It’s Not a Diet - It’s a Lifestyle?
Yesterday was to be Day 1 of Phase 1 of the South Beach diet in my household.
3 chocolates & 2 bottles of porter later… not off to such a great start. I’ve been suffering for two weeks with a nasty flu. My birthday is in a few days and I’ve had several invites to go out for dinner with friends. Great time to start a diet. I think I set myself up to fail before I began.
A couple of years ago we did the South Beach diet for a few months with great results. Lost a bit of weight but more importantly gained some energy. We vowed it wasn’t a diet it was a lifestyle change. Mmhmm.. within 4 months we were back to the pasta, breads, & rice as regular parts of our daily meals and the SB diet lifestyle was forgotten again.
The problem is that pasta, bread, rice, and similar foods are easy. They’re fast. Avoiding these foods is a lot of work. I can walk past a carton of ice cream or a bag of cookies every day and not bat an eye. But when I’m tired (or lazy!) it’s a lot easier to cook some pasta and throw some sauce on it then it is to cook vegetables & protein. When I think of comfort foods I think mac & cheese, pizza, mashed potatoes not scrambled eggs & steamed spinach.
So today’s question is… Do I do a sort of half-assed version of SB for the next week or so and still go out for birthday dinners out with friends and order as I wish? Do I just say fukkit to the SB diet until the birthday outings are over? Or do I buckle down, try to stick to Phase 1 as I’m supposed to making life uncomfortable for both myself and those who’ve invited me to dinner?
Hi Merlene! well for me I don’t do diets and don’t think they work in the long-term, because they don’t teach you how to not overeat and they make you feel deprived. It’s the feeling of deprivation that makes some people then overeat on ‘forbidden’ food. Maybe try to continue eating the same food, just reduce to one portion of each. That way you can still eat at the birthday outings and stuff. Just remember to stop at one piece of cake!
Or maybe you say fuck this. I’m a healthy beautiful woman and I’m not going to get sucked into the Diet craziness .
I’ve seen you, met you. Your a beautiful woman and if you think that at age 40 your not supposed to have a curve on your body your buying into media hype.
95% of people who use a diet, inclusive of healthy and fad diets end up gaining more weight then they started out with.
Grodstein F., Levine R., Troy L., Spencer T., Colditz G.A., Stampfer M.J. Three-year follow-up of participants in a commercial weight loss program. Intern Med. 1996;156:1302-1306. Bennett, William Ira. (1995) Beyond Overeating. The New England Journal of Medicine Vol. 332 (10) 673-674; Weinsier, R.L., et al. (2000) Do adaptive changes in metabolic rate favour weight gain in weight-reduced individuals? An examination of the set-point theory. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 72. 1088-1094.
Of women between the ages of 24 and 54 who diet, 76% diet for cosmetic rather than health reasons.
Thompson, D.M., et al. (1985). Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia: The Socio-cultural Context. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 1 (3), 20-36.
Excess of $32 billion sales posted by diet industry.
Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth (1990). U.S. News of the World Report (1990).
The Ottawa Citizen (1990) reported Canadian sales by diet centres of at least $300 million per annum.
Eater’s Digest, 3, Summer 1992.
So do it yes, do it for yourself, for your health and for your peace of mind. Lose two pounds a week. Anymore and your endangering yourself. Or you could just accept that your hot as hell, look half your age ( remember I met you when you were on deaths door pretty much and you still managed to look fantastic) and any person would be luky to have you and just kind of accept reality.