How Your Body Sabotaged Your Diet– and what to do about it!
I can’t really catalog all the bad food choices I made yesterday. It started with breakfast and ended with dinner. I made some good choices, too, but yesterday… there was stress. There was family drama and a half a bag of cheese popcorn disappeared before I knew it. I woke up feeling sick, and discovered by the end of the night that I’m coming down with something. Ugh! I suppose in retrospect I made better choices than I really expected, but coming on the heels of a rather point-licious night out with my stepmom and second cousin…. it was bad. Real bad.
What I want to talk about today is that whole “coming down with something” problem. If you’re a 100-pound-loser, you have probably had this happen to you in one form or another:
You start a weight loss program. Things go really well in the first week– phenomenally so! You optimistically plan to attend your 15th college reunion.
Three weeks later, just about when your weight loss starts to slow down and stabilize into a healthy 2 lbs/week, you wake up in the morning with a sore throat. You can’t believe it– what rotten luck! You’re supposed to be getting healthier! You ask why you should have the rotten luck to get sick right now, when you want to feel your best!
Here’s the secret: it’s not luck.
Your body is a cruel thing. It likes you to be at the weight you’re at. It’s perfectly comfortable where you are right now, eating too much of too many foods that are not good for you. When you lose weight, your body rebels in many curious ways and tries to sabotage your success. These are particularly common in the first 2-4 weeks of a new weight loss program, but they also often happen when you’re heading into a plateau:
- You get sick. This is one of the most common saboteurs, and it’s the worst, because it’s entirely biological. Your body’s immune system can simply stop fighting quite so hard. Sure, maybe that’s because it’s adjusting to new fuel sources or amounts. Or maybe, there’s a little army of your immune system that’s sitting around saying “hey! Where’s the cheese popcorn!”
- Cravings. You crave something specific, like chocolate-covered pretzels. For me the cravings are usually from two cravings/flavors groups, like sweet+salty, or spicy+fatty.
- Injury. A companion to getting sick, when you start an exercise program, it’s common to feel sore in the first couple of weeks, or even injure yourself. Remember to take everything slow. Weight Watchers doesn’t even recommend starting a new exercise program until a few weeks into the program to give your body and mind time to adjust.
- Forgetfulness. Ever have this happen early in a diet? You’re going about your business and at the end of the day, you sit down to journal your food and you literally cannot remember what you ate? That’s because your mind sabotaged even your journalling! Or you’re already holding the bag of McDonald’s before you remember that you did, in fact, start your new program yesterday. How’s this happen? Again, internal sabotage!
- Inconvenience. Suddenly, your week looks busier than last week. Did you really commit to carpool every day this week? Are you seriously planning to tackle three new projects by Monday? Part of this has to do with your mindset: when you start a new program, your mind is ready to start something new, and it can be easy to overcommit when you’re in that mode of thinking. But again, part of this is because you’re glaring down the barrel of a celery stick, and your subconscious mind knows that if you have a busy schedule, you’ll give yourself some slack on the whole diet thing.
What can you do about it? Well, if you’re a parent, you’ll recognize the signs of rebellion and malingering pretty well. Feeling sick? Got injured? Get your ass into a doctor! You should be starting a weight loss program with your doctor’s advice anyway, so make an appointment to see one! Oh, really? You say you’re maybe not that sick after all? Aha! Malingering!
For cravings, you have to keep a really solid food journal for this one, because there are times when you have to feed the salty-snack demon. But you can feed the demon with salted, low fat popcorn rather than pretzels, if you’re paying attention to the flavors you crave, not specifically the food items.
Warning: There are some cravings that are not simple flavor cravings. These are chemical dependencies, from caffeine to alcohol to sugar to MSG. If you are a coffee drinker, do not give up caffeine in the first week of your weight loss program– if you’re a smoker, now is not the time to stop smoking. You can only work on one addiction at a time, so pick the most damaging one to your health, work on it for 6 months to a year (depending on severity), and then move onto the next one. For food additive addictions, like MSG and sugar, you can get the monkey off your back through your new weight loss program.
For forgetfulness and inconvenience, you’re going to have to take a look around you, streamline your process, and tie a string around your finger. I am not kidding about the string. You must have some way to remind yourself, as you are out and about, that you’re doing this amazing thing to improve your self and your health. If that means a string around the finger, so be it!
For the convenience factor, take every possible shortcut to having healthy foods ready-to-go, and learn how to say “no.” But also, remember that “it’s inconvenient” is an excuse for eating poorly; you know you can make better choices, so make them! Remember: there will always be something that can be put in your way to a healthy lifestyle. Your job is to leap over or kick down those obstacles.
