All-Juiced 13th: "Die-yets" Don't Work!

Did your cabbage soup diet die yet? It's already on life support by Day 1.

Day 44 (of 45). If I look down, I can see the end credits beginning to roll. We’re that close to the end, folks. I’m starting to plan out meals and mentally craft shopping lists, as this is one of the ways I’m going to prevent Fat Me from taking over the controls for any extended period of time for a long, long while. If I know what I’m going to eat, and when I’m going to eat it, then I don’t have to fret for long over either of those things. The first Lean Habit is to eat three or four meals per day, without snacking, so I can forget about those little Ziploc bags of veggies I used to bring and munch on over the course of a day (unless, of course, those things constitute my afternoon meal). As someone who is just not accustomed to quantifying his meals in such a discrete fashion, this seems like a fairly daunting habit to master right out of the gate.

My fat cried buckets yesterday. Gotta bust it on that treadmill to lose weight!

Yesterday, I re-discovered the foolproof method to get that scale moving again. First, if you’re juicing, it is an absolute MUST to confine your consumption of fruit juice to the early morning. I mean, no later than 10am. Anything else means that your body will be burning the massive amounts of fructose you just drank for fuel, rather than your excess body fat. Second, make sure not to eat much past 6pm. Sometimes the realities of life dictate that we’re sitting down for dinner a little bit later than that, and for me that’s fine. But I know that if I’m still thinking about getting one last little taste in at 8pm, then I’m officially cheating on my eating regimen. The longer you can allow your digestive system to rest between dinner and breakfast, the more your body will use what’s already on hand for energy – namely, the stuff you want to burn anyway. Third, don’t forget to bust your hump in the gym! Or, on a day like yesterday, in the great, glorious outdoors. I’ve been dealing with a bit of tendonitis in both knees, so I chose to hit the treadmill instead of pounding the pavement outside. When the knee pain goes away, then I’ll be back outside. For now, thank goodness for that moving rubberized road! In a half an hour, I managed to get in a full 5K, where before our vacation I wasn’t quite getting 3 miles in the same amount of time. After a few sets of weights and a short sauna session, I had worked up quite a nice sweat. And sweat means weight loss.

Afterwards, I had to celebrate a non-scale victory. I’m having to get used to the fact that I wear size 32 pants. Oh, sure – they’re just a little bit tight in some places, when I first put them on. But I know that I’m in a definite transitional phase, so there’s no reason for me to buy anything bigger than that, because – as demonstrated with the shorts I bought for Disney at the end of June, which I’m now folding way over because they’re HUGE on me – I’m heading towards smaller sizes, not larger ones. I ran into Target yesterday and pulled two pairs of size 32 shorts off the sale rack without even thinking about it. After my workout, the only bottoms I had to wear were one of those shorts. Part of me wondered whether I would even be able to get them buttoned (since I had never even tried 32 shorts on before). And it was slightly difficult to do that, I’ll admit. But they got buttoned and stayed buttoned fairly comfortably after that. I even wore them to go hit balls at the driving range, without incident. Victory!

Just one of the many ways I tried to diet, that didn't work.

On to the story. Yesterday, I started to hash my way through my personal history with diets. Or, as I like to say, “die-yets.” As in, “Did it die yet?” Meaning that diets, by their very nature, have a clear expiration date. What happens after the diet has died becomes crucial. Whenever I’ve been on a diet, I’ve limited my intake of calories or types of foods until I get to a point at which I say, “Okay, I’m good,” and abandon this eating style in favor of the Standard American Diet (SAD) in massive quantities, which leads me to pack the pounds back on, plus interest. This goes on for a few months, or years, until I get sick of seeing a blubbery reflection in the mirror and find a new “die-yet.”

Basically, I go through phases with diets, depending on how long I stick to them. First, I “buy it.” Meaning that I encounter a set of principles that resonate with me at any given time, and try to change the way I’m eating to adhere to that set of principles. It could involve the purchase of a gym membership, or a book (like the Atkins book), or attendance at weekly weigh-ins (Weight Watchers), or signing up to receive a month’s supply of pills, powders and potions (like we did first with Herbalife and then with Visalus). Either way, at the beginning of this process, I’ve felt like I’m “all-in.”

Next, I “try it.” Kinda speaks for itself. I throw myself into the plan, following it to the letter, for a time. More often than not, that time has been extraordinarily short, before I “modify it,” because it’s too difficult to do the way the creators of the diet have designed it. I mean, they don’t know me! They don’t understand that my blood sugar gets low if I don’t eat a certain amount of meat and/or cheese every day! So I drink the vanilla shake, and have a turkey and cheese sandwich (c’mon, it’s wheat bread). Or two. And another one while watching “SVU.” Oh, and every good sandwich is made even better with jalapeno kettle chips. And you can’t forget about Diet Dr Pepper, can you?

Get the picture? Two weeks in, we’re ordering pizza every Friday night and I’m eating at least six large pieces of it, plus whatever my kids didn’t eat from their pizza. And stopping at the drive-thru on the way home. Wondering why I haven’t lost any weight drinking those shakes. At this point, I usually just “deny it,” convincing myself that this diet might have worked for tons of people, but it’s just not going to work for me, for some reason. I end up “fly[ing from] it,” back to the way I’m used to eating, the one that is most comfortable for my tyrannical taste buds and expanding belly, and “cry[ing about] it,” lamenting the fact that no one has ever constructed a diet that works for me, personally, to adhere to for the rest of my days.

End stage dieting, before I discovered juicing and WFPB.

I wonder if anyone else has experienced something like this cycle? I suspect a few other people have, because way back in the mid-90s, Harvey Diamond had identified the phenomenon and titled the very first chapter of his ground-breaking book Fit For Life “Diets Don’t Work.” Because they don’t! And, I would argue, they weren’t designed to “work,” not the way most people who embark on diets want them to. Not the way I wanted any of the diets I’ve ever done to work.

Annnnnnd…I managed to transition back to the next part of my diet journey in time to run out of words for this post! Yesterday’s post clocked in at about 2500 words, which is just too long. I’m confining myself to about 1200 from now on, which means I have to save the one in which I extol the virtues of Fit For Life and continue to relay my life-long struggle against my weight for tomorrow. I hope you found some light in this one, though. Peace and blessings to all!