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…

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Starting any new plan, especially when it is something you have never done before, is exciting.  Starting a new diet plan that promises transformation that you never imagined you could achieve is even more exciting because it holds such promise with it:  a new body, a new level of fitness or a new level of health.    When something like this comes along, adherence is hardly the issue.  Instead, keeping our heads wrapped on tight is normally the problem because we become obsessed psychos with a goal to accomplish therefore failure in the beginning stages is mild.  However, as time goes on, the lessons learned are deeper and harder to spot.  Track with me through this series as I build a case for failing forward from the ground up.

Weeks 1 thru 4

Man, food shopping never seemed like such fun.  Strangely, it’s okay that our dieter only has a few items to choose from because as of right now she still loves them all.  Bland food and limited choices are actually a joy right now because who wants to think about what to eat?  She’s too worried about how she’s going to fit in workouts, cardio, meal prep and still keep up with life.  By a few weeks in, though, she’s got a rhythm and she’s feeling good about life.  She barely survived the first cheat meal but now that she’s over the shock of cheese on her palette, she can get on with this dieting thing.

Good stuff: Organization.  Not sure where it comes from but we suddenly have our acts together here.

Bad stuff: Perfectionism.  This will not rear its ugly head until later.  Right now it’s in check but it was conceived during this time of dieting.

Failing Forward: The Cheat meal fiasco.  Typically we figure out what we can and cannot have as a cheat meal as soon as we find ourselves eating through one whole bag of mini Reese’s peanut butter cups by ourselves.  All of us start out thinking we’re only going to have “this” only to find out that we also want a little bit of “that” and some more of “this”…  It can get ugly.  We also find out fun things like foods that shoot through us faster than Hailey’s comet, 5 ways to bloat your belly bigger than a bull frog and the ever elusive diet secret of retaining water like a dry sponge dropped in a small lake.   But we learn this and that is a good thing.

Weeks 5 thru 8

The fun of this is not so much anymore.  Our dieter is tired.  Cardio has increased, choices are less and she’s getting pretty hungry.  A girlfriend of hers is always criticizing her for not being around like she used to be and work seems oppressive all of a sudden.   There are changes in the body but not enough for her.  She’s thinking, “I thought there would be more.  I thought by now I would look different.”   She’s packing all her meals, making all of her workouts and it’s still new enough that she’s putting up with all of these demands with a good attitude but it’s wearing thin.  What she didn’t plan on while dieting like this was the emotion that has come with the whole process.  Up one day, down another, how come everyone keeps asking annoying questions?  This needs to move along faster.

Good Stuff: Resolve.  Never really had it before but somehow we manage to gain some through this part of the diet.

Bad Stuff: Impatience.  Because we don’t see enough happening we start cutting things out on our own and not following every detail of the plan.

Failing Forward: We’re not as smart as we think we are.  By upping the ante on the plan sooner than we were supposed to, this put us in a position of burnout way earlier than we anticipated.  Even though we’re hyped, we’re ready for this to be over yesterday and we can’t help but feel like ‘just give me the body already’.  For the first time ever, though, we’re sticking with it through thick and thin and that is an accomplishment in and of itself.

Weeks 9 through Finish

Just got the plan update and our girl can eat a leaf, a berry and a bean and not necessarily all at the same time!  She’s hit ground zero.  She hates her food choices, she’s tired, she’s in perpetual motion and she can still pinch some stuff.  What’s up with that?  So although there have been many pluses about this process, she’s not sure they outweigh the negatives, yet.  Flash forward to the end of the diet phase and it’s vacation time.  All that dieting to look good in a place 3000 miles from where she lives, go figure!  But she did it and she’s proud of it.  She’s lost 18 pounds in 12 weeks, took off countless inches and feels like a million bucks.

Good Stuff: We made goal.  The first time around seems so easy that we convince others to do it, too.

Bad Stuff: Lack of knowledge.  Dieting to go on vacation is one of the biggest no-no’s ever and she’s about to find out why.  Our next post is all about this and where we really begin to see what failing forward means.

Failing Forward: Nothing right now.  But a storm is a brewin’ and it’s not cool.

There are four major phases to dieting:  the initial success, rebound, dieting after rebound and maintenance. We just went through the easy part, we head into the jungle tomorrow when we talk about the week of vacation.  Get your bathing suits out.  We’re goin’ in!  Woop woop!

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If you really want to get a chuckle, look at my resume from when I first started working.  I have done just about everything under the sun from delivering newspapers to designing balloon catheters and stints for angioplasty surgery.  I went to school for mechanical engineering and biology and graduated with the expectation of going into the biomechanical engineering field but that never happened.  Instead I took my first job as a chemical engineer—don’t ask how I made that leap—and had an eclectic career path in engineering that ended with me working for the state as a civil engineer (Dear God in Heaven will this madness stop?—again…don’t ask how I made that leap).  The only common thread during all of those years was I was an athletic junky.  I wasn’t a gym rat, yet, just an athletic junky and I taught group fitness classes after work every night.  I did this until 2001 when I took another leap, only this one was a leap of faith and dropped the engineering altogether to see if I could make it as a full time trainer (I did this to be a SAHM.  I still love engineering.)  Years later, here I am as a janitor of Starbucks.  Oops, that’s coming soon…not there yet.

It’s important for you to know my background because it speaks directly to how I think, train clients and determine what a failure is and what is not.  In the world of engineering, there is no such thing as a failure per se (unless a client dies as a result of your design and then that’s not just a failure, that’s a tragedy and a lawsuit.), it is more like ‘that was good information’ and now you know better.  Obviously, good engineers get closer to the mark, fail faster and fail cheaper but failure in some way, shape or form is expected (preferably in the design stage, though, so as to avoid lawsuits).  The process is best described as iteration and is what I live my life by in terms of how I do things.  I really couldn’t care less if I mess something up and many times I get excited when I do because it means I making progress.  The question is, am I going to hang out crying over my failure or am I going to say, “Crap.  Now why did that happen?” and do something with it.  At that moment, the choice is mine to do with it as I may and glean from it as many golden nuggets of info as possible.

Over the next few days I want to walk you through a diet like I did before, only this time I will walk you through with you seeing through the eyes of the dieter and the dieter going through a few 12 week cycles instead of just one.  We can all learn a lot from this, including myself, because we all have a certain amount of perfectionism that we bring to the table that inevitably holds us back from forward progress.  However, the main thing that I want to show you is that almost all of us have survived dieting by iterating to some extent and if we just fully embraced it instead of poo-pooing it, we’d fail forward faster.   The fact that we look at it as a failure as opposed to good info is a primary reason as to why so many of us become discouraged and head into the land of moping.  I also want us to see how we regroup while dieting.  Some of us have become very adept at looking at our pasts and seeing where we made mistakes, but in the land of engineering that takes way too long and wastes way too much time and money.  We need to be more efficient in our failing.  We need real time data and real time “fixing”.

Meet me here tomorrow, dressed for the gym with your cooler packed as we start our 12 week diet.  I look forward to losing a few pounds with friends.   Hit me up below if you want me to mention anything in particular.   Woop woop!

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