Morning 22 of your 21 day diet: wake up and smell the coffee
Many years ago, when none of us knew any better, my sister and I decided to go on a diet together. She had been on a road trip and believed she could now lose a few pounds around her hips. Me, I had been under the weather and believed if I could just get a hold on my erratic eating habits everything else in my life would magically fall into place (sounds delirious now but made perfect sense back then).
After some careful research (15 minutes in a bookstore), we settled for a low glycemic diet. What struck us as particularly appealing from this system were, in order of relevance: the promise of the title (21 days to your best body ever), the large letter type (less pages to read), and the testimonials on the back cover (everybody emerged thin and happy by day 22).
We left the bookstore in an elated state and proceeded to buy our eating supplies at the nearest supermarket. We scanned through the “shopping list” section of the book (all diet books have one, you must know that) and purchased all required foods – this happened to be only blueberries, oatmeal, spinach, eggs, salmon and broccoli, which we didn’t buy because be both hated broccoli. Oh, and we also bought two gigantic portions of fettuccini alfredo and similar sized chocolate brownies, that would be our “farewell dinner” before we embarked in project perfect bodies.
For the next 21 days, my sister and I were on a diet together. The first 3 days were really easy because we were really excited to turn our lives around through food, and we talked enthusiastically about all the benefits that this particular diet was going to bring us – by day 3 nobody else listened, so good thing we were in this project together.
The next 4 to 10 days were much harder: my body missed its usual morning cup of coffee, and my sister’s GI tract did not agree too well with so many omelettes. But we stuck to it – not because we were particularly brave, but because we happened to live in the same household and it was virtually impossible for one of us to cheat without the other finding out (believe me, I tried to grab a low fat chocolate cookie, but my sister barked at me like a mad pitbull and made me drop it before she could bite my hand off).
We hung in there the best we could for the coming 10 days, and by the end of the third week we were feeling at our best: we had already gotten used to the insane amount of blueberries and salmon (not to be eaten together, though our taste buds were so dulled it wouldn’t have made any difference), and the numbers on our scale had dropped steadily, which made us ecstatic. We believed we finally had found the perfect weight loss system, and we were in diet heaven. That is, until the diet was over.
The morning of Day 22, the world was a strange place to be in. We were no longer bound by the restrictions of our diet, so technically we could eat anything we wanted. Trouble was, the things that we really wanted to eat were all the foods that were forbidden by the diet.
“We could have spinach omelette for breakfast instead of oatmeal and blueberries”, my sister suggested, trying to shake things up a bit.
“Hell no”, I grunted. “I want coffee and a toast” (toast? Weren’t carbs the enemy? Could I really indulge in a toast???)
“Me too”, sighed my sister. “I actually want a muffin”, she looked at me with puppy eyes. “I mean, it could be blueberry muffin. We already lost the weight, so it shouldn’t be a big deal, right?”
Right. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know what happened next: we went on a 21 day binge and gained most of the weight back (and some more). We avoided blueberries, oatmeal, spinach, eggs and salmon for over a year. And broccoli.
Still, if any of our female friends asked about our diet (guys don’t ask), we told them that it had been great. Had it worked? Yes! We did lose the weight in 21 days after all. Was it easy to follow? Uh yes, there were only 5 ingredients so following it was a no brainer. Was it easy to stick to? Uh-uh well, if you like salmon…
The truth is, nobody asked the questions that mattered, and we didn’t offer the information either. Was the diet pleasurable? Was it a long term solution to our weight problem? Would the diet put an end to our anxiety around body issues? Would we be suddenly happy in 21 days? No no no no and nooooo….
So why smart women like my sister and I keep going on diets that don’t deliver?
Because we want to believe that they do. We want to be skinny and happy in 21 days (make it 14 or 7 if at all possible). We want to be in control of our bodies and emotions without having to deal with them. And so we get caught up in another shiny promise and forget to ask the real, hard questions. We forget to be smart, partly because we’ve learned from our culture that smart and pretty seldom go hand in hand.
So my friends, let me remind you that you can be both – in fact, in order to have your best body ever, you need to be smart.
Just ask my sister. She’s having toast for breakfast.
