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How to eat right when you don’t want to. I often said that giving myself permission to eat whatever I want, whenever I want it, seems to work. This takes away the sense of being either on or off a diet. It eliminates false urgency: “I have to eat this chocolate cake today, even though I don’t really want to, because tomorrow I start my diet again.” When you get rid of all these rules, it’s amazing, you end up eating a lot less chocolate cake.
But I have to be honest. For several years after I ignored such rules, even after my weight
stabilized, I didn’t eat right. I spent years on the all-dessert diet. I don’t mean
that I ate dessert with every meal. I ate dessert for every meal.
My staple food was pastries. My favorites were day-olds; those that are sort of hard and chewy
and, well, stale. But they’re cheaper than the fresh ones. This can only be a holdover, or perhaps
a hangover, from my dieting days, when I believed I was so fat that I didn’t deserve to eat.
Somehow, I still must have believed I didn’t deserve to eat the really good stuff. But
day-olds are okay; those I could have, since they’re cheap and they’re only mediocre.
There used to be a donut shop up the street from my house. It was called, appropriately,
California Donuts. You could get bags of day-old Danish pastries every morning. And I did. The
Danishes were pretty hefty, about four-times bigger than your normal little weakling
Danish—almost as big as my head, in fact. I’d have one for breakfast, one for lunch,
and one for my mid-afternoon snack, right before I taught my 3:00 step class. (Yep, I can eat
almost anything and work out right after. Years of practice makes perfect.)
Why did I do this? Certainly it was not because I’d read the latest bestseller, Lose Weight
and Feel Great on the All-Danish Diet. I was eating whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. But
there was still one step I had to take. I was eating what my head wanted, not what my body
wanted. After years of alternating stringent diets with I-hate-myself uncontrolled eating, I
couldn’t separate the food needs of my head from those of my body. I had no idea what my
body needed. It took years of eating junk—in moderation, true, but it was still junk—before I tuned in to the foods that made me feel well, as opposed to just not deprived.
The irony is that I was physically active. I taught group fitness classes. You wouldn’t
think I could do that with a junk diet, but I did—partly because I learned how to cheat.
When you’re the instructor, there are ways of looking like you’re working harder than
you actually are. Of course, I wouldn’t have had to cheat if I’d eaten better, but that
didn’ matter to me at the time.
My diet really didn’t change until I got involved with sports in which I couldn’t get away with bad eating. I started bicycling, did short triathlons, and taught Spinning. Then I noticed the connection between what I ate and how I felt. The connection had been there all along, but I had never felt it before. Can you say, “Duh”?
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