Friends, as you know, I’ve been on this diet journey of mine for more than 13 months, and perhaps you too have been on this journey in some form or fashion. Lest we forget, it is a true lifestyle change, and in a way it can be exhausting. You eat right, exercise, celebrate your successes and promise to keep at it when minor setbacks occur, then do it all over again. Weight loss and maintenance are always in the back of your mind. You constantly balance your running tally of calories with any activity you’ve done or think (or hope) you’ll do that day.
Dieting is hard because not only does it involve changing outside behaviors, but also internal attitudes. These attitudes are put to the test daily, but especially during the holidays. For an effective long-term diet, harmful conceptions you may have had toward food must change. If food has been a replacement friend when real-life ones bail, a cure for boredom, a reward for a job well done or something to be eaten always because there are starving kids in Africa, it’s not fulfilling its primary job as nourishment. It has become affection, entertainment, incentive, obligation and who knows what else.
I thought I was going to be okay on Thanksgiving: indulge one day, then get right back on track with my exercise and eating on Black Friday. Simple enough. But in practice, I had to face the reality that I was alone in my apartment with leftovers of my holiday feast, calling to me from the fridge. And since I’d slept in until past two, it was quickly growing too dark and dreary for me to want to do anything physical, even an exercise DVD; I do despise living at the edge of Central time. So my Friday included browsing online sales (beating the Cyber Monday rush!), compulsively checking Facebook (what else is new?) and clearing the DVR of things I’d recorded on a whim (Samantha Who? is okay, but I can’t see myself watching it regularly). I also managed to eat way more than I intended.
Was it the loneliness? Was it the close proximity to pie? Was it that the only thing I felt like doing was watching TV? I’m pretty sure it was a tangled web of all these things. “I’m doomed for sure,” I thought. “If I can’t get my butt in gear and back into health mode now, how hard is it going to be once I’m more than a week into these old bad habits?”
But Sunday, I found myself popping in my workout DVD and cooking up a nice batch of brown rice with some broccoli on the side. Believe me, I was as surprised as anyone. I guess these new behaviors are more of a part of my life than I thought.
Sometimes we all want to take a break from dieting, and that’s perfectly okay. We just need to know that we’ve built inertia into our healthy ways, and that stopping and starting again too much is at best ineffective for weight loss, and at worst taxing on our psyche. As we head into the bulk of the holiday season, I hope your healthy habit recovery goes as smoothly as possible. Yes, it’s hard to come back from cheat days and festive food celebrations, but it can be done. If you’ve made the changes to your whole self, your body won’t forget it. Believe me, you’ll soon start craving vegetables and a good workout. You also won’t think twice about that leftover pumpkin pie.