I have seen some jacked food combos in my time that’ll make your hair stand on end, all in the name of “variety”.  I am a huge proponent of variety in one’s diet and when folks try to put this into practice, it sometimes translates into a nightmarish situation.   But there is a reason I harp on variety and it bears repeating in this post:  severe, hard core, no-joke, serious BOREDOM.  So much so, that you may find yourself chewing on grass just for a different feel and flavor on the palette.  This is where the crazy combos come in—and trust me, they are crazy.  It behooves us then to talk about what variety really is so we can avoid the pitfalls of every day eating that allow us to fall into the mundane dieting some of us are doing today.

There are three major things that come to mind when I think of variety in our diet:  different types of food, different food flavors and different textures of food.  If you have enough diversity in the types of foods that you choose, then you will do well in all three categories.  If not, you could be chewing on your blanket by the morning and that’s not a very pleasant thought.

Different Types of Food

I have this incredible talent for taking things that are simple and defined and making them confusing and complicated all in a matter of seconds.  I know this simply because when people tell me what they’re doing with their food choices all week long, they are nothing close to what I suggested.  When it’s one person, it’s them.  When it’s a bunch—it’s me.  Therefore, I own this and I get it and I am here to try to make it better by being more clear when explaining what your week should look like.

What it isn’t:

• A different food everyday that never repeats in the week. I don’t know where this came from but man am I impressed if you can get this done.  There has to be a food that repeats in a week.
• A different protein at every single meal. Again, no, you cannot have chicken at every meal but you can have it at 2 meals in a day.
• Thai food today, Mediterranean tomorrow, Italian on Thursday. You are not obligated to become Chef Boyardee.  Please avoid the temptation.

What it is:

Variety is varying the foods in your diet in such a way that your Monday does not look *exactly* like your Tuesday and that you sufficiently switch up your fruits, veggies and starches throughout the week.

• If you have chicken for lunch on Monday, have it for supper on Tuesday and have something different for lunch on Tuesday so you are not eating the same grilled chicken salad everyday for the next 2 years.
• If you have oatmeal on Wednesday, have cereal or oatbran on Thursday.  Go back to oatmeal on Friday.
• Have 3 favorite breakfasts, lunches and snacks each so you can rotate them around and keep it fresh.
• Change your fruit daily.  It’s the easiest thing to do since you do not have to cook it.

Different Types of Flavors

For some reason, this is the hardest of all the things to get folks to fool around with.  There is more to life than BBQ sauce, lemon/pepper, garlic salt/powder and grated parmesan cheese.  If you continuously eat the same 1 dimensional food flavor, you will have no defense against a meal that smells like Heaven and tastes like a motley of spices and sauces.  You’ll be dead in the water.  Most neglected flavors:

• Citrus (other than lemon)—Orange chicken is lovely.  I don’t mean the one you get at a Chinese food restaurant.  I mean one made from a reduction of orange juice.  YUM.
• Tropical—Mangoes, coconuts, passion fruit and so on can be very fun.  Get to know them.
• Polarizing—Cloves, mint, licorice (anise) and other dominating flavors

Check this site out and go crazy:  Khymos

Different Types of Textures

Protein powder is not a food, it is a supplement.  It is wonderful post workout to make sure you get in all your nutrients fast, but it is not a meal.  We are meant to chew our food and when you do not, you are not satisfied. When two or more of your meals are shakes, the odds of you being happy while having them are low.  Can you stay on it?  Sure.  We are happy to be unhappy for long periods of time so staying on it is not necessarily an issue.  Is it a good thing for you?  Nope.  Why?  Texture is more important than variety and flavor combined.  Any time I ask a woman why she ate such and such, the number 1 reason she broke her diet, she’ll say because she loved the way it crunched.  This is a major message for all of my non-starchers out there.  At some point, you could be taken down by an Ak-Mak cracker.

• Salad is great for a crunch but it rarely does the trick.  We eat it way too much.  However, croutons will light up your life alongside craisins, sunflower seeds, al dente beans and
• Mixing cold and hot foods together is another way to explore texture.  Hot rice on a cold salad or cold, crunchy veggies in a warm wheat pasta salad—yum.
• Next in line to crunch:  creaminess.  Melted cottage cheese on a potato or cold greek yogurt mixed with salsa, lime and pineapple on a piece of warm chicken come to mind.

Keep in mind you will refuse to eat a food first because of feel on the palette before taste ever becomes an issue.  This means if you are at work with your packed lunch of mushy chicken and slimy asparagus and someone shows up with warm Asian chicken covered in an orangey/citrusy sauce with crunchy wonton strips and cold green beans marinated in a hoisin sauce, you could beat her down in the office.  Please let me know so I may be there.  I need the entertainment. Woop woop!

Previous Series Post Next Post in Series

Previous Series Post Next Post in Series

Play Now:

 Are You Sure [11:37m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I started to open this series up with a ton of science on our brains that shows how we are hard wired to desire certain types of foods and how these foods affect our emotions so we desire them more and so on and so forth.  However, I kept coming back to the same place of debunking some kind of crazy myth that we all seem to buy into that has been perpetuated by the powers that be and has secretly tormented us over the years.  I finally came to the conclusion that I need to debunk the myths first.

It is no mystery to any of us that we care about how we look.  We also love the satisfaction of a good workout, the feeling of being fit and the distinction of being different than the rest of the population.  With that love comes the heavy burden of trying to stick to a challenging diet for a long period of time:  no processed food, limited starches, limited sweets and low fat choices with very little support from outside of the clean community.  This is not the haven we thought it would be when we first signed up for this lifestyle.  I don’t know about you, but I know I thought this would be easy because I would feel great all the time and wouldn’t want unhealthy food because I was now “so healthy”.  I had no idea what I was in for the first time I broke my diet.  All I know is I started in the morning with Dunkin’ Donuts and ended in the evening with Bertucci’s and everything in between was a blurr.  That was 9 years ago and I remember it like it was yesterday, although, that could be because there was butter involved.  Shhh.

When I first started dieting, I did it for a very specific reason so the means justified the ends.  I was a fitness competitor and the protocol was that you needed to torture yourself with dieting in order to get on stage or else you were not getting on stage.  Or let me say, I wasn’t getting on stage.  I don’t know if everyone shared my same views back then.  But there was an obvious reason for my very bland, boring diet that lacked variety, starch and fat.  Fast forward to present day and my diet, although still clean, looks very different than it did back then.   Flavor, texture, fat, balance and quantity vary all the time and that is something that has mattered far more than anything when it comes to me sticking to this eating lifestyle.  The majority of us who can’t stick to it long term or find ourselves struggling all the time are over dieting for the results that we desire.  If you say to me that you do not want to get on stage and you are not eating sodium, still eating tuna from a can or packet or follow any bogus diet in a magazine, we really need to talk.

This industry (meaning clean eating) it what it is because of competitors and fitness models.  You can thank both men and women alike that don the cover of magazines and strut across stages for our initial desire to enter into this way of eating.  Even if you are a runner/athlete, you have been enticed to this way of living because that’s how your favorite athletes are maintaining their weight, as well.  However, we want their look without the stage or the lights and believe to get that we need to follow their diet, or their method of dieting, *all* the time.  Not so, says I.  Also, this industry is full of “diets” but then refer to them as a lifestyle.  You cannot have a lifestyle of dieting (in the noun sense)—that’s a nightmare waiting to happen.  At some point we need to learn how to *live* this life instead of hopping on a diet for 12 weeks, off a diet into a pit of sugar for 8 weeks, back on the diet to negate all that we did in the pit, back off of the diet again into sheer anger and frustration and so on.   Or better yet, live in maintenance hell where you are constantly wondering if you are doing enough to stay where you want to be so you do more, crash, do more, crash, etc.

There are many things we need to consider when eating like this:  flavor, texture, variety and balance are a great place to start.  We also need to think about serotonin, dopamine, estrogen and galanin when it comes to the brain stuff and lastly, sodium, sugar and fat are beyond important to our long term survival.  Magazines like to talk in terms of recipes and nutritional sound bites, your friends will talk in terms of suffering, the internet is going to show you how much you suck at doing this but I’m going to talk about this as a living, breathing thing that must be learned and nurtured to be accomplished.  Are you ready?  Woop woop!!

Previous Series Post Next Post in Series

We have some bad habits.  It’s true.  Beyond our bad habits, though, lie some disturbing and tortuous habits that have been born out of survival and strange Greek mythology.  I’m not sure where some of them came from, but we’re going to talk about these things because they affect us long term and erode our dieting process.   We’re also going to talk about how we eat our food, what kind of food we eat, what we put on it and how all of these things can sometimes set us up for:

The Big Binge

Although this sounds like a lot of food, for many of us it usually isn’t.  All we need is a jar of peanut butter, a few slices of toast and 2 bananas and we have ourselves a Big Binge.   This does not happen regularly and we’re not always sure of what brings it on so diving into this series may help.  One thing is for sure, though, we feel like crap right after and we throw out all peanut butter for at least 3 days.  Then we go shopping and somehow it miraculously ends up in the cart again.  Very strange.

The Endless Cheat Meal

This is the meal that starts on Saturday night and ends some time Monday morning when we feel it’s safe to start dieting again.  This isn’t an all out gorge, it’s more like an unstructured hodge podge of “little bit of this, little bit of that” because our oatmeal and egg whites are about as appealing as our mates worn underwear.   If left unchecked, it can easily become…

The Behind Closed Doors Scoffing

“Monday” has come and gone and we still do not have full focus but we’re not way off track either.  No, we have some restraint but it’s interrupted daily with some kind of cookie, chip, nibble or sneak that no one else sees (so we don’t have to acknowledge or own it).  Not only do we conveniently ‘forget’ that we had those nibbles, but we will vehemently deny them to our spouse/boyfriend/mate if they catch us behind the door in the act.  Shameful.

The Que Sera Sera Menu

My heart goes out to any woman who has this menu right now.  I have a tendency to run into people in various places and inevitably someone will attack me and say, “Could you please just make me a diet?  Just tell me what to eat.  Don’t make me have to choose.  PLEASE!”  You know my answer is always, “NO.”  But why are they there?  Because they are eating ‘whatever will be, will be’ every day of the week.  They’ve been eating the same menu since the last solar eclipse and they are ready to take an eyeball out for it.  I can’t say this enough, though…giving you a menu will not solve this so you’ll have to keep up with the series.  Sorry.

The Militant Madness

Here’s where we all want to be because we think this is nirvana.  Tupperware containers stacked in the fridge with just the right amount of food in each ready to go for the next few days.  No fuss, no muss.  However, we’re not eating it.  We’ll “forget” in the fridge and run out to work or we’ll bring it but someone will ask us to go to lunch and we ditch it.  We’re eating anything and everything other than our perfectly packed Tupperware.  What’s up with that?

As always, before l launch into this series I need to remind you real quick of how I use the term diet.  I am not referring to it as something that you go on for a particular amount of time that restricts food, life and all enjoyment of anything worthwhile.  Rather, I use it as a verb and it describes the act of you eating clean food but not necessarily in a restrictive, bland sort of tortuous sense.  At all times we are ‘dieting’ because, in essence, we are different than the general population that eats whatever they want whenever they want since we choose to eat only unprocessed foods in a ‘small meal all day long’ fashion.  This is important for you to remember because when I start harping on (because you know I’m good for a rant albeit mild compared to my old self) the types of foods we eat, you won’t be thinking silly thoughts like “I can’t have that while ‘dieting’” because I’ll come and give you a noogie through the computer.

Meet me here over the next few days while I talk about the crazy neurotransmitters that make us do what we do as well as our own destructive behavior that only exacerbates the issue.  We’re not talking about any of the above scenarios for the next few days; those are just manifestations of the real problem.  We’re going to focus on taste, texture, smell and so on because they’re the real culprits.  Hang tight. Woop woop!:o)

Next Post in Series

Previous Series Post

Play Now:

 Our Maintenance Hangups [9:21m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Before I delve into how our girl is a survivor and how she is much smarter in her attempts to diet, I want to back track a bit to yesterday’s post.  Under Stalemate, I mentioned a bevy of things our girl was no longer sticking to like she did the first time around and I failed to mention how important that was.  When we diet the second time, third time and even fourth time around, we become less and less detail oriented.  We excuse more and more of our indiscretions but yet we look for the exact same results that we had when we were following the plan to a T.  As soon as we realize that we are not progressing like we did before, we then use that as a weapon of mass destruction against ourselves, our purpose, our success in life, our relationships and so on.  So we do it half heartedly but judge it whole heartedly.  It’s a bad combo.  What can we learn from that?

Myth: We are really on point while dieting even though we’re not tracking anything or fully adhering to anything.

Fact: We know when we are on fire and we know when we are going through the motions.  We are not disappointed with the plan when we do not get results—secretly we know we shouldn’t have any.  We are actually disappointed with ourselves because we cannot stay focused.

Failing forward: The longer we diet, the better we get at knowing when to start a plan and when to cry ‘uncle’.  Much like learning how to separate emotion from the task at hand, knowing when to start a diet and knowing when to wait is an art in and of itself but it can be done.  We begin to learn that there is a difference to committing to a plan and “cleaning up our act”.  The latter is best used when it is not a good idea to diet but staying where you are is not a good idea either.

Won the Battle, Lost the War

She reached goal, folks, and you would think that she would be excited but she’s not.  In fact, not only is she not excited, she’s actually panicked about it.  For her to make goal she had to do a bunch of things with her diet and workouts she wasn’t exactly prepared to do and now doesn’t know how to back out of them.  For one thing, she does cardio 2 times a day, 7 days a week and has no idea how to back out of that.  She also eats less than 1000 cals per day, no fat, no cheat meal and hasn’t seen a starch for weeks.  She’s exhausted, cranky, weather beaten and bitter because this isn’t what she had in mind when she first started dieting.  She feels sort of trapped.  On the one hand, she loves her body but on the other hand, she feels like a slave to it and can’t imagine keeping the pace she is at indefinitely.

Myth: Maintenance is hard.  It is actually easier than you think but our girl is confused right now.  She does not realize that the only reason she is in this spot is because she forced a situation in the first place.

Fact: The longer you are at a weight, the more you *own* it.  It will take more to make you gain weight as time goes on and you will do less and less to maintain it.

Failing forward: Eventually we begin to learn that we can’t just *stop* things.  We begin to see that there is a method to this madness and that a slow taper will keep our results while we lighten the burden on our bodies.   As we do this, we start to learn what’s a trigger food, what causes us to have insomnia, what’s the least we can do and still sane and what’s the most we can do and not collapse from exhaustion.

The Smoke is Clearing

Flash forward a year and our girl is doing ok.  Not great, just ok.  She has much to learn about being lean and staying lean but seems to be up for the lessons.  She rebounded again from the last diet she did but nowhere like she did the first time.  The second rebound was about 7 pounds and the manic frenzy of eating was not nearly as dramatic as before.  However, she noticed that her body on a whole is different, her weight distribution is not close to being the same and she is developing acne for the first time in her adult life.  Something is up but she’s not sure what.

Myth: We just diet, get lean and all else stays the same.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Fact: If you want to maintain this lifestyle long term, you need to get smarter about what you are doing to your body being this lean.  There are good and bad consequences and you should know what they all are.

Failing forward: With as much drama that comes with every diet, we look better each and every time we do it.  Our weight distribution tends to even out, our body composition changes more favorably and we have less and less mood swings when done the right way.   However, when it’s not done the right way we can develop disordered eating patterns, burn ourselves out and go the complete opposite direction of health and wellness and head down a long dark corridor of confusion and disillusionment.  Failing forward is the right way.  By giving ourselves permission to not be perfect, not always be on a plan, gain a few pounds here and there and like working out for other reasons than how we look, we begin to embrace this as a lifestyle instead of a means to an end.  What I would love for us to see on a whole is that every week of your diet is a learning experience—not a test.  Therefore, you are there to take notes…not score a 100.  If you look at your dieting in this light, it will change the way you react when you “can’t get everything right”.

I wrap this all up tomorrow on audio.  I have some things I want to say more than write so I hope you meet me there.  In the mean time, get off your back and cut yourself some slack.  Cool?  Woop woop!

Previous Series Post Next Post in Series

…may make or keep you fat.

Meet Fat Fox.  He’s my daughter’s stuffed animal who has turned my house upside down.  We have arguments over whose turn it is to hang out with Fat Fox.  He’s the man.  However, when you think you *look* like Fat Fox, that’s not cool.  Especially if you’re orange.  That’s a bronzer issue.

You would be amazed at how much you really do not know about losing weight or being lean.  The whole ‘cals in vs cals out’ thing?  Nonsense.  The no starch but ‘healthy veggie carb’ thing—only a matter of time before you find a bunch of insulin resistant folks out there because of this misinformation.  The ‘lean’ craze that hit everyone who eats meat about 10 years or so ago—holy helpless hormones, Batman, we’re beginning to see the effects of that surface now.  Our girl is no different in what she thought about dieting.  What she thought to be fact is actually fallacy and now the struggle begins.

Back in the Battle

About a month after Armageddon, our girl is ready to get back to dieting.  She’s officially disgusted with herself.  Mirrors?  Thing of the past.  No, our girl is not dressing up anymore or wearing her cute gym clothes, she’s in a baseball cap, black baggie sweatpants and a too big T shirt.  She’s switched gyms because there is no way she can go back to her old gym and face anybody a month after her glorious goal date.  It’s too fresh and raw for her.  So she joined a gym on the other side of town and got back into the swing of things.

Failing forward: You will never rebound with the same magnitude again.  You may rebound again, but it will not be as great as the first time.  Changing gyms is extreme and really speaks to the severity of insecurity our girl had.  However, some of us wished we had changed gyms but stuck it out anyways.   What our girl is really suffering from is the fall from the top.  I’ve alluded to this here.  I will tackle it for real some day in a longer post, just know it’s coming.

Watching Grass Grow

The second time around is nothing like the first.  Nothing.  First, it’s hard to get that fight in your spirit again.  You know how hard it’s going to be.  You know how much you’re going to have to give up for it again and you’re not sure you want to.  There’s also no romance left to this battle:  the little nuances of seeing the body change, the cool reaction of all your friends when they would see you and not knowing what all the phases of dieting would be like so you looked forward to each one.  Second, it is WAAAAAAAYYYYYYY harder to lose weight each and every time you diet.  If you lost 2 pounds per week the first time around, you’ll lose 2 pounds per 2 weeks and possibly 3 weeks the second time around.  It’s hard.  It’s laborious.  It’s like watching grass grow.  So here’s our girl…miserable, heavier than her initial weight and profoundly disillusioned.

Myth: Many girls believe they have “metabolic damage” at this point and that’s why they cannot lose weight.  That’s not exactly true although they have jacked up their hormones which is what’s causing the delay in weight loss.

Fact: This is going to sound insane, but if you want to try and lose weight right after a rebound, you need to at least start with a re-feed of some sort and then s-l-o-w-l-y start to diet again.

Failing forward: At this point, patience is a virtue and we seasoned dieters tend to understand this.  We do not look for progress the first 4 weeks or so and instead, give our bodies time to get back into the groove.  Learning to separate our emotions from the task at hand is not easy and takes a good amount of practice and emotional fortitude.  But going for the gusto here would do more harm than good so she has to ride out this storm in slow motion.

Stalemate

Eight weeks in and our girl weighs 2 pounds less than when she started.  She picked up right where she left off and can’t understand why the scale isn’t moving.  Yes, she’s had a few breakdowns here and there.  A whole pint of ice cream, a few days of endless nibbles, some cookies and a few other indiscretions not worth mentioning but that shouldn’t be enough to stop her progress, right?  She’s missed the gym a few times, too, and she doesn’t keep track as well as before but she’s still in the gym 7 days a week so what gives?  She also doesn’t measure what she’s eating and she has the meal plan memorized so she knows what she’s eating every day so whatever.  She’s on it…yes?

Myth: Picking up where you left off will give you the results you had before.  Somehow you think your body should just snap back in place because you’re back to eating the same boring chicken and tasteless green beans.

Fact: You didn’t start off your first plan at 7 days a week and no condiments, why would you start there now?  Torturing yourself does not make your body conform faster.

Failing forward: We begin to discover the tricks of the trade and what really produces change in our bodies.  We do not lose weight because we exercise and eat right, we lose weight when we cause a *change* in the body great enough to elicit a response from it.  If you’re used to running 5 miles a day, you will not all of a sudden start losing weight doing so just because you declared yourself on a diet.  You must do something different or more to elicit that weight loss response from your body.  As we mature as dieters, we begin to realize this by actually backing off from dieting when we really do not need to.  This keeps us from having to go on 10 calorie diets and run a ½ marathon every day for cardio.

We’ll pick her saga up tomorrow when she finally gets to where she wants to go but now finds maintenance about as fun as getting a colonic with a central vacuum attachment.  More to come! Woop woop!!:o)

Previous Series Post Next Post in Series

I began this series by pointing out the four phases of dieting which are success, rebound, dieting after rebound and maintenance.  Each phase has a unique characteristic of struggle associated with it that is present with almost all dieters when they are in that particular phase.  As we mature as dieters through experience (both positive and negative), we slowly but surely learn to fail forward.  These phases and their quirks no longer bring us down and we begin to make it through the obstacles faster.  Some of us do it by learning and some of us do it by adapting.  The latter is not healthy and if I remember, I will talk about this at the end of the series.  If not, it’ll come up again I’m sure and I’ll make you aware of it then.  Today, however, is dedicated to the characteristics of the rebound phase and how detrimental it can be.   Our girl did go on vaca and gain a few pounds, but it didn’t end there.  She came home and really sealed the deal.

Ok…so this is a hobby horse but you get the point.

Unpacking

It’s been 3 days since she’s landed back home and to say things have gotten worse is an understatement.  At first it was all about ‘just feeling better’:  you know…stop the bloat, eat healthy and feel ‘clean’ again.  But no matter how much she wanted that, she couldn’t stop eating junk.  Lots. And lots. Of junk.  Suddenly she hates chicken and the way it feels on her teeth when she chews.  And she loathes the smell of tuna fish from a can although she’ll eat it from a packet.  And don’t even mention cottage cheese! OY!  Amid all this repulsion of good food, is this strong desire to eat ANY kind of bad food.  Chips in any form, chocolate, bread, ice cream and peanut butter is all she had on hand when she first came home and that wasn’t enough to stop the onslaught.  She went out to dinner with friends and killed a bottle of wine by herself AFTER she ate the bread basket, all the oil that came with it and the dessert she ordered.  And this was all in the first three days!!  As she unpacked her clothes, she sat in shock of how much she’s packed in her mouth in 72 hours and the pounds keep adding up.

Myth: We have control over our eating and when we don’t it’s a lack of will power.  This is true if you’re talking about turning down dessert not when your dessert starts on one end of the kitchen cabinets and ends on the other.

Fact: If she does not intervene, this will not “just end”.  This will go on for a good amount of time.  For some it’s weeks, for others it’s months.

Failing Forward: Our girl will soon learn that when the sugar monster shows up, he must be tamed by the FAT guy.  Good fat silences the sugar demon.  It’s not perfect, but it’s better than this.

Stressing

When the initial smoke cleared from her free-for-all, our girl mistakenly thought it was ‘safe to go back in the water’ and 2 days after the first eating spree ended, the second one began.  This one was less fervent and far more insidious because instead of her eating a ton of junk endlessly, now she ate really well all day but then lost it at night.  Or she would have a crappy breakfast, great lunch, no dinner and a box of junior mints to top off the day.  She didn’t know how to eat and she didn’t know how to stop the onslaught.  She feels bigger than she ever did before she even started dieting and now she’s out of control.  What the????????

Myth: Now that I eat healthy, I’ll never go back to eating crap again.

Fact: We are driven by emotion, not by health.  If you think you eat the way that you do because of health, you have another thing coming in way of revelation.

Failing forward: Stick to eating small meals often even if they are not super clean.  When this goes down, give up the rigidity of rules or you’ll hold yourself down longer than need be.

Lamenting

Now what?  Why go through all that dieting only to end up here?  Our girl feels trapped.  Who can she tell?  Who would understand?  Better yet, who would care?  She has never felt so lonely before in her life.  This has got to stop.  This weekend is it, she decides.  I’m getting back on plan and I’m going to get this all off.

Myth: You can just get back on plan.  Good luck with that.  You’ll probably take a hostage by meal 2 and demand a ransom of a gallon of ice cream and some fudge sauce or you’re fleeing with your hostages.

Fact: Your issues at this point are out of your “will’s” control.  They are hormonal and emotional, there is no will in that.

Failing forward: If this ever happens to you, lose all structure.  Stop trying to conform to something and just accept that you are a hot mess and no amount of planning is going to fix that.  As soon as you let go, you’ll be more in control.

There’s more to this craziness.  Pull up a chair and stay tuned.  We need to talk about when she starts dieting again.

Previous Series Post Next Post in Series

I’m sure we’ve all had a little of what our girl went through on vacation at some point in our lives.  We may not have had it while on vacation, but we certainly had it in our everyday lives.  Slowly spiraling out of control is both physical and emotional;  knowing which one is which is imperative to moving forward while falling apart.

Do not diet into a vacation or honeymoon. There are two things we never think of when we diet but yet they kill us in terms of emotion and food choices:  cortisol (being crazy amped for weeks on end) and low estrogen (suddenly realizing you were craving a loaf of bread as you are *eating* the loaf of bread).  Planning for a vacation, emotionally investing ourselves into dieting and making sure everything is all set when we do finally go is exhausting and can really get our stress levels up.  When you finally come down off of your high, you are left with this gaping hole in your soul (emotion) that needs to be filled with bread.  Scary.  However, dieting all that time causes our estrogen levels to plummet the leaner we get thereby causing our bodies (physical) to scream for carbohydrate to temporarily raise our estrogen levels.  So for a good week or two after dieting we are always ready to launch a full out attack on anything that even looks like it could hold butter.

Failing forward:

• Plan your goal date at least 2 weeks before you are to go away on vacation.
• It will be hard to bring your emotions in line before then but it will be doable to bring your eating into maintenance before you go.  Eating more fat and minimal carbs during this time will help you to get past the uncontrollable munchies.
• Since you can’t keep the high from being high, you can keep the low from being super low by making sure you have plenty of sleep before you go.  Do not wait to catch up on sleep thinking you’ll do it on the beach because that will be a disaster.

Do not diet on vacation. If this lifestyle is new to you, try to make 2 meals a day be good choices while on vacation.  Do not try to diet the whole time you are away, it’s just too much pressure.  The more you try to deny yourself, the greater the desire to throw yourself head first into your plate.  Total waste of time.

Failing forward:

• Have a good breakfast on vaca.  Try to have protein then because it gets harder throughout the day.
• Do not try to eat every few hours and do not worry about mixing foods or eating meals without all the right components.  Instead, enjoy yourself and the week will happen more organically.  I cannot stress this enough.  Those that are successful on vacation will always tell you that they didn’t think about it and it just happened.
• Do not drink midday.  There is something about sitting at the pool midday with a martini that just screams red alert.  By the evening, you’re ready for dinner without utensils and eating in your birthday suit.  Not good.  You are an official lightweight now and for some reason, wine is much more dangerous to social behavior than liquor.  Keep that in mind.

Do not think that you have “blown it”. Could she have saved the week after the first few days of a free for all?  Yes, but only emotionally.  Physically she could not have done much to stop the carb nightmare from going down but emotionally she could have resisted the temptation to throw in the towel.

Failing Forward:

• At some point we all realize that what’s going down is not necessarily what was in the original script.  Whether it’s actual weight gain, bloating or feeling like crap, it really doesn’t matter, all 3 of those register as disaster on the emotional Richter scale and will make us feel as if there is no hope or no way out.  Failing forward here would be done by regrouping.  This cannot be learned here for the first time so my hope would be that she began to learn how to do this while dieting.  I call it ‘inner dialogue’ and it is just a simple conversation you are going to have with yourself that reminds you that everything is A-ok.  This simple conversation can spare you countless  pounds on your backside if you learn how to do it and will get you out of a tough day in a heartbeat.

Stop worrying about what others think. I LOVE when I say that because I know some of you want to throw a brick at me but I really mean it.  You would be amazed at how much we all think alike and that the fears that you have are the same fears another women has and she could be hotter than hot.  They/we/them/us/all of us are insecure in some way, shape or form and if someone tries to say they’re not, tell them I said, “Liar, liar pants on fire.”

Failing forward:

• The only thing that’s going to get you back to where you want to be is facing the storm of your *perceived* judgment and weathering it.  Once you realize this, it will no longer have a grip on you and you will just go about your business of losing weight again.
• Somehow we all seem to realize that most people are so self absorbed that they don’t even notice we’ve put on some extra weight.  But if they do, we can always remind them of when they did, too.  That normally gets them to back it down if need be.
• This is not a one time task.  You will have to do this over and over again so the sooner you get to trying, the sooner you will get to doing.

She’s home and settled in and wants to lose what she gained.  She’s back in the gym and in for the shock of her life when one month later she’s still the same weight.  Hang tight.  Woop woop! )

Previous Series Post Next Post in Series

Women are natural sadists—well, while dieting at least, because I swear we diet just to beat the living tar out of ourselves.  Although, most of us will tell you we diet for a specific reason:  vacation, wedding, event and so on.  Our girl is no different.  She was going on vacation.

It looked so peaceful.  Too bad it had 14 pounds lurking in the tide.

After 12 weeks of dieting, endless hours of cardio and more poundage moved in the gym than on a shipping dock, our girl is looking darn good (if I don’t say so myself) and traveling through the airport with confidence and ease.  She made goal and she is pretty darn pleased with her results.  She couldn’t wait for this day and has been having dreams of drinks on the beach with all inclusive meals and treats while lying pool side in Aruba.  This has been what all the suffering was about and she cannot wait until she is on the beach in her new bathing suit feeling comfortable in it for the first time ever.

I don’t know if any fitness professional has ever told you this so I am going on record saying it now:  do not ever diet into a vacation.  Do not do a 12 week countdown into drinking, merriment and revelry.  The only thing worse than dieting into vacation is going into an all you can eat buffet with someone getting off a 40 day fast.  Don’t do it. Not to mention metabolism-wise, it is the biggest mistake ever.  Lots of damage done with this one.

The resort is gorgeous and the weather is surreal.  She thinks this is going to be the most amazing week she’s had in a long time.  Her journal entries are as follows:

Day 1: I am exhausted.  Had to beat the front desk down because they messed up my room but when they saw the look on my face that said, “I’m about to blow a gasket.”  They suddenly found a solution.  I need a drink but I want to be good.  I told myself that I was only going to have a treat a few times this week and I really want to save it more for the end of the week.  I want chocolate bad but I am waiting for the midnight chocolate buffet on Wednesday night before having any.   Time to check the menu for healthy options.

As newbies we all start out with good intentions.  But then it soon goes to hell in a hand basket.

Here is where we begin to fail: unrealistic expectations of ourselves.  First, vacation is meant to have fun–not spend a week dieting in a different country.  This isn’t her lifestyle, yet.  She is working on making it so, but it’s still so fresh in her system that to expect her to go into an eating and drinking smorgasbord and not lose her mind borders on being irresponsible.  Second, she forgot to factor in the fact that she will have no will after the first drink.  At that point, all bets are off.

Day 2: Who knew that I was gonna be that much of a lightweight now?  Hope no one got a picture of me dancing topless on the fondue bar.  I am so bloated and feel like crap.  I swear I just killed all the work I did to get here in one night.  I could not stop eating the bread they brought to the table.  Ugh!

At some point in our dieting we all end up being humbled by the Carb Demon.  This guy is no joke when he shows up.  Whatever control you may have thought you had, goes right out the window whenever he makes an appearance.  Some of us have been known to defy physics with some of the things we can eat on a “bender”, our girl was lucky enough to stop at 2 bread baskets and 3 martinis.

Nothing on here said anything about it causing grown women to eat entire back rooms of restaurants.  They should have warning labels.

Day 6: Obviously I blew this week on Sunday so the rest of the week has been a wash.  I’m glad I was smart enough to pack another bathing suit just in case.  The only thing I can fit in right now is a moo-moo.  I don’t know why I can’t stop eating like this.  I will never get my act together.  I knew it was too good to be true.  I’m meant to be heavy for the rest of my life.  Those chics in the magazine are just gifted.  Why bother.

I get it when we feel like this because at the time we are so low emotionally that it is sad to even think about sometimes.  But this has to be the ultimate in inaccurate statements.  The girls are not gifted and you can stop eating like that.  What we didn’t know before we began to diet was what our bodies were going to go through at the pinnacle of our dieting:  low estrogen levels, high cortisol levels and a mind ready for a fresh game of “highs and lows”.  Alcohol after dieting is a no-no.  Carbs after dieting without being interrupted by fat first is a no-no, as well.

Plane ride home: I can’t let anyone see me.  I am so embarrassed.  All that hard work out the window and for what?  A bunch of drinks?  I can’t wait to get back and just clean up the diet and feel good again.  I just want to ring myself out dry and empty my stomach of everything.  Oh man I feel like death.

Little does our girl know that this is just the beginning of her drama.  Just having her girlfriend pick her up at the airport put her in a frenzy because she didn’t want to have to explain why she looks so different.  The emotion brought on from a sense of failure and the difficulty she is about to have thinking she can just “lose that weight again” may be more than she bargained for…

Tomorrow I walk you through all the ways she could have failed forward on her vacation and saved the amount of damage that was done in this one week.  Once this whole vacation week and the following week are all said and done, our girl will have gained 14 pounds in 2 weeks.   Much to talk about…

Previous Series Post Next Post in Series