the nearest office was in Sioux Falls, which was about an hour and a half drive for me. It was difficult and expensive for me to make a three hour round trip once a week just to get on a scale in front of someone else. Also, this plan wasn't cheap. Between the food and the supplements, it was in the Nutrisystem neighborhood of expense. $300 a month in health meant $300 a month less in fun. I dropped it, got a bad case of the winter blues, decided I needed to get out of Iowa and applied for a job in Minnesota, and the rest is history. Through the stress of making the decision to leave and getting settled in my new situation, I've gained 40 lbs back.
So, there it is. I know this isn't a complete list of my efforts, but it catches all of the big ones (for instance, I was meeting with the school nurse in college once a week to help monitor my weight and keep a food journal until she used me as an example in class and embarrassed me out of continuing). I hope Dr. Haub of Kansas State can forgive me for my rantings and ravings before, but when you have lived a life filled with struggle only to have someone point out something that should have been fairly obvious, like lower daily calories of any kind equal lower pounds, it is easy to lose your mind a little. I'll be happy with my morning oatmeal and my cucumber/tomato salad for lunch, but I'll stop beating myself up so much for that handful of pretzels I ate last night while waiting for my tuna salad pita to cook and contemplating Dr. Haub's demise. After all, “Food is neither clean nor unclean, but merely energy my body needs to function and survive.”
Mantra + Yantra = Tantra
Jeff
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