From skwigg's journal:
I keep thinking about something Georgie's husband said the other day:
"Diets are easy, most of you reading have done them. Of course they suck and you stopped, but yeah, they are easy. You know what is hard? Changing you enough that you don't need a diet. That sort of change is hard work. That's the scary shit. You know what actually works? You got it, the scary shit."
I used to always describe the way I eat based on macros, or calories, or the rules I was following. Now I say annoying things like: I eat whatever I want. I eat when I'm hungry. I eat to feel good. Statements like that would infuriate me when I was dieting. The diet was my control. Without it I wanted to eat nothing but sugar and junk food, I was always hungry, and landing face down in pizza and cheesecake would feel pretty good. That was because of my restrictive thinking and frequent undereating. It wasn't because I was defective or broken.
I would try to ease up on the restrictive dieting but I wouldn't give it enough time. I'd do it for a week or a couple of months, gain some weight, and start restricting again. I thought that I was different, that a non-dieting approach could never work for me. This last time, THE last time, I spent about two years learning new habits, changing my thinking, and becoming both consistent and flexible.
In terms of speedy weight loss, I would have written it off as a complete failure. I was only losing maybe a half a pound to a pound per MONTH. Some months, I'd gain. The thing is, that year or two was going to go by anyway. It could have been more of the same old frustrating restrict/regain pattern, but instead I easily lost the 15-20 pounds I'd been battling with my entire adult life, and they stayed gone. With a new way of eating and thinking, weight loss and weight maintenance became non-issues.
I don't know where I'm going with that. I guess just that I about nodded my head off when I read Roland's words.