Over the years in my quest to lose weight, friends, family members and, most recently, readers of this blog, have been generous with their advice. They tell me, often with a passion that borders on the fanatical, that the key to weight loss is (fill in the blank).
The feedback goes something like this:
You can’t be healthy until you lose weight. You need to accept your body as it is.
All calories are the same. No calorie is the same
Stop eating carbs. Stop eating fat. Eat anything you want, in moderation.
Forget the vegetarian thing; you need to eat meat. Forget the vegetarian thing; you need to be vegan.
Keep track of your weight. Never get on a scale again.
I’ve learned that weight loss may be tied to things I’d never considered: fatty livers, leptin deficiencies, sleep patterns, breathing. I’ve been told to fast, juice cleanse, attend Overeaters Anonymous, track my progress on Twitter, listen to weight-loss podcasts, grow my own food, spend more time at the beach. One friend took the fear route and told me that if I don’t lose weight now, I’ll be in diapers by the time I’m 60.
I want to seriously consider every morsel of weight-loss advice, from crackpot plans to holistic approaches, in order to make up my own mind about what will work for me and my body. But the more advice I get, the more convinced I am that there’s only one person to whom I really need to listen: myself.
If there is anything good that can come from the struggle to lose weight, it’s the fact that you learn a lot about yourself in the process.
I know that for me, exercise remains my biggest challenge. I’m not exercising at all now, other than walking to work, and I know that needs to change. I just need to find the regimen that appeals to me, and that I really believe I can stick to long-term. Am I lazy? I don’t think so, but I’m willing to reconsider. I do know that telling me to “just do it,” as one marathon-running, skinny-since-birth friend of mine recently opined, won’t make it happen. I’m still trying to figure out what will.
I also know that I have a love-hate relationship with food. At several points in my life — birthdays, New Year’s Eve, random Mondays — I’ve said, “This is the day I’m going to start eating healthy and exercise more,” only to return, tail between legs, to bad habits a month later. Perhaps I get bored easily, or let my emotions drive my diet and exercise habits. Whatever the reason, I still need to learn more about the emotions that accompany my eating.
Finally, I know that for me, being a vegetarian is more important than losing weight; I won’t consider an eating plan that includes meat no matter how much weight it might help me to lose. For me it’s an ethical choice — about killing animals, mostly — that is far too integral to who I am as a person to suddenly change. My light-bulb moment happened at age 16, the day a loud-mouthed classmate gasped and pointed at the blood-filled vein sticking out of a chicken leg I was about to gnaw on. I stopped eating animals over the course of the next few months, and lost about 10 pounds as a result. My meat-loving mother once joked: “I’m fine with you being gay. But when is this whole vegetarian phase going to be over?” It’s not.
I recently returned from a two-week vacation in Brussels, Amsterdam and Paris. At times, my only vegetarian options were butter-bursting croissants and heavy cheeses. But I lost five pounds.
Maybe it was all the walking, or the small portions. The trip spurred me to start seeing a nutritionist, who can help me integrate what I learned about how Europeans eat, and what it means to be an urban vegetarian with a weight-loss goal. And I’m hoping that by talking — and writing — about eating, I can keep on listening to myself and start making smarter choices.
(Source: NYT)
